Dialect Anthropol (2016) 40:1–11

DOI 10.1007/s10624-016-9411-z

Sidney W. Mintz: from the Mundial Upheaval Society

to a dialectical anthropology

George Baca1

Published online: 2 March 2016

 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Introduction

Sidney Mintz (11/25/22–12/25/15) represents the passing of the final member of the
distinguished group of anthropologists who formed the ‘‘Mundial Upheaval
Society’’ (MUS) during the late 1940s at Columbia University. Though Mintz
had the privilege of studying with great anthropological minds, of the likes of Ruth
Benedict and Julian Steward, fellow graduate students stoked his passion for
anthropological theory and ethnographic fieldwork. Indeed, the membership of the
group was impressive, including such luminaries as Eric Wolf, Stanley Diamond,
Morton Fried, John Murra, Robert Manners, Robert Murphy, and Elman Service.
Through his participation in lectures, discussions, and debates with members of the
MUS, Mintz became a voracious reader of the anthropological canon. Throughout
his career, he remained committed to the insights of Boas, Malinowski, Ruth
Benedict, Audrey Richards, Max Gluckman, Hortense Powdermaker, Robert
Redfield, Edmund Leach, and many other significant figures in anthropology. At
the same time, he valued anthropology in a critical way as he set the discipline’s
descriptive empiricism on a collision course with historical materialism and
concepts of power.
In many respects, the founding of Dialectical Anthropology grew from the
exchanges between Mintz, Diamond, Eric Wolf, and the other members of the
MUS. Though each member’s approach and contributions remained distinct, they
shared an interest in connecting their experiences of hardship during the Depression
and their observations of the massive mobilization of state power during World War

& George Baca

baca.george@gmail.com
1
Dong-A University, Busan, South Korea

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II to reframing of anthropological questions. More than two decades after the

dissolution of MUS, Stanley Diamond’s establishment of Dialectical Anthropology
continued this scholarly project. With Diamond’s lead article ‘‘The Marxist
Tradition as a Dialectical Anthropology,’’ the MUS’s imprint was clear. The journal
was to be part of ‘‘a wider effort to resurrect and redefine the Marxist tradition’’ with
the specific aim of comprehensively criticizing anthropology and the larger tradition
of social sciences. Rather than ‘‘destroy the pretensions of social science,’’ Diamond
hoped to encourage a reevaluation of the whole tradition, which Marx represented
‘‘the critical cutting-edge’’ (Diamond 1975: 1–2).
In this essay, I will reflect on how Sidney Mintz’s work simultaneously grew
from the collective endeavor represented by the MUS and, at the same time,
represented a unique approach to an anthropology of modernity. His concomitant
obligation to ethnographic fieldwork, the Boasian culture concept, and historical
materialism distinctively influenced anthropological approaches that would become
increasingly dialectical and focused on ‘‘power.’’ Ashraf Ghani points out that
Mintz’s singular focus on the Caribbean ‘‘did not restrict the scope of his curiosity.’’
Rather, the region functioned as an ‘‘anchor for a particular perspective’’ that Mintz
used to ‘‘reconstruct the field of anthropology’’ to understand ‘‘the reproduction of
cultural systems, political power, and institutions’’ (Ghani 1998: 103–104). In this
way, Mintz redefined such subjects as slavery, plantation agriculture, and
colonialism in ways that we could see them as part of what Enlightenment scholars
often celebrate as ‘‘modernity.’’ In Mintz’s redefinition, modernity comes into view
as a relationship of power. And he took great care to elucidate the Caribbean’s
distinctive role in shaping the dialectical relationships between the rise of
industrialization and the establishment of plantation societies in the Caribbean.
Modernity, as such a relationship, he revealed to be contradictory and a dubious
object for celebration.

