Sidney Mintz’s Caribbean_Scott

Modernity that Predated the Modern:Sidney Mintz’s Caribbean

by David Scott

In the view espoused here, Caribbean peoples are the first modernisedpeoples in world history. They were modernised by enslavement andforced transportation; by ‘seasoning’ and coercion on time-consciousexport-oriented enterprises; by the reshuffling, redefinition and reduc-tion of gender-based roles; by racial and status-based oppression; and bythe need to reconstitute and maintain cultural forms of their own underimplacable pressure. These were people wrenched from societies of adifferent sort, then thrust into remarkably industrial settings for theirtime and for their appearance, and kept under circumstances of extremerepression. Caribbean cultures had to develop under these unusual and,indeed, terrible conditions. The argument here is that they have, as aresult, a remarkably modern cast for their time.

Sidney W. Mintz, 1993

ALIEN BUT NOT EXOTIC

For half a century, Sidney Mintz’s historical anthropology has beenconcerned to conceptualize and delineate the fundamental modernity of theCaribbean, a modernity decidedly coerced as well as coercive in its shapingforce, and subordinate in its structural location.1 To be sure there has beenmuch more to his vocation as an anthropologist, but in many ways I thinkthis argument has been his most distinctive contribution to the under-standing of the Caribbean.

Mintz has never ceased reminding us that the Caribbean region is theoldest outpost of European overseas colonial expansion. The emergence of‘planetary’ empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the inaugu-ration of an ‘oceanic’ trans-Atlantic imperial orientation, begins with theCaribbean. And having had the earliest start in colonial history, some of thelongest surviving colonies are still to be found in the region into the twenty-first century. But, as Mintz would insist, it is not age alone that matters here,the mere number of years of colonial rule. It is, more importantly, thedistinctive character of the colonial history that unfolded there, both thenature of the initial encounter that forcibly established a Europeanpresence, and the nature of the economic project that made that presenceviable, indeed enormously profitable. The Caribbean as we know it is, to avery large degree, an outcome of that colonial encounter; but the worldmade through it (and this is the heart of Mintz’s point) was a precociously

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and paradoxically modern one – precocious because the modern, as a struc-turing form, was then still only a glimmer on the European horizon; andparadoxical because it was completely unanticipated and unnoticed thatsuch people, brought in chains from Africa, might embody that comingfuture. Caribbean peoples, one might say, were the first overseas conscriptsof modernity.2

Over the decades, Sidney Mintz has maintained a remarkable fidelity tothe Caribbean as a focus of scholarly investigation, not just in the earlyyears of the 1950s and 1960s when Caribbean Studies seemed to be gath-ering momentum as an innovative field of research, but in the 1980s as well,when it looked exhausted, winded, spent of purpose and direction. He hasoften lamented that the region has appeared something of an anomaly inthe anthropological (not to say in the larger social science) imagination. Notonly has it been marginalized or neglected because of its relative geopolit-ical insignificance and the consequent absence of powerful institutionalsupport in the North Atlantic academy; but more interestingly for Mintz, ithas typically been misrecognized and therefore consistently misunderstood.Neither properly ‘primitive’ nor ‘civilized’, neither ‘non-Western’ on theconventional criteria nor unambiguously ‘Western’ (in short, neither fishnor fowl), the Caribbean has never quite fit securely within any anthropo-logical agenda. ‘Whereas New Guinea, Africa, Amazonia offered kinshipsystems, costumes, coiffures, cuisines, languages, beliefs, and customs ofdizzying variety and allure,’ Mintz has recently written,

to almost all anthropologists the Caribbean islands and their surround-ing shores looked rather too much like a culturally burned-over, second-hand, unpristine world. Whether it was kinship or religion or languageor anything else, Caribbean people all seemed culturally midwaybetween there and here – everything was alloyed, mixed, ground down,pasted on, the least common denominator.

Nor has this been mere ideologically innocent ignorance. ‘For most NorthAmerican anthropologists’, Mintz continues, ‘that sense of things wasprobably accentuated because racism and social separation in NorthAmerica had made their black fellow citizens alien without making themexotic.’3 And yet it is perhaps precisely this seeming anomalousness andmarginalization that has driven Mintz’s preoccupation with defining andclarifying the distinctiveness of the region, and that has given this preoccu-pation its thematic focus and animated its anti-racist humanism.

But Mintz has also noted – and with some dismay – the curious fact thatwith the rise over the past decade or so of new intellectual fashions – suchas Diaspora Studies, Migration Studies, Transatlantic Studies and (govern-ing them all) Globalization Studies – the Caribbean has witnessed an obliquerevival of sorts. It hasn’t amounted to much, however, in terms of therevision or transformation of central historiographical or anthropological

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assumptions. Mostly, and in a dispiriting way, the Caribbean has been asource of intellectual raw materials. As Mintz points out, there has been arampant appropriation of concepts developed in the study of the Caribbean– as, for example, such terms of art as ‘hybridity’, ‘creolization’ and‘marronage’ – without even a cursory glance at, much less a historical under-standing of, the cultural and ideological features of the region that gave thembirth.

Mintz’s work has always been alert to the poverty and intellectual oppor-tunism of such academic practices as these. But it has never deterred himfrom plying his craft in the waters he knows best. And this is where I willfollow him in trying to discern something of the outline of the Caribbeanhe made into his scholarly vocation. My principal interest here is withMintz’s focus on the modernity of the Caribbean and the implications ofthis conception for the kind of anthropology of which he has been anadvocate. My aim in this is less to criticize than to contextualize; locatingSidney Mintz, so to say. First I want to consider some aspects of thehistorical moment in which the Caribbean emerged as a systematicanthropological concern, and some of the ideological and conceptualconditions that shaped it as the kind of object it has been. Mintz was therefrom the beginning, or very nearly the beginning. Second, and distinguish-ing it from an earlier ‘cultural’ paradigm, that of Melville J. Herskovits, Iwill sketch out something of the social-historical story Mintz tells about thedistinctive character of the Caribbean, and his argument for why we oughtto think of it as modern. I want to suggest that there is much that is helpfulin Mintz’s approach for displacing old questions about the relation betweenCaribbean pasts and Caribbean presents, and for introducing new ones.And finally, considering the argument of his best-known book, Sweetnessand Power (1985), I will urge that it is important to read it for the place ofthe Caribbean in his understanding of the modern global world. For as far-flung as this book’s temporal and spatial canvas is, as fundamental asEurope is to the story about the transformation of taste it tells, it remainsa book with a Caribbean centre and purpose.

