And the Rest Is History: A Conversation with Anthropologist Sidney Mintz
Sid and Jackie Mintz in Fars Province, Iran (1966). Courtesy of Sidney Mintz.
Sidney Mintz was an acclaimed professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University for over 20 years. After graduating from Brooklyn College in 1943 and serving in the military, Mintz received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1951. He taught at Yale University for 24 years before moving on to Johns Hopkins, where he co-founded the Department of Anthropology in 1975. Mintz was also a visiting lecturer at Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Berkeley, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Paris), College de France, Ludwig-Maximilians University (Munich), the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the University of Puerto Rico. He received many honors during the course of his career, most notably the Franz Boas Award from the American Anthropological Association in 2012.
Sid Mintz’s research in the Caribbean began with fieldwork in Puerto Rico in 1948 as part a famous project supervised by Julian Steward. Situating anthropological research in the context of both local history and the history of global capitalism, Mintz wrote books and articles on topics such as slavery, labor, markets, and food. His first book, Worker in the Cane (1960), is a detailed life history of a laborer in the sugar fields. Mintz later examined large-scale economic processes in Sweetness and Power (1985), which describes the role of sugar in the spread of colonialism and capitalism. In Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom (1996), Mintz made clear his seriousness about the study of food and an anthropology of modern life. His last book was entitled Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations (2010). Mintz continued to write about the anthropology of food and to publish on the Caribbean region until his death at the age of 93 on December 27, 2015.
This interview was conducted by JT Thomas on October 18 and 19, 2013, at Mintz’s home in Cockeysville, Maryland. Thomas, who took his very first anthropology course from Mintz at Johns Hopkins, received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Iowa in 2014. This interview originally appeared in the American Anthropologist in 2014. Many thanks to Sidney Mintz’s wife Jacqueline Mintz and Dr. Michael Chibnik, former editor of the American Anthropologist, for making this interview possible
I. ON SID’S PARENTS
[Sid’s parents were emigrants from Eastern Europe. They lived in New York City when they arrived but soon moved to Dover, NJ, where Sid grew up.]
Sidney Mintz: My mother had a sharp tongue and a startling way with words. You can hear her influence on the way that I speak. English was her fourth language, and she spoke it well. While I was growing up, she might say to me about someone, “Well, it’s hard to talk with her about the situation. She’s so phlegmatic.” “Phlegmatic,” I’d think, “where the hell did she get that?” She loved words, but I cannot imagine she was ever taught a grammatical rule. Her spoken English was absolutely correct and in its economy quite lovely.
My father never really learned English properly. He had a trade school diploma from a technical institute of some kind in Vilna (Vilnius, Lithuania), where he’d learned to be a diemaker. He came from a family with many siblings who were talented with their hands — two dentists, a pharmacist, and my father among them. My mother had been allowed to attend the Tsarist state primary school because out of 11 siblings, only she and one brother had survived the first year of birth. Her education might have been to what would be about the fifth- or sixth-grade level here, probably even less.
JT Thomas: Your mother became a union organizer. Who did she work for?
SM: She had several political ties, but she identified mostly with The Industrial Workers of the World. People called them the Wobblies. It was an anarchist organization, dedicated to worker education and collective action. It was grounded in the union movement and was especially active in mining operations in the western states but also in industrial cities. The Wobblies would later be proscribed by the federal government. After that legislation was in place, she could have been deported, but by then, she was married and organizing only her kids.
In the 1900s, young Jewish and Italian women who emigrated to the U.S. often became politically radicalized because working conditions in New York City sweatshops were so lousy. The garment trades are the textbook example. Most Jews who came here from Eastern Europe had lived in rural slums, inside the Tsarist Pale of Settlement. They could not own land or attend state schools there. Because there was little that men could do gainfully in these places, besides manual labor, often they became religious scholars, dependent on their wives for their daily bread. Their women usually played a more active economic role, commonly in marketing.
JT: I love the beginning of Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom [Mintz1996] where you talk about your father’s restaurant in Dover. Have you always been interested in the anthropology of food?
SM: I was always interested in food, but it honestly never occurred to me that I might become an anthropologist of food until after I wrote that sugar book and people began telling me that I was one. Very early I became interested in how people acquired, prepared, cooked, and served food, and that all came from my father. One of my earliest memories is of the walk-in refrigerator in my father’s big, earlier restaurant, before 1929, when he was at the pinnacle of his brief success. I had trouble climbing over the foot of the entrance door and was told that if I became locked in, I would freeze like the sides of beef hanging there. I never forgot it. I came by my interest in food honestly; feeding people had become what my father did for a living. As I grew, I was able to help.
JT: What types of things did he cook? Did he cook whatever people in New Jersey wanted to eat at that time?
SM: The average New Jerseyans who came to his tiny Depression-era place were regulars — store owners from down the street, salesmen who visited Dover each week or month, the local cops, the lawyers. It might be someone from the local Jewish community, a few of whom were workers in the nonunion slipper and hosiery sweatshops fleeing New York City at that time. I was ten years old in 1932, and we were three years into the Depression. My dad’s was one of the few places to eat in Dover in those hard years. My father served a variety of dishes and had many favorites of his own. He adored shad when it was in season, and fresh-picked corn on the cob was a special treat. He made good omelets. During the Depression, he used to serve a ribeye steak with French fries and a lettuce and tomato salad on the side for about seventy-five cents — it was a local favorite. People were not yet as crazy for hamburgers as they later became, after World War II. Before then, ground chuck was used more for meatloaf or meatballs, or stuffed peppers. My father liked steak tartare and made it for himself with chopped red onion, capers, and Tabasco sauce. I don’t know where he learned that. He produced excellent fresh horseradish for his boiled beef and dyed it red with beet juice. He cooked very good “Jewish” food — really the food of the Poles and Russians among whom the Jews within the Pale lived. His pies were highly regarded. He had an open dish so-called “Dutch apple pie” that I adored, and his soups were marvelous, as was his pcha: calves’ foot jelly.
JT: So he didn’t have these food traditions growing up as a child? These were not his mother’s recipes or anything like that?
SM: Some must have been his family’s recipes. But he stopped eating a diet defined by his faith at an early time, and he learned to cook a lot of other foods as well, including of course pork and shellfish, which are tabooed foods for practicing Jews. He probably learned to eat some new foods during his six years in the Tsarist Army. Russian or Polish peasant food can be very good, of course, when cooked well. He had a special liking for Russian mushrooms, which are spectacular, especially the Boletus eduli; grbi in Russian — marvelous [when] dried and eaten in soup. He served cold soups for summers, with hot boiled potatoes with lots of dill and butter on the side, and cold and hot sorrel soup; those are important in Eastern Europe. Sorrel leaf is sour; if you wrap fish in it, it will soften the fish. It’s cut into chiffonades, strips, or for soup, chopped; sometimes it’s served with hard-boiled eggs cut in quarters and dropped in the soup. Borscht, sure. Borscht doesn’t have to be beet soup, it can also be cabbage soup. He had a cabbage dish he called kapusta, the Polish word for cabbage. It was eaten with spare ribs — pork ribs cooked with sauerkraut and tomatoes and served with smetana — sour cream. Of his cold soups, the one that I liked the best was called kholodnik, “the little cold one,” made of various fresh garden greens, intensely cold and sour, with ice cubes and citric acid, the bowls chilled first in the freezer and [then] eaten with hot boiled potatoes with dill.
