Sidney Mintz's Caribbean - Scott

Modernity that Predated the Modern: Sidney Mintzs Caribbean by David Scott
In the view espoused here, Caribbean peoples are the rst modernised peoples in world history. They were modernised by enslavement and forced transportation; by seasoning and coercion on time-conscious export-oriented enterprises; by the reshufing, redenition 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 under these unusual and, indeed, terrible conditions. The argument here is that they have, as a result, a remarkably modern cast for their time. Sidney W. Mintz, 1993 ALIEN BUT NOT EXOTIC For half a century, Sidney Mintzs historical anthropology has been concerned to conceptualize and delineate the fundamental modernity of the Caribbean, a modernity decidedly coerced as well as coercive in its shaping force, and subordinate in its structural location.1 To be sure there has been much more to his vocation as an anthropologist, but in many ways I think this argument has been his most distinctive contribution to the understanding of the Caribbean. Mintz has never ceased reminding us that the Caribbean region is the oldest outpost of European overseas colonial expansion. The emergence of planetary empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the inauguration of an oceanic trans-Atlantic imperial orientation, begins with the Caribbean. And having had the earliest start in colonial history, some of the longest surviving colonies are still to be found in the region into the twentyrst century. But, as Mintz would insist, it is not age alone that matters here, the mere number of years of colonial rule. It is, more importantly, the distinctive character of the colonial history that unfolded there, both the nature of the initial encounter that forcibly established a European presence, and the nature of the economic project that made that presence viable, indeed enormously protable. The Caribbean as we know it is, to a very large degree, an outcome of that colonial encounter; but the world made through it (and this is the heart of Mintzs point) was a precociously
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and paradoxically modern one precocious because the modern, as a structuring form, was then still only a glimmer on the European horizon; and paradoxical because it was completely unanticipated and unnoticed that such people, brought in chains from Africa, might embody that coming future. Caribbean peoples, one might say, were the rst overseas conscripts of modernity.2 Over the decades, Sidney Mintz has maintained a remarkable delity to the Caribbean as a focus of scholarly investigation, not just in the early years of the 1950s and 1960s when Caribbean Studies seemed to be gathering momentum as an innovative eld of research, but in the 1980s as well, when it looked exhausted, winded, spent of purpose and direction. He has often lamented that the region has appeared something of an anomaly in the anthropological (not to say in the larger social science) imagination. Not only has it been marginalized or neglected because of its relative geopolitical insignicance and the consequent absence of powerful institutional support in the North Atlantic academy; but more interestingly for Mintz, it has typically been misrecognized and therefore consistently misunderstood. Neither properly primitive nor civilized, neither non-Western on the conventional criteria nor unambiguously Western (in short, neither sh nor fowl), the Caribbean has never quite t securely within any anthropological agenda. Whereas New Guinea, Africa, Amazonia offered kinship systems, costumes, coiffures, cuisines, languages, beliefs, and customs of dizzying variety and allure, Mintz has recently written, to almost all anthropologists the Caribbean islands and their surrounding shores looked rather too much like a culturally burned-over, secondhand, unpristine world. Whether it was kinship or religion or language or anything else, Caribbean people all seemed culturally midway between there and here everything was alloyed, mixed, ground down, pasted on, the least common denominator. Nor has this been mere ideologically innocent ignorance. For most North American anthropologists, Mintz continues, that sense of things was probably accentuated because racism and social separation in North America had made their black fellow citizens alien without making them exotic.3 And yet it is perhaps precisely this seeming anomalousness and marginalization that has driven Mintzs preoccupation with dening and clarifying the distinctiveness of the region, and that has given this preoccupation its thematic focus and animated its anti-racist humanism. But Mintz has also noted and with some dismay the curious fact that with the rise over the past decade or so of new intellectual fashions such as Diaspora Studies, Migration Studies, Transatlantic Studies and (governing them all) Globalization Studies the Caribbean has witnessed an oblique revival of sorts. It hasnt amounted to much, however, in terms of the revision or transformation of central historiographical or anthropological