Routes to anthropology

Mintz’s scholarship grew from his unique family background. Many anthropologists
read Mintz into the history of radical Jews who came to New York at the turn of the
century, often dubbed ‘‘red diaper’’ babies. I learned this view when I was an
undergraduate at San Francisco State University (SFSU) in the early 1990s. I came
to the University after having worked as a Teamster while meandering my way
through the maze of the California Junior College system. These experiences
provided me with an appreciation for Marxism as I began discovering anthropology.
At the time, Philippe Bourgois taught at SFSU and he provided me a pathway that
connected my past with my interest in anthropology by introducing me to Mintz’s
Sweetness and Power. Suddenly, I became acquainted with other pioneers of
Marxian anthropology, of the likes of Eleanor Leacock, Eric Wolf, Claude
Meillasoux, Georges Balandier, and many others. As I worked my way through
various articles and monographs, I became intrigued by the biographies of these
anthropologists who had redirected the discipline through historical materialism
during the 1950s. As it turned out, Sid was very accessible. One day, I called his

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office and left a message. About 15 min later he returned by call and started telling
stories; stories that would continue for the next 20 years.
Sid’s stories were colorful—usually the color blue—and absorbing. His family
history fascinated me and revealed tales of a more complicated picture than that of a
red diaper baby. Sid’s father, Solomon Mintz, was anything but a ‘‘red.’’ Born
sometime in the late 1870s, he served in Czar Nicholas II’s army and was honorably
discharged before the revolutionary upheavals of 1905 and 1917. As Sid told me
about his father’s military experience, I started imagining a group of soldiers
forcibly dragging a poor peasant from his village in Russian-occupied Poland. Not
correct, Sid admonished. Solomon Mintz was relatively content in the Russian
army, completing a 6-year stint and reaching the equivalent rank of staff sergeant.
Sid conjectured that his father would have stayed among the Czar’s fighting forces if
the military had promoted Jews. Rather than being swept up in the political storms
that would eventually bring down the Czar’s regime, Sid’s father quietly moved on
in a practical fashion. He attended vocational school, became a tool and die-maker,
and immigrated to the United States.
From his mother Fanny, Sid gathered a progressive education and developed an
affinity for Marxian thought and socialism. Contrary to her husband, she was a
leftist and self-described anarchist. Fanny came to New York City during the first
decade of the twentieth century and wound up working as a seamstress in a
sweatshop and later became a labor organizer for the Industrial Workers of the
World, famously known as the Wobblies. As Mintz wryly tells the story in an
interview with Charles Carnegie, ‘‘the moment she got off the boat, she went to hear
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn give a speech, who would later become a member of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party. I fear that my mother was a danger to
the Republic from her first day on American soil’’ (Carnegie 2006: 115).
Despite her radical proclamations, Fanny turned out to be anything but a threat to
the American order. When Solomon proposed to her, she demanded that they move
to a small town as she reasoned the city was a dangerous place to raise a family.
Sid’s father happened to have a friend from the Army who washed dishes at a
restaurant in Dover, New Jersey—a small industrial town, still rural at the time. Sid
always remained puzzled by his mother’s decision. With merely a primary school
education, she was brilliant with languages. In addition to her native Yiddish, she
spoke German, English, and Russian well, and had a sharp wit and even sharper
tongue. Nonetheless, she resigned herself to a life of domesticity and ‘‘gave up her
political life, and there [Dover] she remained angry for the next 50 years’’ (Carnegie
2006: 115). Meanwhile, Solomon became successful. He eventually bought the
restaurant, invested in property, and even had such luxuries as a car and a summer
home. The stock market crash of 1929 ended the family’s brief experience of the
American Dream; they lost everything and Solomon returned, in his old age, back to
the restaurant he had once owned as a mere employee.
Notwithstanding academic success at Dover High School, Sid had few
educational options. To deal with the family’s lack of resources, Fanny engineered
an arrangement that continued to embarrass Sid throughout his life. She forced him
upon his newlywed sister and brother-in-law so he could pretend to be a borough
resident and enroll in Brooklyn College. New York opened Sid’s eyes to a more

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complex world, and he suffered ‘‘culture shock.’’ He expressed amazement about