JT: Did he make food at home or strictly in the restaurant?
SM: He cooked at home for us — almost always Jewish food. During the Depression, he cooked a lot of innards — offal. Those were truly hard years. He had a great kidney stew, peppery and rich. He’d cook heart and lung, not common dishes.
II. THE PUERTO RICO PROJECT
[Sid attended Brooklyn College, where he received a B.A. in psychology in 1943. After serving in the military during World War II, Sid entered graduate school in anthropology at Columbia University. He soon became involved in a now-famous fieldwork project in Puerto Rico that was run by Julian Steward, at the time an anthropology professor at Columbia.]
SM: Julian Steward planned a team project for the study of a modern complex society by anthropologists — a very daring conception, actually, in 1947. Then he selected a number of Columbia and Chicago students, some of them Puerto Rican, to carry out the project in Puerto Rico. He was able to arrange for us Columbia people to interrupt our studies after only a year and a half of classes, before we’d had our comprehensive exams; and he organized a semester-long course aimed at preparing us for fieldwork. He really tried hard to figure out what we could be taught, but the answer was everything: I don’t think we knew anything! Few of us had undergraduate degrees in anthropology — as an undergraduate, I’d only had one course in anthropology — and we’d had a year and a half of general graduate courses. His confidence in us was not so much misplaced as innocent. He did bring in people to lecture us who had worked in Puerto Rico, teaching anthropology or doing fieldwork: Morris Siegel, who taught and supervised a community study there; Frank Tannenbaum, an eminent historian of Latin America, who came to the class and told us how he had ridden a mule across the island; and others I’ve forgotten. Steward also assigned us a few community studies to read, and he chose relevant ones, though they were few. He introduced us to some really good books, such as Goldschmidt’s As You Sow (Goldschmidt 1947), a comparison of two agricultural communities in California, one consisting of small farms, the other being essentially a corporate company town. The author documents the churches, schools, and medical care that the small-farm community had created for itself. The company town lacked any community institutions at all, and it made for a glaring contrast. We also read a book on a Japanese urban neighborhood, Suye Mura (Embree 1939), that was way ahead of its time. The best of all of them, I thought, was Peasant Life in China by Fei Xiaotong (1939), who was a student of Malinowski’s. His book describes how a remote Chinese village — actually, his birthplace — became part of the modern world because its women were manufacturing raw silk for the world market and how the Great Depression broke that connection and threw all of those women out of work.
Sadly, though, there was hardly a word about Puerto Rico in the course. There was an important community study, Comer´ıo, by the American sociologist Charles Rogler (1940); but there was too little else from a social science perspective on the island. Remember that although Steward had a study plan, he too knew nothing about Puerto Rico. We arrived there poorly prepared. Our only virtue was that we knew that we were poorly prepared.
JT: Did you speak Spanish at the time? Was there any language training?
SM: No — I couldn’t say buenos días when I arrived. When Steward came to visit us six months after we got there, though, he was greatly impressed because we were all speaking Spanish.
In the weeks after our arrival, we had the use of a car and a chauffeur so we could visit communities and work up our criteria for choosing a human clustering in which to live. We traveled in groups and got lots of immediate comment from fellow students. Consistent with Steward’s plan, each community that we chose for our work was supposed to represent some important economic adaptation in the island economy so that the studies we made could serve as a basis for a larger overview. Steward had gotten a grant from the Social Science Research Council, and I think the Centro de Investigaciones Sociales of the University of Puerto Rico paid most of our living costs. Steward’s grant paid for our transportation and for costs of the project administration, I suppose . . . Steward was very smart and quite modest, at least in our company. He could say a great deal briefly and eloquently. I still remember his phrasing from a group discussion one day, back in Columbia, about the relationship between local social groups and the evolution of their forms of governance. Remember, he wrote his first serious theory paper on simple bands. He said to us something like “When a specific technology is superimposed upon a particular environment, the social organization of the local group sets the limits of any possible variation of political forms.”
JT: To me that sounds like paraphrasing of Marx’s famous quote, “In the social production of their means of existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations which are independent of their will.”
SM: It’s more than that — both more and less specific; because it’s also about mode of production. He’s not trying to describe a case; he’s trying to fix parameters for a range of cases, arising from the way labor extraction fits onto nature, in accord with what the engineering and tools make possible. He said it much better than I just said it — and much more briefly.
When Steward sent us to Puerto Rico, he had not thought much about the history or sociology of Puerto Rico’s national institutions. He talked about banking, the education system, and the military, but he had not confronted analytically the fact that Puerto Rico was a dependent possession, a colony, of the U.S. Our overall treatment of island society was skewed by this failure to come to terms with the real political and economic situation. In this connection, I had better mention that the introduction and conclusion to The People of Puerto Rico (Steward 1956) were written by Eric Wolf and me. The introduction was written by the two of us, and the final chapter was written by Eric. I think that if Steward had read them thoroughly, he would almost certainly have made some changes. One colleague actually refers to what we wrote as a “palace revolution” of a sort. But even so, it was still an awfully cramped critical overview. In that important regard, I think the book failed. But in spite of that, I do think the community studies had much to offer, and the book had a salutary influence on the “savages only” outlook.
Eric’s and my cooperation in writing the start and finish of the book came about unexpectedly. I got back from Puerto Rico in August 1949, and Eric got back at about the same time. We prepared to finish our courses. And then quite suddenly one day Steward said to us, “Well, if you fellas want to make some money, I will pay you each a dollar an hour to write the introduction — he would later add the conclusion — of the book.”
JT: Which you probably both jumped at.
SM: Of course! For Eric and me, this was a great way for us to add to our income. But it was also a precious opportunity to formulate our ideas about what the project had, indeed, accomplished — the scholarly benefits of the entire project, including the valuable work of many young Puerto Rican scholars. The Puerto Rico project could have been much more important, I think, even though when it ended, we were still busily learning what we’d been doing. The community studies are good, in my opinion. Eric did coffee; I did sugar on a U.S.-owned plantation; Elena Padilla did an analysis of a government-managed North Coast sugar mill; Bob Manners worked on minor crops; and Ray Scheele studied the island’s upper classes. The other students who’d participated had also learned and written a lot. John Murra was a good field director, and we had met and talked with him and each other often enough, and with enough seriousness of purpose, to make our cooperation valuable and interesting.