Sidney Mintzs Caribbean
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assumptions. Mostly, and in a dispiriting way, the Caribbean has been a source of intellectual raw materials. As Mintz points out, there has been a rampant appropriation of concepts developed in the study of the Caribbean as, for example, such terms of art as hybridity, creolization and marronage without even a cursory glance at, much less a historical understanding of, the cultural and ideological features of the region that gave them birth. Mintzs work has always been alert to the poverty and intellectual opportunism of such academic practices as these. But it has never deterred him from plying his craft in the waters he knows best. And this is where I will follow him in trying to discern something of the outline of the Caribbean he made into his scholarly vocation. My principal interest here is with Mintzs focus on the modernity of the Caribbean and the implications of this conception for the kind of anthropology of which he has been an advocate. My aim in this is less to criticize than to contextualize; locating Sidney Mintz, so to say. First I want to consider some aspects of the historical moment in which the Caribbean emerged as a systematic anthropological concern, and some of the ideological and conceptual conditions that shaped it as the kind of object it has been. Mintz was there from the beginning, or very nearly the beginning. Second, and distinguishing it from an earlier cultural paradigm, that of Melville J. Herskovits, I will sketch out something of the social-historical story Mintz tells about the distinctive character of the Caribbean, and his argument for why we ought to think of it as modern. I want to suggest that there is much that is helpful in Mintzs approach for displacing old questions about the relation between Caribbean pasts and Caribbean presents, and for introducing new ones. And nally, considering the argument of his best-known book, Sweetness and Power (1985), I will urge that it is important to read it for the place of the Caribbean in his understanding of the modern global world. For as farung as this books temporal and spatial canvas is, as fundamental as Europe is to the story about the transformation of taste it tells, it remains a book with a Caribbean centre and purpose. THE CARIBBEAN AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL PROJECT In 1948 Julian H. Steward (19021972), who a few years before had left the Bureau of American Ethnology to take up a professorship at Columbia University, organized a group of graduate students (from Columbia and the University of Chicago) to go to Puerto Rico to conduct anthropological eldwork. The study was carried out under the auspices of the Social Science Research Center of the University of Puerto Rico and supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. The Puerto Rico Social Anthropology Project, as it was called, and the co-authored volume that came out of the collective research, The People of Puerto Rico (1956), were to contribute
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signicantly to the post-World War Two reorientation of the focus and methodology of US anthropology.4 The project, moreover, was to yield two of the best-known names in twentieth century Marxist anthropology: the late Eric Wolf (19231999), and of course Sidney Mintz (b. 1922). Though they were to continue to share a great deal in their anthropological interests the concern with the denition and understanding of peasantries, for example, or more considerably, the concern with the anthropology of world systems Wolf was to move on from Puerto Rico to Mexico (and Latin America more generally), while Mintz retained a fundamentally Antillean preoccupation, working subsequently for periods in Jamaica and then Haiti. For Mintz, the Puerto Rico Project marked the beginning of an extraordinary anthropological career spanning the better part of ve decades in which the Caribbean would be his vocation in which, indeed, his name would become inseparable from the making of an engaged and critical Caribbean Studies. It is a familiar story that the Second World War constitutes a watershed in the history of US anthropology, the anthropology initiated by Franz Boas.5 Up until the war, this anthropology was concerned largely with the study of so-called primitive peoples peoples who, so it was said, lived in small-scale and isolated societies (tribes) with rudimentary technologies; societies regarded as discrete, unchanging, and integrated wholes based on kinship and intimate face-to-face relations. Of course it wasnt that Boas and his students were so naively ahistorical as to believe that the Native American people among whom they mainly worked had not been touched and transformed by the aggressive assault of Western civilization. To the contrary, this was plain enough for everyone to see and often enough to lament. Rather, the anthropological enterprise constituted for Boas a meditation on the crisis into which Western civilization had thrown humanity. In this sense, the primitive provided a sort of mirror into