Brooklyn College as he often said: ‘‘I was astonished! I had never seen so many
Jews.’’ Feeling like a country bumpkin, he was intimidated by the loquaciousness
and self-confidence of his classmates. Sid did not distinguish himself academically.
However, he had the luck of taking a course in anthropology from Alexander
Lesser—one of Franz Boas’s more thought-provoking, if not well known, students.
Years later, Professor Lesser’s unique synthesis of Boasian anthropology,
Darwinian evolution, and British Social Anthropology would have a profound
impact on Sid’s scholarship (See Lesser 1952, 1961).1

Mundial upheaval society: from the ashes of Columbia anthropology

After the war, Sid was grateful for the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944,
known as the GI Bill. Federal funds allowed him to bypass his family’s economic
misfortune and attend graduate school. With no idea about his future academic path,
someone suggested that he visit one of Ruth Benedict’s lectures at Columbia. He
was impressed with the way Benedict’s masterfully described cultural details. Sid
became inspired to pursue anthropology because of the way she presented ‘‘a total
culture’’ as if it ‘‘were a work of art’’ and ‘‘something to be coolly contemplated,
something utterly unique and distinctive, yet available to be studied, analyzed,
understood’’ (Mintz 2004: 114).
Mintz came to Columbia in the fall of 1946 and became Ruth Benedict’s student
and research assistant. Nevertheless, his excitement for Columbia University’s
anthropology was fleeting. Indeed, Franz Boas’s legendary department had been
mired a 40-year conflict with Columbia University’s President Nicholas Murray
Butler, an arch-conservative. Butler battled against Boas’ progressive vision of the
academic as a ‘‘citizen-scientist,’’ what he felt was ‘‘a moral obligation to spread
scientific knowledge as widely as possible.’’ Boas, accordingly, ‘‘applied anthro-
pological findings to human problems in education, race relations, nationalism and
internationalism, war and peace, and the struggle for democracy and intellectual
freedom’’ (Lesser 2004: 9). Butler, no doubt, epitomized the very racism,
militarism, and Eugenics that Boas vociferously opposed, which Upton Sinclair’s
muckraking classic The Goose Step vividly depicted (Sinclair 1923).
Indeed, the department was in shambles. Eric Wolf described it as the worst
educational experience he knew of (Peace 2008: 146–147). Sid described it to me as
‘‘total chaos.’’ The poorly staffed department could not keep up with the swelling
number of veterans who entered with ample federal funds yet were insufficiently
prepared for the rigors of graduate training. Rather than being demoralized, Sid,
Eric Wolf, Stanley Diamond, Robert Manners, and Morton Fried formed an
independent study group for qualifying examinations. Over the next few years, the
group expanded its purpose and enlarged its membership to include Elman Service

1
Mintz viewed Alexander Lesser as a pioneer in bringing a political and historical approach to
anthropology. In the 1980s, Sid helped Professor Lesser publish many of his articles in a collection
entitled History, Evolution, and the Concept of Culture: Selected Papers by Alexander Lesser (1985).