Steward’s idea that institutions were horizontal sociocultural binding mechanisms was far too simple and unhistorical to handle what we faced in Puerto Rico. I think anthropological methods can be fruitfully applied to a complex society. But to do it right, people must take seriously what “complex” means. The overwhelming weight of economic and political power has to be appreciated longitudinally, historically.
Yet it turned out that Steward eventually lost interest in the project. I suspect that he had concluded that he would not be able to say anything new and theoretically important based on what we’d done. He kind of gave up, I think, and turned back to an “acculturational” overview of culture change. What he had done that I thought was daring and praiseworthy was to argue that we could use anthropology to study a complex modern nation. Then he had found the means, the field workers, and devised a theoretical schema with which to try it out.
III. NEW YORK AFTER PUERTO RICAN FIELDWORK
[After fieldwork in Puerto Rico, Sid returned to New York City to finish his coursework and write his doctoral dissertation at Columbia. During this period, Sid was an active member of an informal group called the Mundial Upheaval Society (MUS) that discussed anthropological issues. Some of the other members were Stanley Diamond, Robert Manners, Elman Service, and Eric Wolf. John Murra and Rufus Mathewson also attended and participated. Many participants presented their original work to the group before publication.]
SM: When we got back in the summer of 1949, we’d been away a year and a half. There was an awful lot of adapting to do. All kinds of personal changes were in process. Things had happened to all of us. Births, divorces — all the usual and unusual events. But the principal field workers, both North American and Puerto Rican, finished their assignments, and many published their work.
JT: I’m sure fieldwork made you feel like you had something under your belt at that point.
SM: It did more than that for me. When I finished college, I went into military service the following week, but neither experience made me feel grown up. College was wonderful, but it was college — once I was in the service, I realized that. Military service was mostly boring, in my case. Not for Eric, of course; he had nearly died of his wounds [ Wolf fought in the Tenth Mountain division in the Italian Peninsula and was badly wounded, nearly dying in a prisoner of war camp]; but I daresay that, all the same, neither of us felt very adult at the time we went to the field. I think I only began to realize what being a grown-up meant after I went to the little line village that I’d decided to study in the south of the island. Nothing I’d done before that — college, Air Forces, graduate school, and work at several real jobs — had felt like adulthood to me. What made me feel grown up was new. It was being with people whose language I had learned, whose way of living I was learning, from whom I was learning things that even many Puerto Ricans of other classes knew little or nothing about. It was information that I was learning how to put in written form, as accurately and impartially as possible. John Murra was actually reading my field notes and asking questions of me. I was learning to understand something new about other fellow humans, people who’d grown up in this different place, some of them in another time. Learning to report carefully and fully would become my profession. Being able to do that made me feel grown up. Increasing self-confidence leads us to work in a more serious way; doing the work with expertise and ease means becoming professional. Of course, it also meant learning more about myself — but obviously that was not the point of it. It was not for self-realization that we’d been entrusted with funds and given an objective. Similarly, our friends in the Mundial Upheaval Society, some of them older than Eric and I, such as Murra and Service, people who’d already begun their careers, were willing to talk to us seriously, as equals — and that gave us a new grasp of ourselves. I feel sure that at least some graduate students who read this now will know just what I am talking about.
At the same time, being grown up meant not losing our readiness to see clearly and to be able to laugh at ourselves. Sydel Silverman [anthropologist of Italy, widow of Eric Wolf, former head of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, told me that after Eric died, she had to go over mountains of stuff in his files, and one of the things she found buried there was a postcard from 1950 that said “MUS Monthly meeting, Tuesday,” with a date, and then it read “Same place, same time, same crap.” I was MUS secretary, and the card went to members to alert them to our next meeting. Even the name of our organization — Mundial Upheaval Society — was a gag. Elman [Service] had wanted to call it “Peasants are revolting” — a line from an old joke — and someone declared that was like “going against the class interests of the rural sectors” or some other pompous phrase. So our name became the MUS — to which, by the way, two books have been dedicated. Being able to poke fun at the way people are captives of their own ideas made us think harder about saying what we thought more succinctly, more clearly. We were learning about writing our theses as we were talking about our other aspirations. Some people — I’m one — can learn quite quickly to write stuff down or to talk about it clearly but have not yet learned how to think. Since I was in MUS, I have never stopped trying to learn how to think.
The demeanor of the people in the MUS was striking. The members were so different from each other, and the differences were dramatic, I thought. I don’t know what anybody thought of me, but I was intensely aware of how other people were different. We used Elman’s or Mort Fried’s office for our meetings, and we filled the room. We could observe each other up close as we talked and argued. There was always some joking but certainly not all the time. People weren’t the way they were in classes — there was no “teacher.” I think we all felt ourselves to be both teacher and student. Some people were particularly voluble. Stanley Diamond, for example. Stanley talked a lot. He talked only about what he was interested in. He found it difficult to listen to other people, and he treated most dialogue as not germane to his interests. He was often eloquent, and he could laugh at himself, but he thought that everybody else was much more comical than he was, and he’d bully his listeners. He might decide that Rousseau was his subject of the week, for example, and then he’d stop you in the middle of Amsterdam Avenue with cars whizzing by, reading to you from Rousseau. He would do it any time of the day or night, and no matter what you wanted to say, even about Rousseau, he might ignore. Don’t get me wrong! It was a great group — it really was — and I thought that each person in it had a distinctive personality.
JT: Was Eric quiet?
SM: Eric talked less, I suppose, than anyone else. Stan Diamond talked the most. Eric often said the most important things, but he talked very little.
JT: When he said something, people listened?
SM: You bet. I think most people in that bunch — not all — admired Eric’s mind. He had arrived in the United States with a very solid grounding in the European curriculum. He had read Marx,Weber, Sombart, and others scholars in the original German, including some of their work that had never been translated into English. When he explained himself, he was modest but also confident. He differed from many people I’ve known in his clear and objective view of Stalinism. Yet he thought that the existence of the Soviet Union was an important international political fact of life. He cared enough about world history to respect serious works by scholars of many different political labels, and his breadth of knowledge never ceased to amaze me.
Like Eric, John Murra was very erudite and often said things in a distinctive manner. John was changing his political outlook at that point in his life, I believe. But when people are going through big personal changes, often they don’t want to admit it or discuss it with others. I was quite close to John, and we talked together a lot. In contrast to what I imagine he was experiencing, I think now that Eric’s and my philosophies were hardening at that point. John and Elman had both been in the Spanish Civil War, which set them apart in the ways they saw some things. Mort and Elman tended to share their views with each other but by no means perfectly. Of course, these things have to do with schools of thought — Leslie White, or Alfred Kroeber, say, or the diffusion of British functionalism — but they also have to do with different personalities, different stages in life for individuals.