which civilization could look self-critically, a contrastive trope in the cultivation of a distrust of civilizations autobiography.6 As a consequence of this orientation, Boas and his students were largely concerned, as Mintz has cogently put it, with the reconstruction or retrieval of the aboriginal cultures of Native American peoples. . . .; to recover what could be detected or elicited from a now nearly obliterated past. And such emphasis, he goes on, led quite naturally to a relative unconcern with (or lesser attention to) the present.7 Pre-war Boasians were among the last of the descendants of those eighteenth and nineteenth-century critics of Enlightenments self-regard, from Rousseau to Nietzsche.8 They treated the primitive as if they were precontact rather than contemporary, as if they belonged to the past of civilization. Before the war, perhaps the exemplary work in this vein was Ruth Benedicts Patterns of Culture, published in 1934; Benedict was Mintzs teacher at Columbia University. After the war, however, such books would appear increasingly quaint (think of Paul Radins The World of Primitive
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Man, published in 1953), as though they belonged to a bygone era, or embattled (think of Stanley Diamonds In Search of the Primitive, published in 1974), as though their idiom of criticism was too off-beat to catch the new rhythm and direction of things.9 The world of the social science academy to which US anthropologists returned from their wartime service in government intelligence-gathering institutions (such as the Ofce of War Information, for example, where Benedict worked, or the Ofce of Strategic Services), was a world much animated if not completely governed by the new priorities of the emerging Cold War. The war of course altered the place of the US in the global political-economic arena, an arena now dened on the one hand by the contest between capitalism and communism, and on the other, by the anti-colonial nationalisms of the Third World (the phrase itself, it is worth remembering, is an ideological product of the period). Making the world safe for democracy (understood in largely anti-communist terms) and modernizing political and economic development (understood as keeping the Third World out of the sphere of inuence of the Soviet Union) these became the priorities of the new alliance between the intelligence apparatuses of the US state (including the Central Intelligence Agency, the successor of the Ofce of Strategic Services), the philanthropic foundations (Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, especially), and such key universities as Harvard, Columbia, and MIT. Together they reimagined the globe as a number of strategic research areas, and enabled, underwrote, and shaped the new area-studies-directed social science of the post-war era.10 In anthropology-land (to use the late Bernard Cohns felicitous term) these new priorities urged a marked shift away from studies of allegedly primitive people toward the investigation of complex or contemporary or modernizing societies. Julian Steward was a leading exponent of the new area-studies approach, producing an early conceptual manual for the Social Science Research Council; and as his Introduction to The People of Puerto Rico makes clear, the study of a national formation and its various subcultures was explicitly designed to make a contribution to its agenda and methodology.11 Thus the Puerto Rico Social Anthropology Project was one of the earliest scholarly endeavours organized within this new post-war regime of knowledge and power. But if the war altered signicantly what the US state thought it could accomplish through the instrumentalizing of social science research, it also altered enormously what many young progressive scholars believed they could achieve with more goal-directed research. A good deal of optimism followed in the wake of the defeat of fascism and the gathering momentum of the anti-colonial movement. And many young men and women believed that the social sciences could be a positive factor in the struggle for radical social change. On the left as much as on the right, a revamped positivism and behaviourism were the undergirding assumptions of the new programmatic social sciences. As Eric Wolf put it, looking back at the making of the Puerto Rico Project: For some of us, going to school after the war on public
