Sidney Wilfred Mintz (born November 16, 1922) is an anthropologist best known for his studies of the Caribbean, creolization, and the anthropology of food. Mintz received his PhD at Columbia University in 1951 and conducted his primary fieldwork among sugar-cane workers in Puerto Rico. Later expanding his ethnographic research to Haiti and Jamaica, he produced historical and ethnographic studies of slavery and global capitalism, cultural hybridity, Caribbean peasants, and the political economy of food commodities. He taught for two decades at Yale University before founding the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins University, where he has remained for the duration of his career. Mintz' history of sugar, Sweetness and Power, is considered one of the most influential publications in cultural anthropology and food studies.[1][2]
Sidney Mintz為The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society 一書寫的afterword,可參看
Sidney W. Mintz. "The Changing Place of Soybeans and Soyfoods in U.S. Culinary and Economic Life."《第七屆中國飲食文化學術研討會論文集》，台北：中國飲食基金會，2002 。165-177
Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern HistoryImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view. My work on sugar, Sweetness and Power, situates it within Western history because it was an old commodity, basic to the emergence of a global market. The first time I was in the field I’d been surrounded by it, as I did my fieldwork. That led me to try to trace it backward in time, to learn about its becoming domesticated, and how it spread and gained importance in the growing Western industrial world. I became awed by the power of a single taste, and the concentration of brains, energy, wealth and — most of all, power — that had led to its being supplied to so many, in such stunningly large quantities, and at so terrible a cost in life and suffering. (From Sidney Mintz on Sugar)
As a young anthropologist, Sidney Mintz undertook fieldwork in Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. Fifty years later, the eminent scholar of the Caribbean returns to those experiences to meditate on the societies and on the island people who befriended him. These reflections illuminate continuities and differences between these cultures, but even more they exemplify the power of people to reveal their own history. Mintz seeks to conjoin his knowledge of the history of Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico–a dynamic past born of a confluence of peoples of a sort that has happened only a few times in human history–with the ways that he heard people speak about themselves and their lives. Mintz argues that in Jamaica and Haiti, creolization represented a tremendous creative act by enslaved peoples: that creolization was not a passive mixing of cultures, but an effort to create new hybrid institutions and cultural meanings to replace those that had been demolished by enslavement. Globalization is not the new phenomenon we take it to be. This book is both a summation of Mintz’s groundbreaking work in the region and a reminder of how anthropology allows people to explore the deep truths that history may leave unexamined.
Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Power, and the PastImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view. A renowned anthropologist explores the history and meaning of eating in America. Addressing issues ranging from the global phenomenon of Coca-Cola to the diets of American slaves, Sidney Mintz shows how our choices about food are shaped by a vast and increasingly complex global economy. He demonstrates that our food choices have enormous and often surprising significance.
Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life HistoryImage may be NSFW. Clik here to view. This is the absorbing story of Don Taso, a Puerto Rican sugar cane worker, and of his family and the village in which he lives. Told largely in his own words, it is a vivid account of the drastic changes taking place in Puerto Rico, as he sees them. Worker in the Cane is both a profound social document and a moving spiritual testimony. Don Taso portrays his harsh childhood, his courtship and early marriage, his grim struggle to provide for his family. He tells of his radical political beliefs and union activity during the Depression and describes his hardships when he was blacklisted because of his outspoken convictions. Embittered by his continuing poverty and by a serious illness, he undergoes a dramatic cure and becomes converted to a Protestant revivalist sect. In the concluding chapters the author interprets Don Taso’s experience in the light of the changing patterns of life in rural Puerto Rico.