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and John Murra, older students who knew more about anthropology and had served
in the Spanish Civil War. Eventually, they became ‘‘bound together’’ through
commonalities of seeing anthropology in connection with a socialist outlook, which
led them to raise questions about class structure and state formation (Ghani 1987:
355). Representing this leftist political view, they jokingly called themselves the
Mundial Upheaval Society, which was derived from a cartoon Mort Fried drew up
as ‘‘an old-fashioned mock radical pamphlet. On the cover…a capitalist, a fat man
with a cigar, riding on the shoulders of a peasant and flicking ashes on his head’’
(Peace 2008: 150).
With the arrival of Julian Steward in 1947, Sid and the other Mundialists found
new inspiration in anthropology. Steward developed an evolutionary and materialist
approach he called ‘‘cultural ecology.’’ Steward had developed an outstanding
reputation in anthropology with the study of several Native American groups in the
Great Basin of Nevada, Utah, and California. He focused on how adaptations to
cultural settings, through ‘‘subsistence activities,’’ shaped cultural life and its
institutions (Steward 1955). As Robert Murphy points out, Steward was less
interested in the grand relations between environment and culture and more about
the mundane processes of ‘‘work;’’ the employment of tools and technologies to
transform and exploit the natural environment (Wolf 2000: 40; Murphy 1970).
In addition to materialism, Mintz was attracted to Steward because he was trying
to reformulate anthropological theory and methods in order to study complex
society and modern social problems. Steward brought a lucrative grant from the
Rockefeller Foundation to Columbia as part of his pioneering vision of anthropol-
ogy. He proposed multiple community studies, each focusing on a ‘‘major variant’’
of Puerto Rican society; yet, he conceptualized the processes of integration that
connected diverse communities into a national system (Steward et al. 1956). The
existence of the MUS made Steward’s life easier. He found a group of motivated
and talented research assistants. He would enlist Sid, Robert Manners, and Eric
Wolf as well as the University of Chicago graduate student John Murra as the field
director. He rounded out the research group with Puerto Rican anthropologist Elena
Padilla and Raymond Scheele. They ended up with five separate communities, and
the individual investigations were loosely organized Steward’s ideas that each
community represented ‘‘adaptations of productive complexes’’ to different
environments from which Steward believed different subcultures had developed
(Wolf 2000: 41).
Over the next several years a synergy between the MUS and Julian Steward
developed, a combined effect that would have a major influence on the development
of American Anthropology during the 1950s and 1960s. Sid valued cultural ecology
as a method as opposed to being a theory. He believed that Steward’s methodology
inspired the members of the MUS to hone their ethnographic skills for searching
out, defining, and tracing social interrelationships and connections. As procedure for
discovering ethnographic facts, it was amenable to many theoretical and conceptual
pairings (also, see Wolf 2000). Indeed, Sid and the other Mundialists developed a
deep appreciation for anthropological theory. Sid explains:

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‘‘Theory’’ is not a word I like to use, but we were reading a lot of theoretical
works and trying to see what light they threw on our immediate research and
writing concerns, which were aimed in large measure at describing social
phenomena accurately. When we were students together, we got interested in
the British social anthropologists, then in their heyday, but also in the rebels,
such as Godfrey and Monica Wilson, and Max Gluckman (Carnegie 2006: 135).
In this way, much of Sid’s enthusiasm about anthropology and his work with the
People of Puerto Rico project stemmed from the way the members of the MUS
developed a sharp and critical view about Steward’s orientation (Carnegie 2006:
111). Steward frustrated the group because he seemed to lack interest in questions of
state power and coercion. In many ways, this disagreement with Steward was
motivated by hardship of the Depression and World War II. Sid explained how this
events shaped the group’s view:
By the Depression, and how state power reacted to the Depression world wide:
what state power produced in Germany and in Japan and in Italy, and what
happened with state power in the United States at the same time, an interest in
that, in the differential consequences, in the historical roots of those
developments. What did the Treaty of Versailles really have to do, what did
inflation really have to do, what did the fear of communism in the West really
have to do, with the rise of Hitler? To what extent can we go back even
beyond those outcomes to see what gave rise to fascism? We thought in those
terms. At the same, we thought a lot about where anthropology stood in
relation to those kinds of developments… I wanted to show… how there is a
cultural dimension to human behavior, a dimension that Marxist theory had
not yet properly embraced, and that remains incomplete without it. That there
is a very important way of understanding human behavior that Marxism has
missed. I think all of us thought in these terms, though we all did so very
differently (Carnegie 2006: 136).
Sid and the members of MUS added this dimension of state power, especially the
politics of labor processes, that led to reconceptualizing Steward’s framework in a way
they believed was pioneering. From their engagement with each other, and a
productive antagonism with Steward, they forged an approach that George Stocking
characterizes as a ‘‘middle range’’ of a generalized Marxist approach to facilitate a
critique and alternative to Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Robert Redfield
(Stocking 2006: 219). In a way, Steward became incidental, which is bluntly described
by Robert Murphy: ‘‘No one had to tell us that need and livelihood exert an evil tyranny
over peoples’ lives, for we had seen our parents crushed under their weight. If Julian
Steward hadn’t come to Columbia, we would have invented him’’ (Murphy 1991: 73).
Mintz and Wolf, through their community studies under the aegis of the People
of Puerto Rico, advanced their research and analysis in ways that Steward never
fully understood, as has been pointed out (see Silverman 1983). Years later, William
Roseberry as a graduate student at University of Connecticut had read The People of
Puerto Rico (Steward et al. 1956) and noticed contradictions between the
introductory chapter, many of the individual chapters, and the conclusion. As it