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funds, anthropology offered a prospect of studying a real world of real people. One had some hope then that knowledge could be linked to action, and that better knowledge would yield better action.12 This optimism was partly stimulated by (and in turn helped to afrm) the return in the social sciences of evolutionary materialist perspectives. In important respects, US anthropology was being Americanized, as one writer puts it.13 And in some quarters, as in the case of Leslie White (a student of Boas who later became a follower of Lewis Henry Morgan), the direction of some of this was at least Marxism-inspired; in others, as with Julian Steward, it was anti-Marxist.14 But even so it stimulated younger scholars like Sidney Mintz to begin to think about the intersections of history and social and cultural change in ways that routed that understanding in and through the materialities of economic production. This is what the Puerto Rico Project sought to do.15 That the Caribbean, and Puerto Rico in particular, should have been central to (indeed inaugural for) this new social science paradigm is perhaps not all that surprising. Of course, prior to the publication of The People of Puerto Rico in 1956, the Caribbean had by no means completely escaped anthropological notice; but this attention was guided very largely by the Afro-Americanist preoccupations initiated by Melville J. Herskovits (18951963) in the 1920s.16 Between formulating the theory of the continuum of Africanisms in the New World in the early 1930s and publishing his path-breaking book, The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), Herskovits launched a series of ethnographic studies in the Caribbean rst in Suriname, then in Haiti (a bit later he also did work in Trinidad) aimed at mapping the extent of African retentions among people of African descent in the New World.17 In this endeavour, the Caribbean emerged as a pivotal space for the critique of the prevalent racist claim that peoples of African descent in the New World lacked a distinctive culture.18 As we shall see in a moment, Mintz (who signicantly wrote a new introduction to the Beacon edition of Herskovitss Myth which appeared in 1990) would retain a profound intellectual connection to the problem of Afro-American culture, but that concern would be located inside a different problematic from the culturalist and retentionist one that animated and propelled Melville Herskovits.19 As I have suggested, in the immediate aftermath of the war a new set of conceptual problems as well as ideological imperatives helped to shape an anthropological concern other than the pre-war one of salvaging the primitive. This concern turned on modernization and development.20 How might social, economic, and political change be managed, especially among that group of backward countries emerging from colonialism? How might these Third World countries all with sophisticated Westernized elites, and many with multi-ethnic populations be encouraged to adhere to the dictates of a pro-capitalist and pro-liberal democratic strategy of modernization? What requirements of input-integration were necessary
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to move efciently along the paths of economic growth prescribed by Cold War ideologues like Walt Rostow? In the 1940s, Puerto Rico emerged as a target of precisely such modernizing concerns and agendas; as Gordon K. Lewis put it, the island became, an experimental laboratory for social change.21 Annexed by the United States in 1898 at the close of the SpanishAmerican War, the island began to loom large in the consciousnesses of North Americans when thousands of Puerto Ricans started arriving in the US, especially in New York, looking for work. For by 1938, to quote Lewis once more, the New Deal in the island had declined into a bureaucratic activity dealing with the accidents rather than the essences of a colonial society.22 This failure, and the political fallout it precipitated, helped to create the conditions of nationalist upsurge in which Luis Muoz Marns party Partido Popular Democratico (founded in 1938) came to power in 1940. (Memorably, Sidney Mintzs inimitable informant, Taso Zayas, the subject of Worker in the Cane (1960), was a staunch supporter of the Populares, and, as an organizer in his barrio, played his own small part in helping to bring them to power in the revolution of 1940.)23 As Governor, Muoz would soon begin to implement the massive industrialization programme famously known as Operation Bootstrap which sought to provide a welcoming environment for US capital, and which, as a model for economic development where size was an issue and resources scanty, exerted a tremendous inuence on the accommodationist nationalist movements elsewhere in the Caribbean. In short, though Steward and his colleagues dont quite acknowledge the constraining ideological conditions and the force of the colonial interests at stake, Puerto Rico had emerged as an exemplary instance of the problem of national development in the new context of regional and global US hegemony. The subject of Sidney Mintzs PhD dissertation, submitted to the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in 1951, as well as of the long chapter based on it that he contributed to The People of Puerto Rico a few years later, was culture change in a rural part of the island.24 His specic concern was with the social organization of the production of sugar in a south-coast community (or municipality), Caamelar. Where sugar is concerned, Puerto Rico occupies a distinctive place in the colonial history of the Caribbean. While a colony of Spain, the island was only briey a sugar island, and never one in the almost explosively exploitative and capitalist sense that the British and French islands had been.25 The US annexation changed all that, however; under the new colonial arrangements, it initiated a large-scale transformation of agricultural production, in particular of sugar. It has been under the United States, Mintz wrote, that the island has joined, in an agricultural sense, its faltering forebears Haiti, Cuba, Barbados, Jamaica, and Guadeloupe.26 The historical signicance of the south coast and Caamelar, where Mintz carried out his eldwork, was that it was the setting of this dramatic alteration in the character and nature of economic exploitation in Puerto Rico. What particularly