For me, the years 1949–1951 were wonderful: exciting, absorbing, and fulfilling. I don’t think most humans recognize what is happening to them while it’s happening. Anyway, I’m much better at looking back a year or even 10 or 30 years later to try to evaluate my experiences in the light of what I was before I’d had [them] and what I think I’ve become since. That was one of the most important periods of my life in a number of ways.
IV. ANTHROPOLOGY, BIOGRAPHY, AND HISTORY
JT: One of the things I think about in terms of your scholarship is your emphasis on life history. Worker in the Cane [Mintz 1960] and some other things you wrote really focused on people’s lives. How did you decide that you were going to look at a very specific person’s life as a lens through which to view Puerto Rico?
SM: I had not thought of doing a life history, and when I started work in Puerto Rico, I hadn’t even thought that a life history would be useful. Boas thought life histories were simply specimens of intellectual history; he dismissed any intellectual value they might have had, and I suspect he was unmoved by such things as Radin’s work with John Rave, for example. It seems to me that he was too grudging about what could be learned from one informant.
I learned a tremendous amount from my friend Taso during my first 18 months in Puerto Rico, but when I left the field and returned to New York to write my dissertation, I had no thought of working with him again. But as I explain in Worker in the Cane, it was when I found out that Taso had converted to the Pentecostal faith that I decided to ask him what he thought of the idea of us working together once more. I was bowled over by his conversion and hoped to understand it better if we were able to talk it through. Taso liked the idea of my coming back. Among other things, our working together had made us more like each other, more equal. [But, for various reasons,] we could not begin until the summer of 1953.
Mintz with Taso’s family, Puerto Rico (1948). Courtesy of Sidney Mintz.
Taso, the man I wrote about, was a working-class person in a modern society, one that was also tropical and mostly agricultural but in some important ways modern. I thought that the history of that region of the island in the preceding century made that crystal clear. Curiously, and as far as I can tell, I was the first anthropologist who ever took down the life history of a working man who was a rural proletarian rather a “primitive.” Everybody knew that there were millions of people in the world, nearly all of them people of color, working at ghastly jobs producing basic commodities, mostly for consumers in the West, but hardly anybody had thought about it — including myself, until I was sent to Puerto Rico. Miners, oil well workers, rubber tappers, chicle tappers, sugar cane cutters, shrimp farmers — you don’t have to be sophisticated to know that there are many people in other places who work terribly hard for our benefit and for tragically scanty rewards. Yet I doubt that there was a recorded sentence anywhere about the life of one such person among those masses of people who have lived in recent centuries. Those are millions of life histories that no one ever wrote down — or, worse, never even thought of writing down. We anthropologists were mostly preoccupied with the peoples we call “primitive” and our responsibilities to them. Our predecessors thought, and with good reason, that their job was to record the lives and defend the rights of primitive peoples. We are not pushing our ancestors aside by broadening the conception of whom anthropologists should learn from now.
SM: Taso was born in 1908. I first got to know him in 1948. He was 40 years old, a young man. But of course, men who have worked in cane for more than 30 of their 40 years are a lot older than most other people of that age. I have a lot of pictures of him. One is of me with some of his family that was taken that first year, and I’m crouching down and a couple of the younger kids are being held or standing, and Taso and his wife Eli are in the back. They look so undernourished, so frail, and I look so fat and comfortable by comparison. I was aware of it then, but I didn’t realize how starkly a photograph would capture that contrast.
He was in a difficult period then. He had worked very hard for his political party — so hard, and I had seen much of it — and had not been rewarded at all. He was deeply disillusioned, even though his party had won power and had been able to make a real material improvement in the life of Puerto Ricans like him. He suffered from an ailment, which he called a hernia. At times it was painful and there was swelling, and he had not had it treated it in any way, not even by wearing a truss. I’m not even sure that he had a medical examination. In Worker in the Cane, he describes how it was cured miraculously. He says very carefully, “It went away. And up to this moment, it hasn’t come back. I’m not saying what will happen tomorrow, but it’s never come back.”
When I understood that Taso thought that changing his religion had led to — perhaps better said, had resulted in — his getting well, it seemed to me glaringly contradictory to the story of his life. He’d been a labor organizer and a charter member of the Socialist party in Puerto Rico. His wife had gone to the elections wearing, as he proudly said, a red dress that was like a flame. It seemed to me that I’d been very obtuse not to have understood more about him. He always made critical remarks when he would see the people dancing at the Pentecostal meeting, and I was fooled by that, and so this contradiction between what I thought I’d seen and what happened made me want to know more about him.
When I went back to Jauca, I asked him about working together. I said,“We have biographies of George Washington and Luis Munoz Marın, and all the Puerto Rican heroes and important figures of the past, but we don’t have your biography.” He did not think that was ridiculous. He said he’d like to work with me again; he thought it was a good idea, and when it was all done, I asked him: “Do you want me to use a fictitious name?” And he said, “No, no, it’s my life. You can put my name to it.”
I undertook the recording of Taso’s life history without realizing that when I’d finished getting it down and translated, I would have a personal account of Puerto Rican history for the preceding 40 years, a life story that runs parallel to the history books. Taso had begun working in Puerto Rico’s most important industry as an orphaned child. He had done the hardest work one could do and had grown up and brought up his children and grandchildren in that environment, supported by his own labor. In Worker in the Cane [1960] he recounts, for instance, how he set out to find medicine for an infant son who was dying, walks all night in vain, and comes home to find the child dead. He had that kind of life, like something out of Russia in the 18th century; and yet it is a crushingly modern story. In the last chapter of the book, “History within History,” I tried to say what his life meant to me because it was bigger than both of us. I thought Taso was a very big human being. If you ask me to look at what I’ve tried to do in my scholarship, certainly one of the most important things to me was to help his voice be heard.
JT: Steward was doing a big, macro-level cultural ecological analysis of Puerto Rico, and all of a sudden you winnowed it down to a single person’s life history. What did he think of this project? What did Eric Wolf think?
SM: I don’t know that Julian Steward paid any attention to it all. I never remember him saying anything to me about it. I cannot remember what Eric might have said, but I do remember that he had met Taso and admired him.
JT: Of course, your work and Eric Wolf’s work are very historical in nature.
SM: I think of anthropology as the daughter of history. It seems to me that while Wolf and I were both historical in outlook, we also saw dimensions of history that anthropology was well equipped to address on its own.
JT: You were moving away from the Malinowski model where anthropologists were writing ethnographies of groups isolated from Capitalism or from world systems?