THE CARIBBEAN AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICALPROJECT

In 1948 Julian H. Steward (1902–1972), who a few years before had left theBureau of American Ethnology to take up a professorship at ColumbiaUniversity, organized a group of graduate students (from Columbia and theUniversity of Chicago) to go to Puerto Rico to conduct anthropologicalfieldwork. The study was carried out under the auspices of the SocialScience Research Center of the University of Puerto Rico and supportedby the Rockefeller Foundation. The Puerto Rico Social AnthropologyProject, as it was called, and the co-authored volume that came out of thecollective research, The People of Puerto Rico (1956), were to contribute

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significantly to the post-World War Two reorientation of the focus andmethodology of US anthropology.4 The project, moreover, was to yield twoof the best-known names in twentieth century Marxist anthropology: thelate Eric Wolf (1923–1999), and of course Sidney Mintz (b. 1922). Thoughthey were to continue to share a great deal in their anthropological inter-ests – the concern with the definition and understanding of peasantries, forexample, or more considerably, the concern with the anthropology of worldsystems – Wolf was to move on from Puerto Rico to Mexico (and LatinAmerica more generally), while Mintz retained a fundamentally Antilleanpreoccupation, working subsequently for periods in Jamaica and then Haiti.For Mintz, the Puerto Rico Project marked the beginning of an extraordi-nary anthropological career spanning the better part of five decades inwhich the Caribbean would be his vocation – in which, indeed, his namewould become inseparable from the making of an engaged and criticalCaribbean Studies.

It is a familiar story that the Second World War constitutes a watershedin the history of US anthropology, the anthropology initiated by FranzBoas.5 Up until the war, this anthropology was concerned largely with thestudy of so-called ‘primitive’ peoples – peoples who, so it was said, lived insmall-scale and isolated societies (‘tribes’) with rudimentary technologies;societies regarded as discrete, unchanging, and integrated wholes based onkinship and intimate face-to-face relations. Of course it wasn’t that Boasand his students were so naively ahistorical as to believe that the NativeAmerican people among whom they mainly worked had not been touched– and transformed – by the aggressive assault of Western civilization. To thecontrary, this was plain enough for everyone to see – and often enough tolament. Rather, the anthropological enterprise constituted for Boas a medi-tation on the crisis into which Western civilization had thrown humanity. Inthis sense, the primitive provided a sort of mirror into which civilizationcould look self-critically, a contrastive trope in the cultivation of a distrustof civilization’s autobiography.6 As a consequence of this orientation, Boasand his students were largely concerned, as Mintz has cogently put it, withthe ‘reconstruction or retrieval of the aboriginal cultures of NativeAmerican peoples. . . .; to recover what could be detected or elicited froma now nearly obliterated past’. And such emphasis, he goes on, ‘led quitenaturally to a relative unconcern with (or lesser attention to) the present’.7

Pre-war Boasians were among the last of the descendants of those eight-eenth and nineteenth-century critics of Enlightenment’s self-regard, fromRousseau to Nietzsche.8 They treated the primitive as if they were pre-contact rather than contemporary, as if they belonged to the past of civiliz-ation.

Before the war, perhaps the exemplary work in this vein was RuthBenedict’s Patterns of Culture, published in 1934; Benedict was Mintz’steacher at Columbia University. After the war, however, such books wouldappear increasingly quaint (think of Paul Radin’s The World of Primitive


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Man, published in 1953), as though they belonged to a bygone era, orembattled (think of Stanley Diamond’s In Search of the Primitive, publishedin 1974), as though their idiom of criticism was too off-beat to catch the newrhythm and direction of things.9 The world of the social science academy towhich US anthropologists returned from their wartime service in govern-ment intelligence-gathering institutions (such as the Office of War Infor-mation, for example, where Benedict worked, or the Office of StrategicServices), was a world much animated – if not completely governed – bythe new priorities of the emerging Cold War. The war of course altered theplace of the US in the global political-economic arena, an arena nowdefined on the one hand by the contest between capitalism and commu-nism, and on the other, by the anti-colonial nationalisms of the ‘ThirdWorld’ (the phrase itself, it is worth remembering, is an ideological productof the period). Making the world safe for democracy (understood in largelyanti-communist terms) and modernizing political and economic develop-ment (understood as keeping the Third World out of the sphere of influ-ence of the Soviet Union) – these became the priorities of the new alliancebetween the intelligence apparatuses of the US state (including the CentralIntelligence Agency, the successor of the Office of Strategic Services), thephilanthropic foundations (Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, especially),and such key universities as Harvard, Columbia, and MIT. Together theyreimagined the globe as a number of strategic research ‘areas’, and enabled,underwrote, and shaped the new area-studies-directed social science of thepost-war era.10 In anthropology-land (to use the late Bernard Cohn’s felic-itous term) these new priorities urged a marked shift away from studies ofallegedly primitive people toward the investigation of ‘complex’ or‘contemporary’ or ‘modernizing’ societies. Julian Steward was a leadingexponent of the new area-studies approach, producing an early conceptualmanual for the Social Science Research Council; and as his Introduction toThe People of Puerto Rico makes clear, the study of a ‘national’ formationand its various ‘subcultures’ was explicitly designed to make a contributionto its agenda and methodology.11 Thus the Puerto Rico Social Anthro-pology Project was one of the earliest scholarly endeavours organizedwithin this new post-war regime of knowledge and power.

But if the war altered significantly what the US state thought it couldaccomplish through the instrumentalizing of social science research, it alsoaltered enormously what many young progressive scholars believed theycould achieve with more goal-directed research. A good deal of optimismfollowed in the wake of the defeat of fascism and the gathering momentumof the anti-colonial movement. And many young men and women believedthat the social sciences could be a positive factor in the struggle for radicalsocial change. On the left as much as on the right, a revamped positivismand behaviourism were the undergirding assumptions of the new program-matic social sciences. As Eric Wolf put it, looking back at the making of thePuerto Rico Project: ‘For some of us, going to school after the war on public


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funds, anthropology offered a prospect of studying a “real” world of “realpeople”. One had some hope then that knowledge could be linked toaction, and that better knowledge would yield better action.’12 Thisoptimism was partly stimulated by (and in turn helped to affirm) the returnin the social sciences of evolutionary materialist perspectives. In importantrespects, US anthropology was being ‘Americanized’, as one writer puts it.13