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interested Mintz were the social and cultural implications of the shift (transition is sometimes the word he uses) from a small-scale family-type hacienda to large-scale corporate land-and-factory combines. And among the most important implications was the rise of an agricultural proletariat displaying a distinctive subculture of values and attitudes. The Puerto Rico Social Anthropology Project was a major and, I think, lasting force in the making of Mintzs Caribbean vocation. Indeed, it may not be too much to suggest that it served as a sort of crucible out of which came the questions that would animate his work over the next half-century questions about labour and commodities, history and capitalism, race and culture. In a certain sense, Mintz has forever been rewriting his Puerto Rico project. Looking back at the Project from the vantage of the late 1970s, he was keen to underline the positive gains it had yielded not the least among them, helping to make the Caribbean region part of anthropological consciousness and thus urging the discipline in the direction of a selfconsciousness of modernity.27 But more to the point of his own preoccupations, by making clear the need for a certain kind of history in the social sciences, a history of crops, the Puerto Rico Project opened up new prospective directions for exploring the role played by the Caribbean in the growth and consolidation of capitalism in Europe. In particular, it suggested to Mintz the germ of the idea that perhaps sugar was useful to capitalism because it provided cheap high-calorie food commodities for Europes growing working classes in the nineteenth century. In order to reckon the importance of this . . . hypothesis, he suggested, it will eventually be necessary to study in detail the changing composition of European diet in the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. If, however, it turns out to be a persuasive hypothesis, it will reveal an intimate linkage between the coerced labor of the periphery and the free labor of the core, of a kind little dwelt upon by historians and anthropologists as yet.28 Here was the thought that would bear fruit years later in his great book, Sweetness and Power. A MODERNITY THAT PREDATED THE MODERN Historical and anthropological stories about the African-Caribbean presents and the slave-plantation pasts out of which they came have very often been told in the form of narratives of survival, resistance, and overcoming. In these stories plantation slavery is presented as a structure of purely negative power that physically brutalized and psychologically dehumanized the slave. This pervasive image of slavery-as-repressive-power forms the background to the generation and structuring of a narrative whose moral-political point is to redeem the humanity and agency of the Black slave and vindicate her or his aspiration to be free. Sometimes this account is given in a Herskovitsian idiom as the story of continuities of African culture that underwrote the formation of New World societies of African-descended peoples. This is the story told, for example, by John
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Thornton in a rich and elegant book.29 But sometimes that story is told less as the narrative of Africa-in-the-Caribbean and more as the account of the diverse syncretic ways in which African-Caribbean peoples have, in the meagre and oppressive circumstances in which they found themselves, invented new social and cultural forms of living. This, of course, is the story Sidney Mintz himself has told (without sacricing, it should be added, the proper regard for Herskovits and what he made possible).30 Given the persistence of racism, the compulsion to tell this kind of story is understandable. There is, however, another story that Sidney Mintz tells (not entirely unconnected to the cultural inventionist one to be sure) that has I think a somewhat different historiographical yield. This is the story about the making of Caribbean modernity, or rather the making of the Caribbean as a precociously modern formation, and in it the accent is more on the content of social form than on cultural distinctiveness. Moreover, this story relies less on the image of the slave plantation as a repressive structure of negative power and more on thinking about it as a coercively disciplining social and economic regime of distinctively modern power. Consequently the overall moral-political point is not to demonstrate that the slaves resisted, survived and overcame their oppression but to inquire into the nature of the forms that conditioned the lives the slaves were obliged to live. * * *