SM: Not so much moving away. I think of it more as adding to what Malinowski and his contemporaries thought and did. Malinowski’s work is a building block in anthropology, a discipline that was building itself. We were not born as a profession before the 19th century, and we only began observing with people like Robertson Smith and Maine. Such observation changed qualitatively after Haddon [Alfred Cort Haddon, founder of the School of Anthropology at Cambridge University] published his ethnographies of the Torres Straits Expedition and Boas established the first anthropology department in U.S. at Columbia. Seligman went to the Torres Straits and was one of Malinowski’s teachers. Firth learned from Malinowski; Leach built upon them both; Tambiah and Barth learned from Firth. We have ancestors, and we have a common body of knowledge that we should pass on. Colleagues who lack a historical sense don’t seem to grasp this. But at turning points, there are always gaps, misunderstandings. When Steward sent us to the Caribbean, I realize now that I ought to have expected that many of our colleagues — “the establishment” — would look upon the work we did as empty of consequence. The peoples of the Caribbean were “nothing people.” They had no history of their own, no headdresses, no songs, their languages were baby talk, their magic was fake magic. Morton Fried, who was a first-rate anthropologist, a smart man, and a member of the MUS, went to British Guiana to look at Chinese culture there and came back profoundly disappointed. There must have been a few thousand people of Chinese origin in the country. Mort said to me, “You know, when you talk to a Chinese farmer in China, he can say to you, ‘The earth I stand on goes back two thousand years.’ But the Chinese in British Guiana don’t really have any past, and they know nothing about their past.” Mort was absolutely unmoved; he found nothing, absolutely nothing, that he wanted to study or understand there, and Mort wasn’t even working with so-called primitives. He wanted the people he studied to be some kind of real thing — just like those of our predecessors who were looking for natural man. Whereas somebody like me would say, “Of course there’s a past! Of course people know about their past. Of course they’re shaped by that past.” There was an unwillingness to be historians, some of it perhaps a reluctance borrowed from our British colleagues at the time. Anthropology was heavily committed to one category of human, the study of whom history had been deemed irrelevant. History had become unfashionable, and science had been made its opposite pole.
Let me be clear. Studying the people who had been deemed to have no history was essential to our profession. I think Kroeber was at least partly right in saying anthropology studied those people because no one else was interested in them. Anthropologists, many of them great scholars, did study them. But that work could not be, and should not have been, cut off from the rest of our species but united with it instead.
Whatever Steward’s shortcomings — as we saw them — he dared us to try to study a whole society scientifically, and our efforts helped to open anthropology to a realization of the chosen narrowness of our earlier objectives.
V. TEACHING INTRODUCTORY ANTHROPOLOGY
JT: Could you talk about the importance in your life of teaching undergraduate introductory anthropology courses?
SM: I became an undergraduate teacher almost by chance. I had no opportunity as a graduate student to teach undergraduate classes at Columbia. I’m not sure, looking back on it, why I didn’t have that chance, but no one ever offered it to me. I remember Chuck Wagley asking me one day, while I was still taking courses myself, if I would give a class in his undergraduate course for him while he was out of town. I leapt at the chance. It’s still fresh in my mind. I prepared my notes with great care. I had about 20 three-by five index cards with my notes for the class — and by the end of the class, it turned out that I’d managed to get through the second card. That was my first lesson in teaching: say less; say it carefully; repeat it but not by saying the same thing twice. While I was writing my thesis, I had a couple of opportunities to teach at City College, downtown and uptown, and Eric had gotten a job at Queens one summer and invited me to teach there. We had different courses to teach, and Eric, who had just learned to drive, would drive us to Queens in a quite stately but well-worn vehicle. I took every such opportunity I got and thought it was quite wonderful. If I remember right, I was paid about $9 a teaching hour. It was like found money. People paying money to listen to me!
Mintz in the Fonds des Negres marketplace, Haiti (1958). Courtesy of Sidney Mintz.
When I went to Yale in the summer of 1951, Wendell (Wendy) Bennett, who was the chair, asked me to teach an undergraduate course in ethnology. I did that for the first couple of years, and I had a class of about 25 students each year. It was very good experience. I’m leaving out my grad courses here. I was asked occasionally by Ralph Linton to give a class for him. He was a Sterling professor — a very prestigious chair at Yale — after leaving Columbia in a huff. He taught the big introductory class to lots and lots of Yale undergraduates. On rare occasions, Linton would overindulge the night before and would ask me to give his course the next day. He was a terrific lecturer, and he held the class in his palms. He lectured, quoting from Icelandic sagas and telling the students what it was like to eat roasted baby and other topics of the sort that would interest Yale undergraduates of that period. When I taught for him, I was obliged to teach from his old notes. I did poorly. I was much too serious and no doubt too nervous, but I did occasionally lecture for him. I had this experience facing an audience of about two hundred students, and Wendy (Wendell) Bennett would try to protect me, which I thought very kind of him.
Around 1958 or 1960 — I’d been there [at Yale] about decade — I was asked to give the introductory anthropology course. By then I had become a more confident teacher. Very soon the class went from 100 to 400, and then to 700. The only place we could meet then was the Yale law auditorium; there were no classrooms that big. I taught that class for perhaps 20 years altogether, at Yale and then at Hopkins. The attitudes of the Yale College administration and my colleagues in anthropology there, with respect to this teaching, were entirely different. The Yale College people were keenly aware that I was supplying the department with future majors by getting undergraduates interested, and doing the college a service too, but my department was not at all interested in what I was doing; they seemed blissfully unaware that it mattered, even to them. I read it as my colleagues thinking that it was an indication of my intellectual limitations if I could talk intelligibly to so many young people twice a week.
Although I had never taken a course like the one I was teaching, I realized that a unified course should represent the four major fields. I’d taken a couple of courses in linguistics and one in archaeology. Of course, I knew only the bare essentials of anything about either of those sub-fields, but I scratched out enough so that I could say a little about language, the same for archaeology, and even for physical anthropology, in which I’d had two courses with Harry Shapiro. I worked awfully hard at it, especially the first several years. My notes were changing very fast, of course, and my reading habits improved. I learned how to work with my teaching assistants, and over time I discovered I could teach a four-field course without shaming myself or, I think, my profession.
When I taught the course in the law school auditorium, there would always be some students who’d come up to the front of the room at the end of the class to ask questions and to listen. They would stay up in the front of the room for up to half an hour while we discussed the material. Occasionally, one or two might come with me for coffee afterward. So instead of being 150 minutes a week, the course was more like 200 minutes a week, and I still remember many of those individual students with a surge of pleasure, and there were TAs and sessions with them. Those classes were among the most educational for me of any I have ever taught. Many of your colleagues and mine are people I met for the first time in that class. (If you are reading this, you know who yo are!)
Though fieldwork had many marvelous rewards, nothing I’ve done otherwise has given me as much pleasure as those classes. I still am in touch with some students from the introductory course, and last year (2013) I was invited back to Yale for the 50th reunion of the class of 1963. I am terribly proud of that part of my career. I’ve had people stop me in the de Gaulle airport or on Boulevard St. Germain [in Paris] and ask me if I’m Sid Mintz, whereupon they tell me they took my course in nineteen-whatever. There’s a lasting benefit in teaching people in a way that what they remember about you is how seriously you took your profession. When people got up in front of me in the classroom when I was a student — and I was a lousy student, a callow student — I would often think “Why is this guy bothering with this? He surely does not care about it; why should I!?” — rather than thinking about the substance of what he was trying to tell me. I think now that was because I had the feeling that he didn’t really care whether his students understood.