And in some quarters, as in the case of Leslie White (a student of Boas wholater became a follower of Lewis Henry Morgan), the direction of some ofthis was at least Marxism-inspired; in others, as with Julian Steward, it wasanti-Marxist.14 But even so it stimulated younger scholars – like SidneyMintz – to begin to think about the intersections of history and social andcultural change in ways that routed that understanding in and through thematerialities of economic production. This is what the Puerto Rico Projectsought to do.15

That the Caribbean, and Puerto Rico in particular, should have beencentral to (indeed inaugural for) this new social science paradigm is perhapsnot all that surprising. Of course, prior to the publication of The People ofPuerto Rico in 1956, the Caribbean had by no means completely escapedanthropological notice; but this attention was guided very largely by theAfro-Americanist preoccupations initiated by Melville J. Herskovits(1895–1963) in the 1920s.16 Between formulating the theory of thecontinuum of Africanisms in the New World in the early 1930s and publish-ing his path-breaking book, The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), Herskovitslaunched a series of ethnographic studies in the Caribbean – first inSuriname, then in Haiti (a bit later he also did work in Trinidad) – aimedat mapping the extent of African retentions among people of Africandescent in the New World.17 In this endeavour, the Caribbean emerged asa pivotal space for the critique of the prevalent racist claim that peoples ofAfrican descent in the New World lacked a distinctive culture.18 As we shallsee in a moment, Mintz (who significantly wrote a new introduction to theBeacon edition of Herskovits’s Myth which appeared in 1990) would retaina profound intellectual connection to the problem of Afro-Americanculture, but that concern would be located inside a different problematicfrom the culturalist and retentionist one that animated and propelledMelville Herskovits.19

As I have suggested, in the immediate aftermath of the war a new set ofconceptual problems – as well as ideological imperatives – helped to shapean anthropological concern other than the pre-war one of salvaging theprimitive. This concern turned on ‘modernization’ and ‘development’.20

How might social, economic, and political change be managed, especiallyamong that group of ‘backward’ countries emerging from colonialism?How might these ‘Third World’ countries – all with sophisticated Western-ized elites, and many with multi-ethnic populations – be encouraged toadhere to the dictates of a pro-capitalist and pro-liberal democratic strategyof modernization? What requirements of input-integration were necessary


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to move efficiently along the paths of economic growth prescribed by ColdWar ideologues like Walt Rostow? In the 1940s, Puerto Rico emerged as atarget of precisely such modernizing concerns and agendas; as Gordon K.Lewis put it, the island became, ‘an experimental laboratory for socialchange’.21 Annexed by the United States in 1898 at the close of the Spanish-American War, the island began to loom large in the consciousnesses ofNorth Americans when thousands of Puerto Ricans started arriving in theUS, especially in New York, looking for work. ‘For by 1938’, to quote Lewisonce more, ‘the New Deal in the island had declined into a bureaucraticactivity dealing with the accidents rather than the essences of a colonialsociety.’22 This failure, and the political fallout it precipitated, helped tocreate the conditions of nationalist upsurge in which Luis Muñoz Marín’sparty – Partido Popular Democratico (founded in 1938) – came to power in1940. (Memorably, Sidney Mintz’s inimitable informant, Taso Zayas, thesubject of Worker in the Cane (1960), was a staunch supporter of the Popu-lares, and, as an organizer in his barrio, played his own small part in helpingto bring them to power in the ‘revolution of 1940’.)23 As Governor, Muñozwould soon begin to implement the massive industrialization programme –famously known as Operation Bootstrap – which sought to provide awelcoming environment for US capital, and which, as a model for economicdevelopment where size was an issue and resources scanty, exerted atremendous influence on the accommodationist nationalist movementselsewhere in the Caribbean. In short, though Steward and his colleaguesdon’t quite acknowledge the constraining ideological conditions and theforce of the colonial interests at stake, Puerto Rico had emerged as anexemplary instance of the problem of national development in the newcontext of regional and global US hegemony.

The subject of Sidney Mintz’s PhD dissertation, submitted to the Depart-ment of Anthropology at Columbia University in 1951, as well as of the longchapter based on it that he contributed to The People of Puerto Rico a fewyears later, was ‘culture change’ in a rural part of the island.24 His specificconcern was with the social organization of the production of sugar in asouth-coast community (or municipality), Cañamelar. Where sugar isconcerned, Puerto Rico occupies a distinctive place in the colonial historyof the Caribbean. While a colony of Spain, the island ‘was only briefly a“sugar island”, and never one in the almost explosively exploitative andcapitalist sense that the British and French islands had been’.25 The USannexation changed all that, however; under the new colonial arrange-ments, it initiated a large-scale transformation of agricultural production,in particular of sugar. ‘It has been under the United States’, Mintz wrote,‘that the island has joined, in an agricultural sense, its faltering forebears –Haiti, Cuba, Barbados, Jamaica, and Guadeloupe.’26 The historical signifi-cance of the south coast and Cañamelar, where Mintz carried out his field-work, was that it was the setting of this dramatic alteration in the characterand nature of economic exploitation in Puerto Rico. What particularly


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interested Mintz were the social and cultural implications of the shift (‘tran-sition’ is sometimes the word he uses) from a small-scale family-typehacienda to large-scale corporate land-and-factory combines. And amongthe most important implications was the rise of an agricultural proletariatdisplaying a distinctive ‘subculture’ of values and attitudes.

The Puerto Rico Social Anthropology Project was a major – and, I think,lasting – force in the making of Mintz’s Caribbean vocation. Indeed, it maynot be too much to suggest that it served as a sort of crucible out of whichcame the questions that would animate his work over the next half-century– questions about labour and commodities, history and capitalism, race andculture. In a certain sense, Mintz has forever been rewriting his Puerto Ricoproject. Looking back at the Project from the vantage of the late 1970s, hewas keen to underline the positive gains it had yielded – not the least amongthem, helping ‘to make the Caribbean region part of anthropologicalconsciousness’ and thus urging the discipline in the direction of a self-consciousness of modernity.27 But more to the point of his own preoccupa-tions, by making clear the need for a certain kind of history in the socialsciences, a history of crops, the Puerto Rico Project opened up newprospective directions for exploring the role played by the Caribbean in thegrowth and consolidation of capitalism in Europe. In particular, it suggestedto Mintz the germ of the idea that perhaps sugar was useful to capitalismbecause it provided cheap high-calorie food commodities for Europe’sgrowing working classes in the nineteenth century. ‘In order to reckon theimportance of this . . . hypothesis’, he suggested, ‘it will eventually be neces-sary to study in detail the changing composition of European diet in thesixteenth to twentieth centuries. If, however, it turns out to be a persuasivehypothesis, it will reveal an intimate linkage between the coerced labor ofthe periphery and the free labor of the core, of a kind little dwelt upon byhistorians and anthropologists as yet.’28 Here was the thought that wouldbear fruit years later in his great book, Sweetness and Power.