To begin with, Sidney Mintz wrote many years ago in a well-known passage in a denitive essay, it is inaccurate to refer to the Caribbean as a cultural area, if by culture is meant a common body of historical tradition. The very diverse origins of Caribbean populations; the complicated history of European cultural impositions; and the absence in most such societies of any rm continuity of the culture of the colonial power have resulted in a very heterogeneous cultural picture. And yet the societies of the Caribbean taking the word society to refer here to forms of social structure and social organization exhibit similarities that cannot possibly be attributed to mere coincidence. It probably would be more accurate (though stylistically unwieldy) to refer to the Caribbean as a societal area, since its component societies probably share more social-structural features than they do cultural features.31 Mintz has pressed this important insight over many decades since he rst articulated it explicitly in the 1960s: it is not a common culture (African or otherwise) that gives to the Caribbean its distinctive cast, but social form. And this social form, in turn, derives its character from the distinctive nature of the colonial history that coercively shaped the region.
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On Mintzs telling of it, the rst chapter in the story of the Caribbean recalls the rapid genocidal extermination of the native population. Within two hundred years of the Spanish Conquest at the turn of the sixteenth century the native people of the region the Arawaks of the Greater Antilles and the Caribs of the Lesser Antilles had ceased being a social, political, or ideological force with which the colonial powers had to contend. As Mintz argues, this colossal destruction of the indigenous population, this stripping away of the native modes of life that humanized the landscape prior to the fatal European encounter, made the acculturational processes of colonialism markedly different in the Caribbean different, certainly, from the highland regions of the New World mainland, and from Asia and Africa. In the Caribbean, he maintains, the confrontation of cultures in the islands was one in which European colonizers were able to work out the problems of settlement, adjustment, and development to a very large degree as if the Antilles were empty lands . . . This scourging of the human landscape enabled the Europeans to set the terms of their future colonialism in the Caribbean area in ways very different from those available to them in the densely occupied areas of the non-western world. The signicance of this distinction is real; the next stage in Antillean history was set in the absence of subject peoples, for the European colonist had transformed himself from guest into host simply through having eliminated his native predecessors.32 The second chapter in the story of the Caribbean is the long and dismal chapter of the project colonialism proceeded to build in the ghostly absence of the native population. It is the story of the remaking of the Caribbean as part of the project of European overseas agricultural capitalism. This colonial project, famously, was based primarily on the cultivation of sugarcane; it depended upon the coerced labour of transported African slaves; and it required the economic organizational form of the large-scale plantation. These together sugar, slavery, plantations reshaped the whole social, economic, and ideological landscape of the Caribbean and did so in a modern direction. The sugar-cane plantations, Mintz writes, were landmark experiments in modernity.33 They constituted a mode of labour organization and economic production which, in scale and complexity, had no comparison in early modern Europe. The plantation was, of course, an agricultural enterprise; but it was also, Mintz reminds us, an industrial (or at least protoindustrial) undertaking inasmuch as a good deal of the processing of the cane into sugar took place within its precincts as well. In short, Mintz says, from their inception in the New World in the sixteenth century, the plantation was a synthesis of eld and factory, of cane-eld and boiling-house. And the regime of sugar production it organized welded together large numbers of both skilled and unskilled labourers, typically working in gangs