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turned out, Mintz and Wolf had written the concluding chapter and brazenly used
Marxian formulations that contradicted the introduction’s cultural-ecological
framework. Mintz believed that Steward never examined the final version. He
reasoned that if Steward had read it, he would not have allowed it to go to press as
he would have rejected their Marxian-inflected conclusions (See Roseberry 1978;
Lauria-Perricelli 1989).
Such transcendence of Steward’s conceptual framework is illustrated by Mintz’s
choice of community. He chose to study a corporate sugar factory on the south coast
of the island and he looked beyond the ecological factors Steward prioritized as he
homed in on the power that Central Aguirre Sugar Company, a US-owned
corporation, exerted upon the municipality. But he did not arrive with a clear idea in
terms of Marxian theory or concepts. Instead, Sid explains the haphazard ways his
mother’s ideas meshed with the empirical facts he saw on the ground:
I was well into the field work in Puerto Rico and had begun to appreciate… the
tempo of life…and the wider forces that had created the conditions under
which they had to live that my own orientation began to develop a life of its
own… until that moment, whatever I knew about Marxist theory was received
knowledge, if you will, part of my patrimony—or matrimony!—coming really
from my family, and the orientation that my mother took towards
understanding the world. While much of it seemed persuasive to me, I had
no living confirmation of its postulates. But in the field, working with those
people under those conditions and observing how their lives had been given
their characteristic shape by forces over which they had no control, I was
able—I think for the first time—to see how Marxist theory could make a living
critique of society as it is, and, in that sense, I think, it was a particularly
important experience for me.2
Yet, his mother’s incisive influence did not stop there. She continued to pose
questions that rearranged his views. As Mintz developed his understanding of
Marxian debates about class power and the state, he continued to derive insights
from his mother. In a well-quoted passage, Mintz captured his mother’s insightful
judgments during the process of discovering the anthropological usefulness of
Marxian insights:
My mother was a political radical. On one occasion, many years ago, when she
was already quite elderly, I received her in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she
had come for a brief vacation. As we drove from the airport to the city, we
passed through an enormous slum, called ‘‘El Fanguito,’’ which stretched
along a brackish estuary. My mother gazed silently out of the window until I
asked her what she was thinking. ‘‘I am thinking,’’ she said, ‘‘that there must
be a lot of rich people in this country.’’ Astonished, I exclaimed, ‘‘how can you
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 be a lot of
rich people.’’ (Cited in Donham 1999: 51)

2
Unpublished Interview, Ashraf Ghani, ‘‘the Formation of an anthropologist,’’ pp. 122–123.

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Between the influence of the MUS and his mother, Sid engaged Robert
Redfield—one of the most prominent anthropologists in the United States at the
time, went beyond Steward (see Mintz 1951). Redfield had made his reputation with
concepts of ‘‘folk society’’ and ‘‘folk culture’’ (Redfield 1941). Sid had great respect
for Redfield and he regarded his ‘‘folk’’ concepts as an ‘‘elegant’’ attempt to create a
method of comparing how communities are ‘‘differently affected’’ by the changes
wrought by ‘‘civilization’’ (See Mintz 1953). Mintz appreciated Redfield’s
typological program and felt it was useful for analyzing and describing processes
of change. Nonetheless, he pointed out—with help from John Murra—that
Redfield’s research of Yucatan did not include a ‘‘study of a henequen plantation,
even though henequen production is the backbone of the Yucatecan economy,
according to Redfield’’ (Mintz 1953: 138). Drawing from his research, and intense
discussions and debates with members of the MUS, Mintz asserted that these ‘‘rural
industrial organizations’’ had molded the Yucatan’s agrarian economy in ways that
raised questions about Redfield’s characterization of ‘‘folk’’ society (Mintz 1953).