‘A MODERNITY THAT PREDATED THE MODERN’

Historical and anthropological stories about the African-Caribbeanpresents and the slave-plantation pasts out of which they came have veryoften been told in the form of narratives of survival, resistance, and over-coming. In these stories plantation slavery is presented as a structure ofpurely negative power that physically brutalized and psychologically dehu-manized the slave. This pervasive image of slavery-as-repressive-powerforms the background to the generation and structuring of a narrativewhose moral-political point is to redeem the humanity and agency of theBlack slave and vindicate her or his aspiration to be free. Sometimes thisaccount is given in a Herskovitsian idiom as the story of continuities ofAfrican culture that underwrote the formation of New World societies ofAfrican-descended peoples. This is the story told, for example, by John


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Thornton in a rich and elegant book.29 But sometimes that story is told lessas the narrative of Africa-in-the-Caribbean and more as the account of thediverse syncretic ways in which African-Caribbean peoples have, in themeagre and oppressive circumstances in which they found themselves,invented new social and cultural forms of living. This, of course, is the storySidney Mintz himself has told (without sacrificing, it should be added, theproper regard for Herskovits and what he made possible).30 Given thepersistence of racism, the compulsion to tell this kind of story is under-standable.

There is, however, another story that Sidney Mintz tells (not entirelyunconnected to the cultural inventionist one to be sure) that has I think asomewhat different historiographical yield. This is the story about themaking of Caribbean modernity, or rather the making of the Caribbean asa precociously modern formation, and in it the accent is more on thecontent of social form than on cultural distinctiveness. Moreover, this storyrelies less on the image of the slave plantation as a repressive structure ofnegative power and more on thinking about it as a coercively discipliningsocial and economic regime of distinctively modern power. Consequentlythe overall moral-political point is not to demonstrate that the slavesresisted, survived and overcame their oppression but to inquire into thenature of the forms that conditioned the lives the slaves were obliged tolive.

* * *

‘To begin with,’ Sidney Mintz wrote many years ago in a well-knownpassage in a definitive essay,

it is inaccurate to refer to the Caribbean as a ‘cultural area’, if by ‘culture’is meant a common body of historical tradition. The very diverse originsof Caribbean populations; the complicated history of European culturalimpositions; and the absence in most such societies of any firm continu-ity of the culture of the colonial power have resulted in a very hetero-geneous cultural picture. And yet the societies of the Caribbean – takingthe word ‘society’ to refer here to forms of social structure and socialorganization – exhibit similarities that cannot possibly be attributed tomere coincidence. It probably would be more accurate (though stylisti-cally unwieldy) to refer to the Caribbean as a ‘societal area,’ since itscomponent societies probably share more social-structural features thanthey do cultural features.31

Mintz has pressed this important insight over many decades since he firstarticulated it explicitly in the 1960s: it is not a common ‘culture’ (Africanor otherwise) that gives to the Caribbean its distinctive cast, but social form.And this social form, in turn, derives its character from the distinctivenature of the colonial history that coercively shaped the region.


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On Mintz’s telling of it, the first chapter in the story of the Caribbeanrecalls the rapid genocidal extermination of the native population. Withintwo hundred years of the Spanish Conquest at the turn of the sixteenthcentury the native people of the region – the Arawaks of the GreaterAntilles and the Caribs of the Lesser Antilles – had ceased being a social,political, or ideological force with which the colonial powers had tocontend. As Mintz argues, this colossal destruction of the indigenous popu-lation, this stripping away of the native modes of life that humanized thelandscape prior to the fatal European encounter, made the acculturationalprocesses of colonialism markedly different in the Caribbean – different,certainly, from the highland regions of the New World mainland, and fromAsia and Africa. In the Caribbean, he maintains,

the confrontation of cultures in the islands was one in which Europeancolonizers were able to work out the problems of settlement, adjustment,and development to a very large degree as if the Antilles were emptylands . . . This scourging of the human landscape enabled the Europeansto set the terms of their future colonialism in the Caribbean area in waysvery different from those available to them in the densely occupied areasof the non-western world. The significance of this distinction is real; thenext stage in Antillean history was set in the absence of subject peoples,for the European colonist had transformed himself from guest into hostsimply through having eliminated his native predecessors.32

The second chapter in the story of the Caribbean is the long and dismalchapter of the project colonialism proceeded to build in the ghostly absenceof the native population. It is the story of the remaking of the Caribbean aspart of the project of European overseas agricultural capitalism. Thiscolonial project, famously, was based primarily on the cultivation of sugar-cane; it depended upon the coerced labour of transported African slaves;and it required the economic organizational form of the large-scale plan-tation. These together – sugar, slavery, plantations – reshaped the wholesocial, economic, and ideological landscape of the Caribbean – and did soin a modern direction.

The sugar-cane plantations, Mintz writes, ‘were landmark experimentsin modernity’.33 They constituted a mode of labour organization andeconomic production which, in scale and complexity, had no comparison inearly modern Europe. The plantation was, of course, an agricultural enter-prise; but it was also, Mintz reminds us, an industrial (or at least proto-industrial) undertaking inasmuch as a good deal of the processing of thecane into sugar took place within its precincts as well. In short, Mintz says,from their inception in the New World in the sixteenth century, the plan-tation was a synthesis of field and factory, of cane-field and boiling-house.And the regime of sugar production it organized welded together largenumbers of both skilled and unskilled labourers, typically working in gangs


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or crews, working side by side in a disciplined, regulated, and synchronizedprocess. Because cane cultivation and harvesting and sugar productionrequired strict scheduling of its different phases, a modern time-conscious-ness permeated every aspect of the slave’s life. In Mintz’s words:

The system required overarching supervision to ensure that time sched-ules were met – and in the case of sugar-cane, the most important crop,those were dictated by the characteristics of the plant itself. Sugar-canemust be cut quickly when its sucrose content is highest; it must be groundas soon as it is cut, so that it does not lose that sugar; its juice must beheated quickly, prepared for crystallization and ‘struck’ – emptied intothe coolers – at exactly the right moment. The water- and wind-poweredfactories were enormous mechanical devices for their times, and it tookseveral men to operate even the initial animal-powered mills used by thesugar-making pioneers of Santo Domingo in the early sixteenth century.The large-scale use of the furnaces and vessels was typical. Even steamwas adopted very early in the evolution of the sugar industry, before theend of slavery in the case of several Caribbean societies. . . . These tech-nical features, many tied to careful timing, introduced more than just anaura of industrial modernity into what were operations which predated,in many cases by whole centuries, the Industrial Revolution.34

However, in Mintz’s view, the modernity of the plantation turns not onlyon the techno-logic of the industrial organizational form itself, but also onits transforming effects on the social and familial life of the labour force.He continues:

Keep in mind whence, and how widely, and under what conditions mostsuch plantation labour was ‘recruited’. Accordingly, ‘modernity’ refershere to a learned openness to cultural variety, an openness not so muchrelativistic as non-valuative – an openness which includes the expec-tation of cultural differences, and is not shocked by them. . . . People whocome from different places and who are not in their own culture canbecome modern, in part because institutional recourse to a standardcommon tradition is not immediately available. Soon after the Conquest,Caribbean people began coming from somewhere else. Most of them hadto come with imperfect institutions, and in the company of othersculturally unlike themselves. Most came without kinfolk. That was alsomodernizing, because the minimal cells of tradition-perpetuation arefamilial.

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, Caribbean plantationlabour became adept at forming relationships quickly, especially dyadicrelationships. Because the basis for operating in terms of known statuscategories was under constant pressure from migration and externalcoercion, they had to learn to deal socially with others, often in the


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absence of culturally-specific preconceptions about the meanings of indi-vidual differences in age, gender or physical variety. Accordingly,‘modernity’ as used here refers not only to the technological accompa-niments to industry, but also to its social organizational sequelae: to thecircumstances for meeting and relating; to ways of socializing withoutrecourse to previously learned forms; to an acquired matter-of-factnessabout cultural differences and differences in social style or manners; andto a social detachment that can come from being subject – while recog-nizing one’s own relative lack of power – to rapid, radical, uncontrolledand ongoing change.35

Sidney Mintz’s Caribbean then, is through and through, a historical space,and that history, emphatically a modern one. It is the peculiar character ofthis colonial modernity of the region – the genocidal violence that inaugu-rates it, and the coercive social relations and the particular institutionalform of the social-economic regime of plantation slavery – that gives theCaribbean its often deceptive, but for Mintz, very real, singularity.

Notably, this story about the powers and conditions of plantation slaveryis not specifically one about its brutality and repressiveness, its power tonegate the humanity of the slave. Obviously this is not because Mintz thinksthat the regime of plantation slavery lacked this kind of power. To thecontrary, Mintz is almost never not reiterating the brutal nature of slaveryand the human spirit it took to resist and survive it. But here Mintz wantsto fasten our attention on something besides this repressive aspect of thepowers that constituted the plantation, namely the coercive powers of thenew technological and organizational conditions to systematically build upmodern sensibilities, potentialities, dispositions, mentalities, and aptitudes.As C. L. R. James said many years ago, altering significantly the accent andimport of his own famous story of repression and resistance in The BlackJacobins, the powers that constituted the slave plantation both demoralizedand civilized the slave, that is to say, simultaneously broke down theconditions of old social and moral modes of being and created conditionsin which new complexes and patterns were induced. And for James as forMintz this ‘civilizing’ direction was a modern one. The temporal rationali-ties and disciplining technologies ensured that, as James put it, ‘from thevery start [the slaves] lived a life that was in its essence a modern life’.36

Rendering the story of Caribbean pasts in this way extracts the plantationfrom a narrative whose telos is the vindicationist one of demonstrating theslave’s will to freedom, and inserts it into a story that seeks to explore themaking of the modernity that is our tragic inheritance.37

THE HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF OURSELVES

In 1985, Sidney Mintz published the magisterial Sweetness and Power: thePlace of Sugar in Modern History.38 The book, the result of a great many


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years of research, brought together several strands of his thematic concerns– the history of sugar and the institution of plantation slavery, Marxism andworld capitalism, the nature of commodities, the cultural construction ofdiet and taste and the social transformation of cuisines – into a single inter-connected argument, at once compelling in its scope and vision, and originalin the patterns of interconnection it draws upon, and draws out. Sweetnessand Power is, of course, a book about the Caribbean (as the site of sugarproduction), as well as about Europe (as the site of the consumption ofsugar). But it is also a book about Mintz’s discipline, anthropology, and thelarge crisis he perceives it to be in. Sweetness and Power is a book envi-sioned as an indication of one way out of this crisis, namely the direction ofwhat Mintz calls the ‘anthropology of the present’, or the ‘anthropology ofmodern life’.

The 1970s, as Mintz made his way from Yale University to JohnsHopkins University to lead the initiative to build an anthropology depart-ment there (one significantly with an emphasis on Atlantic history), wereyears of considerable turmoil in US anthropology.39 The radical socialmovements of the 1960s – counter-culture, Civil Rights, anti-war, BlackPower, feminism – together created a context of disciplinary anxiety, self-interrogation, and reassessment.40 As Dell Hymes, for example, suggests inthe Introduction to Reinventing Anthropology (1972), the edited volumethat, more than any other, captures the mood of antagonism and critiquecharacteristic of these US years, it seemed unclear to many that, aspresently understood and organized, anthropology could justifiably carryon.41 In much of the US social sciences, Marxism defined the intellectualand moral-political battleground. And within anthropology specifically, themost significant Marxist tradition was rooted in a concern with – anddebates about – political economy. Notably these anthropological debateswere being informed increasingly by the emergence of a more historically-minded Marxism interested in the differential and uneven histories of capi-talist development (as between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’). André GunderFrank’s work on the constitutive character of ‘underdevelopment’ withindevelopment, and Immanuel Wallerstein’s on the development of aEuropean ‘world-economy’ from the sixteenth century helped to alter theterms of Marxist anthropological understanding of the non-Euro/Americanworlds.42 During these years, Mintz himself was fundamentally engagedwith the whole idea of a ‘Third World’ (about which he expressed misgiv-ings) as well as the question of a ‘world system’ of capitalism (regardingwhich he was sympathetic but critical).43 Perhaps it is not entirely surpris-ing that the two US anthropologists who most vigorously developed andelaborated these macro cultural-historical concerns in the following decadehad been together in the Puerto Rico Project, and had been developing aMarxist anthropology ever since. Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People withoutHistory was published in 1982, and it was followed a few years later byMintz’s Sweetness and Power.44 While offering a very different set of specific


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objects of investigation, Mintz’s book was, like Wolf’s, a story about capi-talism and commodities told on a global historical canvas. Both, too, drivenby a sense of intellectual commitment, were concerned to rescue the disci-plinary institution of anthropology from what they thought of as the provin-cialism, official professionalism, and social and political purposelessnessinto which it had descended.