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or crews, working side by side in a disciplined, regulated, and synchronized process. Because cane cultivation and harvesting and sugar production required strict scheduling of its different phases, a modern time-consciousness permeated every aspect of the slaves life. In Mintzs words: The system required overarching supervision to ensure that time schedules were met and in the case of sugar-cane, the most important crop, those were dictated by the characteristics of the plant itself. Sugar-cane must be cut quickly when its sucrose content is highest; it must be ground as soon as it is cut, so that it does not lose that sugar; its juice must be heated quickly, prepared for crystallization and struck emptied into the coolers at exactly the right moment. The water- and wind-powered factories were enormous mechanical devices for their times, and it took several men to operate even the initial animal-powered mills used by the sugar-making pioneers of Santo Domingo in the early sixteenth century. The large-scale use of the furnaces and vessels was typical. Even steam was adopted very early in the evolution of the sugar industry, before the end of slavery in the case of several Caribbean societies. . . . These technical features, many tied to careful timing, introduced more than just an aura of industrial modernity into what were operations which predated, in many cases by whole centuries, the Industrial Revolution.34 However, in Mintzs view, the modernity of the plantation turns not only on the techno-logic of the industrial organizational form itself, but also on its transforming effects on the social and familial life of the labour force. He continues: Keep in mind whence, and how widely, and under what conditions most such plantation labour was recruited. Accordingly, modernity refers here to a learned openness to cultural variety, an openness not so much relativistic as non-valuative an openness which includes the expectation of cultural differences, and is not shocked by them. . . . People who come from different places and who are not in their own culture can become modern, in part because institutional recourse to a standard common tradition is not immediately available. Soon after the Conquest, Caribbean people began coming from somewhere else. Most of them had to come with imperfect institutions, and in the company of others culturally unlike themselves. Most came without kinfolk. That was also modernizing, because the minimal cells of tradition-perpetuation are familial. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, Caribbean plantation labour became adept at forming relationships quickly, especially dyadic relationships. Because the basis for operating in terms of known status categories was under constant pressure from migration and external coercion, they had to learn to deal socially with others, often in the
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absence of culturally-specic preconceptions about the meanings of individual differences in age, gender or physical variety. Accordingly, modernity as used here refers not only to the technological accompaniments to industry, but also to its social organizational sequelae: to the circumstances for meeting and relating; to ways of socializing without recourse to previously learned forms; to an acquired matter-of-factness about cultural differences and differences in social style or manners; and to a social detachment that can come from being subject while recognizing ones own relative lack of power to rapid, radical, uncontrolled and ongoing change.35
Sidney Mintzs Caribbean then, is through and through, a historical space, and that history, emphatically a modern one. It is the peculiar character of this colonial modernity of the region the genocidal violence that inaugurates it, and the coercive social relations and the particular institutional form of the social-economic regime of plantation slavery that gives the Caribbean its often deceptive, but for Mintz, very real, singularity. Notably, this story about the powers and conditions of plantation slavery is not specically one about its brutality and repressiveness, its power to negate the humanity of the slave. Obviously this is not because Mintz thinks that the regime of plantation slavery lacked this kind of power. To the contrary, Mintz is almost never not reiterating the brutal nature of slavery and the human spirit it took to resist and survive it. But here Mintz wants to fasten our attention on something besides this repressive aspect of the powers that constituted the plantation, namely the coercive powers of the new technological and organizational conditions to systematically build up modern sensibilities, potentialities, dispositions, mentalities, and aptitudes. As C. L. R. James said many years ago, altering signicantly the accent and import of his own famous story of repression and resistance in The Black Jacobins, the powers that constituted the slave plantation both demoralized and civilized the slave, that is to say, simultaneously broke down the conditions of old social and moral modes of being and created conditions in which new complexes and patterns were induced. And for James as for Mintz this civilizing direction was a modern one. The temporal rationalities and disciplining technologies ensured that, as James put it, from the very start [the slaves] lived a life that was in its essence a modern life.36 Rendering the story of Caribbean pasts in this way extracts the plantation from a narrative whose telos is the vindicationist one of demonstrating the slaves will to freedom, and inserts it into a story that seeks to explore the making of the modernity that is our tragic inheritance.37 THE HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF OURSELVES In 1985, Sidney Mintz published the magisterial Sweetness and Power: the Place of Sugar in Modern History.38 The book, the result of a great many