Once after I gave a guest lecture in an introductory class at Hopkins, a student asked me, “Is anthropology interested in great big generalities, or is it interested in specific little things?” I said to him, “It’s not really the difference between being interested in big things or little things, it’s really about how we’re all one species, and we form groups of different sorts, and in order to understand both of those things at once, you’ve got to deal with lots of big things and lots of little things.”
I told him a story about a wonderful pamphlet written by a sinologist and anthropologist at Chicago’s Field Museum, Berthold Laufer. It’s about cricket champions and cricket musicians. Laufer was a superb scholar and wrote about domestication, turquoise, giraffes — so many different things, but as a museum curator, he often had to write about what seem at first like painfully dull subjects. They had a collection he himself had made of the material culture of people who keep crickets. The Chinese keep crickets to hear them sing. He wrote about how the Chinese love the singing of the crickets and how they build little houses for them and make little brushes with which to tickle the cricket so it will sing. Then he talks about the myth the Chinese have about the lady who falls in love with the cricket and touches it, and the cricket becomes a prince and they get married — you know, there’s all this stuff. Your eyes can glaze over reading about the cricket.
But then there’s a little paragraph at the end — just a couple of concluding sentences. He writes that the crickets are tiny and that the Chinese are different from Western societies because while the West has always been most interested in big creatures, the Chinese have always been interested in tiny creatures as well as big ones. They’ve always studied carefully these tiny bugs and ants and spiders. Then just as we are about to fall asleep, he drops it on you: maybe this is the reason, he almost whispers, that the Chinese were able to domesticate the silk worm and “invent” silk. And that’s the end of the article. It’s about what seems to be a little thing, but it’s also about an amazingly big thing. He points it out so gently and — in my case, at least — it makes the reader feel like such a fool. It is also about what anthropology can do for us by waking us up. It’s about how we ponder the mysteries of uniquely human genius as well as pondering all the stuff we are not so proud of.
I always tell stories; that’s one of the aspects of how I teach. I think many people are charmed, and so they listen. It is surely not necessary to do so, and there are other people who are distracted or put off by stories, but some people also really learn — understand — not for the stories but for what the stories do. In other words, stories can help at least some of them to learn about and to appreciate teaching. That is not my first intention when I tell a story, but that’s what has often happened. For me, teaching undergraduates has always been the most gratifying, the most humanly moving, experience I have had, professionally.
JT: Do you think your undergraduate introductory courses reached more people than, say, Sweetness and Power [Mintz 1985], which would probably be your best-known book?
SM: Sweetness and Power has affected a lot of people, but it’s really for adults. When you teach an introductory course, the students are at a much earlier point in their lives, and the kind of impression you can make on them about thinking is much more fundamental — and, ultimately, possibly much more useful. I found it more exciting to get undergraduate students to understand a little bit about human evolution, say, or about how languages differ than to teach graduate students something subtler or more sophisticated. Undergraduate students are learning things that may stay with them for the rest of their lives. That’s more important than whether or not they become anthropologists.
VI. AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES AT YALE
JT: Could you talk about your role in the development of Yale’s African American Studies program?
SM: It must have been around 1969. People in this country were beginning to recognize that our global struggle for men’s minds was not going to be a smashing success if people of color couldn’t eat in white people’s restaurants or use the same drinking fountains and toilets. The international context for the civil rights struggle is easily forgotten. I think it should be kept in mind. One wonders whether that struggle might not have been delayed another half century had some Americans not seen that American racial inequality could be a deadly reality in the Cold War. It is not surprising that Mac Bundy, newly chosen to head up the Ford Foundation, would give $100,000 to Yale to explore the establishment of an African American Studies Program. The international and global had intruded — as it would thereafter, more and more — upon the domestic and national in striking fashion.
JT: How many African American students were actually at Yale at that time?
SM: About 40. Admitting significant numbers of African American students was an innovation. This was about the same time — it did not become public in any way — that they ended the quota for Jews and just before the first undergraduate women had arrived. I must stress that I don’t think these qualitatively different phenomena were connected; it was simply that Kingman Brewster was a remarkably good president.
JT: How many other universities had African American Studies programs?
SM: None. Yale was the first. Henry Rosovsky, Harvard’s dean after Bundy, thought Harvard was first; I contradicted him in print; he was wrong.
At the very beginning, I didn’t have anything to do with African American Studies at Yale. A committee to explore the issue was appointed by Brewster and presided over by Yale’s provost. About five or six black undergraduates came to committee meetings. I was invited to one of those meetings and [was] asked by the chair if I would head up a curriculum committee, if and when the program they were designing was approved at a Yale College faculty meeting. The message I was getting was that they needed a full professor with a white face to head the curriculum committee. It made good sense to me, and I agreed to do it soon after. All of that went well, albeit with a good deal of electricity in the air. When the dean presented the program to the Yale College faculty, he announced that I would be chair of the curriculum committee. The program was approved in principle, with some fanfare, by the Yale College faculty, and a public announcement soon followed. It went smoothly, up to there, but I remember clearly that same afternoon, when a colleague in my department accosted me. His face set in an uncomfortable half smile, he said to me, “Oh, Sid, this is terrible. You’re academically justifying a pointless exercise.” I’m saying it much more elegantly than he did. “You’re lending your name to this disreputable undertaking. You don’t realize what the consequences are going to be. They’re going to take over.” He gave no explanation of the plural personal pronoun. Though I knew that he was not really interested in my good name, I told him patiently that he had been grievously misled, but then I called an associate dean, a sensible and calm person who knew that among the faculty all was not as tranquil as it might seem. “I’m afraid I’ve caused a sudden anxiety attack on the part of one of my colleagues,” I told him. “I’d be grateful if you could give him a call and try to reassure him.” Of course the dean said, “Yeah, sure. I’ll be glad to do that.” He did, and after that I was not subjected to any more of the same sort of polite racist doom-saying, at least [not] within my department.
JT: So there were elements of opposition within Yale at this time?
SM: Oh, yeah. Not necessarily racist views, although that played a role too. There were quite noticeable elements — and in the wider New Haven community, too, at that time.
JT: Would they voice their views publicly?
SM: Not the Yale folks, no. They were mostly the sort of people who prefer to bemoan any state of affairs they disliked with carefully sanitized gentle slanders and gloomy predictions. I felt strangely confident that I could handle whatever came up. I’d been defending the anthropological study of the Caribbean region for years and arguing that it was anthropology’s duty to study slavery and its aftermaths, the biggest demographic and cultural phenomenon in global history up to that time. In the context of that reality, what had happened in the U.S. was simply a piece of something much bigger, more complex.