* * *

Mintz describes Sweetness and Power as a ‘figurative sort of homecoming’.45

It may seem, at first glance, a somewhat curious description, but what he isalluding to through this image of return is important to grasp for under-standing the recursive optic that informs it (the ‘anthropology of ourselves’,he calls it at one point), as well as the place of the Caribbean in its overallimagination and point. Sweetness and Power ultimately grows out of Mintz’sinitial encounter with sugar in Puerto Rico in 1948 where the focus of hisattention is on the cultivation of sugar-cane and the variety of social andeconomic relations that constitute that local process. And understandablyso, since from the sixteenth century onwards the Caribbean has been drivenby the production of sugar. But Mintz, seeing as it were through the prismof this location, begins to discern the need to ask a different kind ofquestion, if you like, an Atlantic one: what, beyond force and profit, sustainsthe relationship between Europe and the Caribbean? Mintz’s answer turnson the seductions of the new commodity, sugar, and the transformations ofdemand the new taste for it precipitated. In a certain sense, sugar had beenlargely opaque to historians and anthropologists of the Caribbean. Despiteits obvious ubiquity in the story of the colonial relation between Europeand the Caribbean, sugar functioned largely as the occasion for the storyabout the slave trade and plantation slavery. As an object itself – as thecommodity-form realized by slave labour in an increasingly capitalistworld-market – it was very nearly invisible. The originality of Sweetness andPower lies in fundamentally altering this in such a way as to make sugarvisible as a hinge drawing the Caribbean and Europe together into a consti-tutive relationship.

The complex story Mintz tells, then, is partly of course a story about theproduction of sugar. In this chapter, we follow the evidence for sugarproduction from the ancient domestication of sugar-cane in New Guineathrough its cultivation in India, the islands of the Mediterranean (Sicily,importantly), the coast of Andalusia, Morocco, and the Atlantic islands(Madeira, the Canaries, and São Tomé), to its transplantation to the NewWorld by Columbus on his second voyage in 1493. This is the beginning ofsugar’s modern history, and traces the disappointments of the Spanish intheir early experiments in Santo Domingo at the end of the fifteenthcentury, the successes of the Portuguese in Brazil in the sixteenth century,and most dramatically the seventeenth-century explosion of sugar in theBritish Caribbean islands. It is here, in the African slave-based plantations


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of Barbados and Jamaica especially, that, from 1655 onwards, sugar produc-tion begins its meteoric and world-transforming rise.

However, that story of sugar and modernity is also a story aboutconsumption; indeed it is a story about the integral relationship betweenproduction and consumption of this commodity, one of the first capitalistobjects, Mintz tells us (tobacco and tea being others), ‘that conveyed withtheir use the complex idea that one could become different by consumingdifferently’.46 As Mintz says, while some sugar was always consumed in theCaribbean by its (slave) producers, the real locus of consumption was notthere but in Europe – first of all in Britain, the fastest-expanding commodityeconomy in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And consequentlysugar has a cultural history that is not only the history of its cultivation byslaves (prior to the various emancipations) and free labour (after theseemancipations). That cultural history traces the story of the cultivation ofthe taste for sugar, the aesthetic and ideological construction and encour-agement of a demand for it, and the changes in the diet of Europeans itbrought about. And in Mintz’s detailed account, it is the story of the trans-formation of sugar from a rarity in the seventeenth century, to a luxury inthe eighteenth century, to a commonplace – indeed a necessary – item ofmass consumption by the nineteenth century (‘an inexpensive good thatcontinued to seem like a luxury, imparting an aura of privilege to those whoserved it and to whom it was served’).47 Indeed, it is a famous aspect ofMintz’s argument about the transformation of consumption that, in theform of jams, treacle puddings, tarts, buns, sweetened tea, and so on, sugarprovided a cheap calorie-rich substitute for the English working classesduring the Industrial Revolution. In short, then, Mintz is telling a storyabout what ‘sweetness’ comes to mean in the modern lives of ordinarylabouring people in Britain: from a concept that has little meaning beforethe seventeenth century, by the nineteenth the quality of sweetnessbecomes something to be coveted by a broad cross-section of British society– and not just in matters of diet, but as a way of describing a desirablequality especially in people and the arts.

Needless to say, when it appeared in the middle 1980s Sweetness andPower was much discussed and much reviewed.48 And sometimes sharplydisagreed with too, as in Michael Taussig’s critique of the conception ofhistory and meaning it (and Wolf’s Europe and the People withoutHistory) embodied.49 Taussig argued that in failing to attend to the dimen-sion of ‘fetishism’ so important to Marx’s account (and of course thesubject of an important early book of his own),50 Mintz’s understandingof the commodity-form was less a diagnosis than a symptom of capital’shistorical self-understanding. Mintz, he suggested, had merely rehearsedthe ‘great narrative of Capitalism’ and consequently, and in a whollyspurious way, ‘metonymic connections’ were made to appear as ‘causalones’. Taussig makes a powerful case, one with which I am not whollyunsympathetic. But what interests me for present purposes here is less


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Mintz’s alleged hermeneutic naiveté (the unreflected-upon master narra-tive informing his account) than the fact that Sweetness and Power mightbe usefully read as constituting an answer to questions about the anthro-pology of modern life that have animated and propelled his work fromthe beginning.