Pan-caribbean studies and colonial modernity

From an early stage in his academic career at Yale, Sid began to branch out from
Puerto Rico and consider other parts of the Caribbean. Much of this project, which
eventually included Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone Caribbean
societies, came about in an ad hoc fashion. Taking a group of students to Jamaica
in 1952 provided Sid with an opportunity to deepen his understanding of plantations
and slavery as he began to envision his scholarly agenda in terms of three major
civilizations that emerged from European colonization of the Caribbean (See Mintz
2010).
Mintz’s broader work on synthesizing insights from Puerto Rico and incorpo-
rating them with studies of other Caribbean societies suddenly took a backseat in
1953 when learned about an event in the life of Don Taso, his key informant during
his fieldwork in Barrio Jauca. He held Taso as a brilliant person with ‘‘a genuinely
sophisticated knowledge of the political implications of events,’’ and a ‘‘startling
intelligence’’ in that he ‘‘somehow stood outside his community even though he was
thoroughly part of it, made him a rich source of facts and corroboration for me’’
(Mintz 1989: 789–790). Sid was shocked when he learned that Taso had converted
to Christianity, becoming a member of the Pentecostal Church: ‘‘He had been in
trance, he had spoken in tongues, and he had given up various kinds of behavior—
drinking alcohol, swearing and gambling, among them-as part of his conversion.’’
The news startled Sid. Feeling that he had severely misconstrued Taso, and
frightened by the implications that such a blunder may have for the rest of his
community study of Barrio Jauca, Mintz endeavored to record Taso’s life history.
He looked to trace the patterns that resulted in such an unpredictable fate, which
culminated in the classic Worker in the Cane (1974 [1961]).
As Sid pointed out later in his career, his life history with Taso disclosed a certain
way that Ruth Benedict had influenced his work. For many years, he remained
puzzled about Benedict’s significance to his work, because she made ‘‘absolutely no

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reference to history’’ and was ‘‘purely a functionalist’’ (Mintz 2004: 123).

Nevertheless, as he points out, in his contribution to Sydel Silverman’s Totems
and Teachers, Benedict left a strong imprint on his understanding of cultural
processes:
In her sensitive analytic movement from cultural standard to individual
response and back again, Benedict made us aware of the dominant place of
culture in the profile of the individual; but she never portrayed culture—nor I
believe, conceived of it—as some impersonal monster, some bloodless
computer, ‘‘encoding’’ us, or pouring us into rigid molds (Mintz 2004: 115).
Sid productively used this tension between culture and individual to go beyond
Benedict’s interests and provided an intensely intimate and nuanced description of
world historical events as they shaped the lives of proletarians like Don Taso.
Indeed, Worker in the Cane uses the complex details of Don Taso’s life to provide a
breathtaking view of historical changes that followed US occupation after 1898.
From Worker in the Cane, Mintz clarified the position that he developed in terms
of his critique of Redfield: Rural people, many living under the forces of colonial
power, including plantation slaves, were thoroughly contemporary and must be seen
as active producers of ‘‘modernity.’’ Analytically, Mintz took his sharpened insights
from the Puerto Rican case and developed them in the entirely different contexts of
Jamaica and Haiti. This comparative project allowed Sid to deepen his understand-
ing of the role slavery and how the industrial-like production of commodities
connected European industrialization with colonization in the Caribbean. Mintz’s
interest in European power and the construction of the Modern World System did
not reduce the Caribbean to merely serving the metropolitan ‘‘core.’’ Instead, he
made ‘‘plain the obscured but intimate ways in which Caribbean labor has made
modern Europe and North America possible’’ by transforming European habits of
consumption, and ‘‘altering everyday life and the symbols that give meaning to
social life’’ (Carnegie 2006: 106–107).
Mintz’s insights went beyond the correcting of anthropology’s fascination with
the ideal of the ‘‘primitive.’’ He also criticized the way Marxist perspectives often
assume modern forms, represented by industrial factories and processes of
proletarianization, and were uniquely and inherently European. Instead, he showed
that many of the things we associate with modernity and progressive transformation
of society actually appeared in the Caribbean first, or as he eloquently described in
his Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture at Warwick University:
In the view espoused here, Caribbean peoples are the first modernized peoples
in world history. They were modernised by enslavement and forced
transportation; by ‘seasoning’ and coercion on time-conscious export-oriented
enterprises; by the reshuffling, redefinition and reduction of gender-based
roles; by racial and status-based oppression; and by the need to reconstitute
and maintain cultural forms of their own under implacable pressure. These
were people wrenched from societies of a different sort, then thrust into
remarkably industrial settings for their time and for their appearance, and kept
under circumstances of extreme repression. Caribbean cultures had to develop

