Sidney W Mintz: Charting an anthropology of the Caribbean

The research program established by the anthropologist Sidney W Mintz (1922–2015) in a professional career spanning more than half a century was definitive in charting an anthropology of the Caribbean. Mintz’s family context and early training in anthropology provided the basis for a Marxist/materialist and dialectical theoretical approach that interpreted historical structures and specificities through the paradigm of North American cultural anthropology – and used the lens of cultural anthropology to understand historical processes. Mintz was part of a cohort of doctoral students at Columbia University in the late 1940s and early 1950s who would go on to become prominent within the discipline. Part of the pathbreaking The People of Puerto Rico project, Mintz developed a decidedly historical approach to Caribbean societies and cultures and understood them in relation to, and in interaction with, their imperial past and their contemporary locations within the capitalist world system. This informed his research and writing on comparative forms of slavery and their aftermath, the creolization of cultures in Caribbean history, and applied the insight acquired to the study of food and the complex systems by which it is produced and consumed. Mintz’s work has received great amount of attention, including critical evaluations. Mintz was an active participant in how his work and contributions would be assessed