These questions concern anthropology’s seemingly chronic inability toinhabit the simultaneity of a connected-yet-differentiated temporality, tolive (and to live up to living) in the time of its own present without the ‘asif’ of the Other’s alterity.51 The Puerto Rico project had already suggestedto Mintz the measure of this anthropological dilemma. For as the first partof the non-West to be annexed by the West, the Caribbean has always beenmodern, if paradoxically so; Caribbeans have always-already been insertedinto a modern complex of unequal global power, and as such they havealways-already been an integral part of the present of another story else-where. Looking on from Cañamelar, Puerto Rico, it would have been hardto suppress entirely or for long the recognition of a temporally coevalconnection between the sugar-cane worker’s labour on the plantations ofmodernity’s margins and the sweetness that modernity’s centres took somuch for granted. In a certain sense it was Taso Zayas and his compadreswho first pointed Sidney Mintz in the direction of an anthropology ofmodern life because it was through them that Mintz began to discern thefundamental connectedness of the modern world, and in particular, thefundamental connectedness between the Caribbean and Europe and (morelately) North America. From a narrow lens, sugar might appear to be theprosaic product of obscure rural proletarians, but in fact, as Mintz argued,‘the anthropology of just such homely, everyday substances may help toclarify both how the world changes from what it was to what it may become,and how it manages at the same time to stay in certain regards very muchthe same’.52

Mintz, I have already said, has often lamented the trivialization of theCaribbean by anthropologists, its seeming transparency, and thereforeunworthiness, as an object for serious scholarly scrutiny and analysis.Neither seemingly exotic and abstruse, nor of world strategic importance,the Caribbean has been the subject of a good deal of mediocre anthropo-logical research and writing. But the point of Sweetness and Power, and ofthe kind of historical anthropology it practises, is to provide the capstoneargument for the naiveté and ignorance involved in the marginalization ofthe Caribbean in North Atlantic scholarship. The place of sweetness in themaking of modern Europe is impossible to understand without under-standing the place of sugar in the making of the Caribbean. Mintz had tosee the latter before he could see the former. In this sense, Sweetness andPower is a powerful work of humanity and vindication. For it is, in the end,the story of how African slaves – and their descendants – on the plantationsof Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the Caribbean helped to remake not onlytheir own lives at the edges of the modern world, but also the sensibilities


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of taste that constitute the self-understanding of that modern world itselfat its very core.

CODA

Sidney Mintz tells the story of his mother, ‘a political radical’, visiting himonce in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for a vacation. Driving back from the airportthey passed through a large slum that ran along a stretch of brackish water.

My mother [recalls Mintz] gazed silently out of the window until I askedher what she was thinking. ‘I am thinking’, she said, ‘that there must bea lot of rich people in this country’. Astonished, I exclaimed, ‘How canyou gaze upon that, and declare that there are rich people here?’ ‘Ah’,she countered, ‘if there are this many poor people here, there have to bea lot of rich people.’53

The relational contrast is all. It is not hard to see that this acute sense ofthe embeddedness of objects-in-relationships has breathed through Mintz’sattempts to discern and articulate the Caribbean’s contrast and the impli-cations of this for an anthropology of modern life.

As I have tried to suggest, it is a virtue of Mintz’s historical-mindednessthat he has always been self-conscious about the moment at which he beganhis anthropological vocation, and about the place of the Caribbean inhelping to turn the discipline away from its attachment to the primitive andtoward the study of ‘modern’ or ‘contemporary’ people. A good deal hashappened in the Caribbean since The People of Puerto Rico and evenSweetness and Power, and a good deal too has happened in anthropologysince the onset of the terminal exhaustion of the nation-state projects in theregion that had their beginnings at roughly the same time as Mintz’s career.Something new perhaps is wanted now. But whether or not a new anddistinctive anthropology of the Caribbean can emerge will depend in parton what we are willing to learn from the example of Mintz’s vocation, inparticular his insistence that Caribbean difference is neither self-evidentnor transparent, but has, rather, to be elaborated by a patient and meticu-lous labour.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1 The epigraph is taken from Sidney Mintz’s Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture,‘Goodbye Columbus: Second Thoughts on the Caribbean Region at Mid-Millennium’,delivered at the Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick in May 1993 and subse-quently published by them as a pamphlet.

2 I develop this theme in somewhat different directions in David Scott, Conscripts ofModernity: the Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, Durham, 2004.


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3 Sidney W. Mintz, Foreword to Jean Besson, Martha Brae’s Two Histories: EuropeanExpansion and Caribbean Culture-Building in Jamaica, Chapel Hill, 2002, pp. xv–xvi.

4 Julian H. Steward, Robert A Manners, Eric R. Wolf, Elena Padilla Seda, Sidney W.Mintz, and Raymond L. Scheele, The People of Puerto Rico: a Study in Social Anthropology,Urbana, 1956. Perhaps the most comprehensive study of this work remains Antonio Lauria-Perricelli, ‘A Study in Historical and Critical Anthropology: the Making of The People ofPuerto Rico’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, New School for Social Research, 1989. Seealso Review/Revista Interamericana 8: 1, spring 1978, guest-edited by Ronald J. Duncan,comprising the contributions to a symposium held at Inter American University in SanGermán, Puerto Rico, March 1977, to reconsider The People of Puerto Rico.

5 Thomas C. Patterson, A Social History of Anthropology in the United States, New York,2001, chap. 4.

6 Franz Boas, ‘The History of Anthropology’, Science 20, 1904, pp. 513–24.7 See Sidney Mintz, ‘American Anthropology in the Marxist Tradition’, in On Marxian

Perspectives in Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Harry Hoijer, 1981, ed. Jacques Maquet andNancy Daniels, Malibu, Undena [for UCLA Department of Anthropology], 1984, pp. 14–15.

8 See, usefully, Stanley Diamond, ‘On the Origins of Modern Theoretical Anthropology’,American Anthropologist 66: 1, February 1964, pp. 127–9.

9 Paul Radin (1883–1959), The World of Primitive Man, New York, 1953; StanleyDiamond (1922–1991), In Search of the Primitive: a Critique of Civilization, New Brunswick,1974. Diamond told me that he had himself initially been a member of the Puerto Rico Projectbut left it early.

10 There is now a considerable literature dealing with the relation between the universi-ties, government intelligence-gathering agencies, and the foundations. See, for example,Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War, ed.Christopher Simpson, New York, 1998.

11 See Julian H. Steward, Area Research: Theory and Practice, New York, 1950; and Intro-duction, People of Puerto Rico, pp. 1–27.

12 Eric Wolf, ‘Remarks on The People of Puerto Rico’, Revista/Review Interamericana 8:1, spring 1978, p. 17.

13 René Velázquez, ‘Julian H. Steward’s Perspective on Puerto Rico’, Revista/ReviewInteramericana 8: 1, spring 1978, p. 51, writes: ‘Steward, together with Leslie White and RobertRedfield, Americanized anthropology in the United States. They shifted the emphasis fromnon-material to material aspects of culture and returned for theoretical inspiration to the nine-teenth century American evolutionist Lewis H. Morgan’ (his emphasis).