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under these unusual and, indeed, terrible conditions. The argument here is that
they have, as a result, a remarkably modern cast for their time. (Mintz 1993)
Indeed, Mintz conceived of plantations as institutions of modernity as he
gathered inspiration from Edgar Tristram Thompson’s 1932 dissertation entitled
‘‘The Plantation’’ (Thompson 2010 [1932]). Thompson had dismantled climactic
theories of plantation agriculture by conceiving of the plantations as a ‘‘frontier
intuition,’’ operating as a political structure that brought land and labor under new
and more severe forms of control. Mintz developed Thompson’s insights by
describing the multiple ways these ‘‘modern’’ agricultural institutions forged
connections between the developing capitalist states in Europe and slavery in the
Caribbean and the American South. Rather than an archaic form of social
organization, Mintz viewed plantations as ‘‘landmark experiments in modernity’’
(1996b: 295) that did not exist in Europe until much later. In this way, Mintz
pointed out the existence of a factory system in the New World before factories
existed in Europe; an insight that anthropologist Anne Stoler has used to depict
colonies as ‘‘laboratories of modernity’’ (Stoler 1995).
In 1985, Mintz broke free from anthropological and Caribbean circles with the
publication of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in World History (Mintz
1985). He displayed his intensely dialectical approach to anthropology by
examining and analyzing the intricate relations that connected an industrializing
Britain, with plantation slavery in the Americas, and an emergent modernity by
tracing the trans-Atlantic career of the commodity sugar. Indeed, Sweetness and
Power brought Mintz’s anthropology, and his unique conceptualizations of power,
beyond the specialized audiences who had consumed his scholarship for three
decades. By focusing on the magnetic chemical properties of sugar, inherent in the
taste of sweetness, he provides a unique perspective on the workings of industrial
power. Sugar’s story begins as an expensive luxury for the elite and gradually
materialized into a working class necessity. In the process, sugar became
intertwined with proletarianization and the rise of factories in England through
the production of cheap and high-calorie foods that fed working classes. Mintz uses
the rise of this peculiar commodity to reveal the dialectical relations between
enslaved labor on New World plantations and ‘‘free’’ labor in British industrial
cities. In these pages, the reader comes to see many contradictions in the modernity
that is generally embraced, as Mintz reveals the Caribbean, and its enslaved peoples,
as active producers of the modern world.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Dong-A University for supporting this research. Also, Jason
Antrosio, Diane Austin-Broos, Herbert Lewis, and Anthony Marcus provided helpful comments that
improved this paper. I especially appreciate Herb Lewis’s help in contextualizing the MUS regarding the
history of anthropology at Columbia University.

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