Our committee work made it quite plain that this was the case. I had a black junior colleague who was visibly thrilled to learn that African languages had been spoken for more than a century in Cuba. When I mentioned that W. E. B. DuBois had first learned about African empires while listening to Franz Boas at a commencement at Atlanta University, I realized that some committee members were learning this information from me.
I found running that committee quite difficult, but it was also enormously fulfilling. One could sense the swell of the tide. I felt at times that I was on the front line of things. I was invited to at least one town meeting at a nearby suburb where the politeness vanished, and the nastiness was right out there, but at least the people who were racists made it explicit. There was nothing like that on campus. It was more the “But do you really think that there is anything to this idea of an academically defensible program, as in, say, Soviet studies or English literature?” I was asked this a number of times by colleagues. At the same time, I was teaching my undergraduate course and my seminars, and trying to maintain my research, and each day there were new challenges.
But then we submitted the curriculum, and it was approved at a Yale College faculty meeting. There followed the problem of finding a director for the program. If I remember correctly, there were only two black people on the faculty at that time, both full professors, Richard Goldsby and Michael Cooke. Goldsby was a biologist and wisely turned the job down. Cooke, a British West Indian, was too far removed from the American situation.
JT: They really were the only black faculty members at Yale?
SM: Yeah . . . I may be forgetting, but I think not. There were a couple of visitors at that time who were men of color, and I may be omitting someone. I don’t think so though.To put this in perspective, I should add that, if I do remember correctly, there were only two tenured women on the Yale College faculty at that time and only four on the faculty in the entire university.
Until we were able to get a director for the program, I was the person out there for any questions — and that did feel like a hot seat. Happily, we recruited for the position of director Roy Simon Bryce-Laporte, a sociologist whom I had had as a student in Puerto Rico some years before. Roy was a first-rate scholar, highly intelligent, with very sophisticated, nuanced views of race relations. He was a wonderful addition to the Yale faculty. About the same time, several other black scholars were added to the faculty, including Arna Bontemps, a great American author and poet. It was an achievement to recruit him, and I’m proud to have helped. Yale, of course, can do that. They have the money and the prestige. Having both makes possible an ease of manner, a confidence based on past successes. When institutions get money for the first time, they risk becoming arrogant and reckless, but at Yale and in a relatively short time, it was possible to create a setting in which about forty young African Americans were able to become more comfortable than they had been before and where genuine interracial intellectual achievement became possible. It was a slow process and fiendishly demanding for the first crops of students, but it succeeded.
My wife Jackie [Mintz] played an important part in that success. She was dean of one of the residential colleges at the time. The black students in that college were arguing for separate residential quarters in the college, claiming it was justified because without private space of their own, they could not protect their own unique cultural legacy. One of the problems with their position was that they had laid claim to one of the most desirable entrances in the college, and they wanted exclusive use of it. For several successive years prior to Jackie’s appointment as dean, this had provoked an uproar during the annual housing lottery. Unsurprisingly, there was strong opposition from many of the white students. Jackie put together a student committee that would represent the black student group and other students, and she sat with those kids for weeks — I do mean weeks — often until late at night, until a settlement was hammered out. There was, as you can imagine, a certain amount of fear and apprehension about the students and what they might do — a lot of talk about black power and the history of repression. You have to remember this was in 1971, and there had been threats of violence in the years before, culminating in the Black Panther trials in New Haven, along with the presence on campus of the National Guard.
I really could not get over Jackie’s success in keeping order and achieving a victory. When it was over, I said to her at one point, “What did you use to fall back on, when you were in the middle of all the wrangling?” She said, “Well, the most important thing to remember is that they’re just kids. And at the day’s end, they do want to have a Yale degree.” I think now that she and I we were so involved with so much going on that we had hardly any time for other things, or even for each other. But there were some especially good moments. Kingman Brewster stopped by our apartment in the residential college where Jackie was dean. He was going home from a meeting and came by mostly just to thank Jackie for what she had done. He, better than almost anyone else I have known, knew what it meant to lead.
I worked on that program because of its inherent intellectual interest but also because it was the right thing to do. It came off better than just about anything I’ve had a chance to do, and I’m very proud of Yale’s African American Studies program. It took hard work to create it; it produced many good, and some great, students.
JT: Do you feel like you had support from the anthropology faculty in doing this thing that was slightly outside of the department?
SM: Not really. It was partly, I think, because most of my colleagues were cautious about things that were new — that they preferred not to try something that might turn out to be risky.
VII. ANTHROPOLOGY AT JOHNS HOPKINS
JT: Could you talk a little bit about why you left Yale and about your role in starting the anthropology department at Hopkins?
SM: I had been in the Yale Department of Anthropology for almost exactly a quarter of a century when I left, and I’d been promoted from instructor to full professor. Because of my history there, because I taught the big introductory course, perhaps because I mixed more than most of my anthropology colleagues in Yale activities, I’d been able to have some effect upon how the department took shape. Among the people whom I had helped to hire there was Richard Price, who was specializing in the Caribbean region. Rich got an attractive offer from Hopkins. It came about because a very good Hopkins dean had the idea of starting an anthropology department. He’d worked out an arrangement with the department of history there. The historians were aiming to initiate a program in Atlantic history and culture. Anthropology would make an obvious complement. Yale, because of a tenure freeze, could not match the Hopkins offer, and Rich was preparing to leave. Jackie said to me one day, “Well, you like working with Rich, and you’ve been here a long time. I know you like this place, but you’re not altogether happy in your department. Maybe you should consider leaving.” I was deeply fond of Yale, its president, and its educational vision. I’d been there a long time, and I thought I’d been well-treated by the institution. If I left, I’d be giving up a great deal. I was tempted by the idea of starting over, though, because I knew it would be rejuvenating. What had happened to some of my senior colleagues who had perhaps stayed too long in one place was on my mind. I admitted that there might be opportunities in a new context that would simply never turn up at Yale, in spite of the university’s excellence. In only a short time, what Jackie had said began to make good sense to me.
JT: When was this?
SM: 1974. Not long after Jackie and I talked, I called Rich up and told him that if he was interested in having me join him, I’d be willing to listen. He replied that he and his wife had been trying to figure out how to persuade me to move. Rich was the one who came to Hopkins in 1974; the first offer was to him. One eminent historian at Hopkins claimed afterward that Rich had been hired as bait to convince me to leave. That is just another myth.
I had already accepted Carl Kaysen’s offer to spend 1974–75 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Once I decided to leave Yale, that meant moving to Baltimore by September 1975, and that’s what I did. Jackie was associate provost at Yale at that point. She wasn’t prepared to leave then, though she was glad that I had decided to make a new start. I spent the year in Princeton and then I came down to Hopkins. That was when we began to hire colleagues there and started a full time program in undergraduate and graduate teaching.