14 For a useful discussion see Eleanor Leacock, ‘Marxism and Anthropology’, in The LeftAcademy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses, ed. Bertell Ollman and EdwardVernoff, New York, 1982.

15 See William Roseberry, ‘Historical Materialism and The People of Puerto Rico’,Review/Revista Interamericana 8: 1, spring 1978, pp. 26–36.

16 There was also a folklorist interest in the Caribbean in the 1920s, it is important toremember, out of which came Martha Beckwith’s Black Roadways: a Study of Jamaican FolkLife, Chapel Hill, 1929. Beckwith, who taught at Vassar College, was a student also of NativeAmerican dance forms and Hawaiian mythology.

17 One thinks of such work of Melville Herskovits as: ‘The Negro in the New World: theStatement of a Problem’, American Anthropologist 32, 1930, pp. 145–55; (with Frances S.Herskovits), Rebel Destiny: Among the Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana, New York, 1934; Lifein a Haitian Valley, New York, 1937; The Myth of the Negro Past, New York, 1941; and (withFrances S. Herskovits), Trinidad Village, New York, 1947.

18 See Walter Jackson, ‘Melville Herskovits and the Search for Afro-American Culture’,in Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others: Essays on Culture and Personality, ed. GeorgeStocking Jr, Madison, 1986; David Scott, ‘That Event, this Memory: Notes on the Anthro-pology of African Diasporas in the New World’, Diaspora 1: 3, 1991, pp. 261–84. See alsoRichard Price and Sally Price, The Root of Roots: How Afro-American Anthropology got itsStart, Chicago, 2003.

19 See Sidney W. Mintz, Introduction to Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the NegroPast, Boston, 1990.

20 There are now, of course, a variety of books dealing with the post-war rise of ‘development’as a paradigm for solving the problems of the ‘Third World’. See, for example, Arturo Escobar,Encountering Development: the Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, 1995.


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21 Gordon K. Lewis, Puerto Rico: Freedom and Power in the Caribbean, New York, 1963,p. 20.

22 Lewis, Puerto Rico, pp. 143–4. See also Lauria-Perricelli, ‘The Making of The People ofPuerto Rico’.

23 Sidney W. Mintz, Worker in the Cane: a Puerto Rican Life History, New Haven, 1960.24 Sidney W. Mintz, ‘Cañamelar: the Contemporary Culture of a Rural Puerto Rican

Proletariat’, unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation, Columbia University, February 1951; and‘Cañamelar: the Subculture of a Rural Sugar Plantation Proletariat’, in The People of PuertoRico, ed. Steward and others.

25 Mintz, ‘Cañamelar’, p. 315.26 As previous note.27 Sidney Mintz, ‘The Role of Puerto Rico in Modern Social Science’, Review/Revista

Interamericana 8: 1, spring 1978, p. 7.28 Mintz, ‘Role of Puerto Rico’, p. 14.29 John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800,

second and expanded edition, New York, 1998.30 Most comprehensively in the short book written with Richard Price, An Anthropo-

logical Approach to the Afro-American Past: a Caribbean Perspective, Philadelphia, 1976,republished (with a new Preface) as The Birth of African American Culture: an Anthropo-logical Perspective, Boston, 1992.

31 Sidney W. Mintz, ‘The Caribbean as a Socio-Cultural Area’, Journal of World History9: 4, 1966, pp. 914–5.

32 Mintz, ‘The Caribbean as a Socio-Cultural Area’, p. 918.33 Sidney W. Mintz, ‘Enduring Substances, Trying Theories: the Caribbean Region as

Oikoumenê’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2: 2, June 1996, p. 295.34 Mintz, ‘Enduring Substances’. In Mintz’s thinking about the new time-consciousness of

modernity he is clearly indebted to E. P. Thompson’s famous essay, ‘Time, Work discipline andIndustrial Capitalism’, Past and Present 38, 1967, pp. 56–97.

35 Mintz, ‘Enduring Substances’, pp. 295–6.36 C.L.R. James, ‘From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro’, in The Black Jacobins,

second edition, New York, 1963, p. 392.37 For more of this argument see David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, chap. 3.38 Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: the Place of Sugar in Modern History, New

York, 1985.39 The Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University came into being in the

academic year 1974–5 in the context of a commitment (supported by the Rockefeller Foun-dation) to build what was called the Atlantic Program in History, Culture, and Society(launched in 1973) at the university. Richard Price also moved from Yale University with Mintzto be part of this project. For two decades this department was the premier training institutionfor Caribbeanist anthropologists.

40 See Sherry Ortner’s remarks on this moment in her well-known essay, ‘Theory inAnthropology since the Sixties’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 26: 1, 1984,pp. 138–44.

41 Dell Hymes, Introduction to Reinventing Anthropology, ed. Hymes, New York, 1972,pp. 6–7.

42 I am thinking of the well-known essay by André Gunder Frank, ‘The Development ofUnderdevelopment’, Monthly Review 18, 1966, pp. 17–31; and volume one of Wallerstein’s TheModern World-System, New York, 1974.

43 See Sidney Mintz, ‘On the Concept of a Third World’, Dialectical Anthropology 1:1,1976, pp. 277–82; and his ‘The So-called World System: Local Initiative and Local Response’,Dialectical Anthropology 2: 4, 1977, pp. 253–70.

44 Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History, Berkeley, 1982.45 Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p. xv.46 Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p. 185.47 Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p. 173.48 Among the more interesting reviews, see Stanley J. Stein in American Historical Review

91: 2, 1986, pp. 362–3; Clark G. Ross in Ethnohistory 34: 1, 1987, pp. 103–5; and John A. Marinoin Journal of Modern History 50: 3, 1987, pp. 549–51.

49 See Michael Taussig, ‘History as Commodity’, Critique of Anthropology 9: 1, 1989,pp. 7–23. This was a review essay on both Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without History


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and Mintz’s Sweetness and Power. Mintz and Wolf responded vigorously to Taussig in ‘Replyto Taussig’, Critique of Anthropology 9: 1, 1989, pp. 25–31.

50 See Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, ChapelHill, 1980.

51 This is the problem, remember, that Johannes Fabian takes up in Time and the Other:How Anthropology Makes its Object, New York, 1983.

52 Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p. xxvii.53 See Mintz, ‘American Anthropology in the Marxist Tradition’, pp. 18–19.


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Documents

Sidney Mintz’s Caribbean_Scott