I came to Hopkins alone because Jackie couldn’t leave her job at Yale. She stayed there for two more years, and then she went to law school in Philadelphia. Naturally, we had a few years of commuting. I commuted from Princeton to New Haven, and then from Baltimore to New Haven. Once established in Baltimore, I gave a course at Princeton, en route to New Haven. When Jackie was admitted to law school, she commuted for a year to Baltimore. Then I got a year of leave and spent it in Philadelphia. Those were difficult years of adjustment, but the department at Hopkins flourished. We’d made an offer to Emily Martin, our colleague at Yale, to join us even before I’d moved to Baltimore. She was the first addition to the department. She is a wonderful teacher and scholar, and we were very lucky to get her. Then we hired two additional young people, but we kept one slot open for visitors. I was at least 20 years older than all of my department colleagues at that time and was able to invite good friends who were my contemporaries or older. Claude Levi-Strauss agreed to come over to accept´ an honorary degree. Edmund Leach, who I’d known for some time, came twice to teach, for a semester each time — once in our department and once jointly with history. We had visitors — John Murra, Bill Roseberry, Stanley Tambiah, Fredrik Barth, Maurice Bloch, and others — who visited for a semester or more. Bill Sturtevant joined the department as an adjunct professor. We had started with seven positions, and the department was not given an eighth until years after I retired, but with seven, we managed to become a department that counted nationally.
I’d like to interpose here something that you have not asked me about. That is how, from its very beginnings, we were able to instill a highly democratic ethos among our department’s members. All of the votes of our department members were of equal weight. Hierarchy functioned only in voting on promotions. Otherwise our votes were always equal. That was the way Rich, Emily, and I wanted the department to be, and we did so successfully, at least for a couple of decades.
JT: When you were starting the department at Hopkins, it was obviously a conscious decision to make it a sociocultural department and not a four-field department, correct?
SM: I have no memory of our deciding what we would be or not be. We knew from the outset that we couldn’t do four fields with seven positions, but we had a linguist in the department as soon as we found one — and ever since. Occasionally there would be a course in physical anthropology given by someone from the Hopkins medical institutions; we also had visits from archaeologists, but the shape of our graduate offerings reflected basically the competence of our colleagues. There was no prior scheme so far as I can recall, and within a year or two, two other faculty members were ready to teach introductory if I could not.
JT: You couldn’t have a robust four-field department with seven positions?
SM: In my opinion, it would be difficult to have any kind of four-field department at all with seven. Seven posts comes down to an average of one person on leave all of the time; it also means you cannot have two colleagues in each field. We decided at the outset that we had to have a linguist. If we were going to be a social and cultural department, we felt linguistics had to be represented. Keep in mind that Hopkins has never had a linguistics department.
We never made a point of forgetting the four-field conception, which is uniquely American, or nearly so. I have never become comfortable with introductory courses in anthropology that simply omit three-fourths of what anthropology was once thought to consist of or that comprehend whatever the teacher feels like teaching. The four fields were not taught to shape professional scholars who were competent in four fields. I’m sure you’ve heard the old saw about Boas being the first generalist and Kroeber the last. Four fields had meaning because, together, they defined anthropology, and they were taught so students could learn what anthropology was. People still ask me what anthropology is, and I find it strange that there are anthropologists who are not sure how to answer that question. The undergraduate beginners who are taught in a four-field context what anthropology is, and the graduate students who train, tutor, and test them, get out of such a course a basis upon which to talk about all humankind and its products, past and present. If the teacher is well read and competent, then she, her students, and her student instructors have books and papers to read and then to argue over and chew on. The educational objective of such a basic course, for me, has always been to end up with literate adults, not midget Boases.
I read about human evolution all the time. I still look at the reports in Science. Knowing what goes on in physical anthropology and archaeology, even in rudimentary fashion, made me a better anthropologist. I know very little linguistics, but I know enough to introduce undergraduates to the subject. I do wish there were some way to persuade our colleagues that we gain nothing by abandoning the history of our profession, the people whose legacies we sometimes claim, and the background to how anthropology got to be what it became in the U.S.
VIII. SID’S PLANS
JT: What is next for you? What are you working on? What do you want to work on?
SM: I still want to write a couple of anthropological essays — things that I have been thinking about for years but that I never seemed to have the time to tackle, but I will defer that task because I want to try to write a book for Jackie. It has nothing to do with anthropology but [rather] with my habit of telling stories. She’s had more than fifty years to listen to them and finally said, “For god’s sake, why don’t you write them down?” They are about the people I knew as a child. I do not want to write autobiography, but I will have to put some things down on paper in order to make what I want to write intelligible. My life changed very sharply in October 1929, when the Great Depression began with a crash. My parents were immigrants who had worked hard for the whole of their lives, traveling in steerage, learning English, finding a place to live, bringing up the kids, all that stuff. Then they lost whatever material wealth they had gradually acquired. My father had been a big spender and generous. He lent people a lot of money, giving it to people without them signing notes for him. It was inevitable after the crash that he would end up in middle age, his varicose veins tightly wrapped in Ace bandages up to the knee, back behind a stove, a short order cook again. The equivalent had happened to millions of other people. He and my mother survived, but they must have been scared out of their wits, but I never felt that fear, and all things considered, I’d had a carefree childhood. It was pinched, but I was never hungry. The next few years were not great — lots of strangers in a little crowded living space, with one toilet, some truly bad scenes — a wholly different life. The grownups I met in those years when I was a child were damned interesting, but some were quite nasty, others sordid. It was hard for my parents, but I thought it was great.
JT: How old were you then?
SM: I was seven in 1929. We lived in that crowded, dark place for a few years — I have not worked out exactly how many. I thought it was fine. I was well fed, the people whom I met mostly liked me, and I liked them. I didn’t like school much because of some nasty experiences there, but I was good enough at it to get by, even so. During those years, I met all kinds of people that I never would have met had my parents’ ambitions for me been fulfilled. Though I did not think of it this way when I was a child, it was as if the only person I knew for whom the Depression was good was me. I was too young to be victimized by it but old enough to work. I was aware of the concrete conditions, which had turned very, very bad indeed, but I wasn’t crippled by them. I grew into adulthood perfectly confident about the future. The years I spent as a child, when I learned about these people, observed them, got to see their foibles, were very important, I think, to my growing up. If my parents could have protected me from that life, they would have done so. Then I would have never known those people or what they were like. I don’t think I ever could have appreciated equally the life that I was not living because of my parents’ inability to underwrite it.
So I’m going to try to get that down, because I told Jackie I would. And once I get that book done, I’m going to climb Mount Everest.
At home in Baltimore, 1997. Courtesy of Sidney Mintz.
Acknowledgments. This interview would not have been possible without the assistance of Michael Chibnik of the University of Iowa and Anna Waterman of Mount Mercy University. I would like to thank Sid and Jackie Mintz for their warmth and hospitality. Funding for this interview was provided by the American Anthropological Association.
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