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years of research, brought together several strands of his thematic concerns the history of sugar and the institution of plantation slavery, Marxism and world capitalism, the nature of commodities, the cultural construction of diet and taste and the social transformation of cuisines into a single interconnected argument, at once compelling in its scope and vision, and original in the patterns of interconnection it draws upon, and draws out. Sweetness and Power is, of course, a book about the Caribbean (as the site of sugar production), as well as about Europe (as the site of the consumption of sugar). But it is also a book about Mintzs discipline, anthropology, and the large crisis he perceives it to be in. Sweetness and Power is a book envisioned as an indication of one way out of this crisis, namely the direction of what Mintz calls the anthropology of the present, or the anthropology of modern life. The 1970s, as Mintz made his way from Yale University to Johns Hopkins University to lead the initiative to build an anthropology department there (one signicantly with an emphasis on Atlantic history), were years of considerable turmoil in US anthropology.39 The radical social movements of the 1960s counter-culture, Civil Rights, anti-war, Black Power, feminism together created a context of disciplinary anxiety, selfinterrogation, and reassessment.40 As Dell Hymes, for example, suggests in the Introduction to Reinventing Anthropology (1972), the edited volume that, more than any other, captures the mood of antagonism and critique characteristic of these US years, it seemed unclear to many that, as presently understood and organized, anthropology could justiably carry on.41 In much of the US social sciences, Marxism dened the intellectual and moral-political battleground. And within anthropology specically, the most signicant Marxist tradition was rooted in a concern with and debates about political economy. Notably these anthropological debates were being informed increasingly by the emergence of a more historicallyminded Marxism interested in the differential and uneven histories of capitalist development (as between core and periphery). Andr Gunder Franks work on the constitutive character of underdevelopment within development, and Immanuel Wallersteins on the development of a European world-economy from the sixteenth century helped to alter the terms of Marxist anthropological understanding of the non-Euro/American worlds.42 During these years, Mintz himself was fundamentally engaged with the whole idea of a Third World (about which he expressed misgivings) as well as the question of a world system of capitalism (regarding which he was sympathetic but critical).43 Perhaps it is not entirely surprising that the two US anthropologists who most vigorously developed and elaborated these macro cultural-historical concerns in the following decade had been together in the Puerto Rico Project, and had been developing a Marxist anthropology ever since. Eric Wolfs Europe and the People without History was published in 1982, and it was followed a few years later by Mintzs Sweetness and Power.44 While offering a very different set of specic
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objects of investigation, Mintzs book was, like Wolfs, a story about capitalism and commodities told on a global historical canvas. Both, too, driven by a sense of intellectual commitment, were concerned to rescue the disciplinary institution of anthropology from what they thought of as the provincialism, ofcial professionalism, and social and political purposelessness into which it had descended. * * *
Mintz describes Sweetness and Power as a gurative sort of homecoming.45 It may seem, at rst glance, a somewhat curious description, but what he is alluding to through this image of return is important to grasp for understanding the recursive optic that informs it (the anthropology of ourselves, he calls it at one point), as well as the place of the Caribbean in its overall imagination and point. Sweetness and Power ultimately grows out of Mintzs initial encounter with sugar in Puerto Rico in 1948 where the focus of his attention is on the cultivation of sugar-cane and the variety of social and economic relations that constitute that local process. And understandably so, since from the sixteenth century onwards the Caribbean has been driven by the production of sugar. But Mintz, seeing as it were through the prism of this location, begins to discern the need to ask a different kind of question, if you like, an Atlantic one: what, beyond force and prot, sustains the relationship between Europe and the Caribbean? Mintzs answer turns on the seductions of the new commodity, sugar, and the transformations of demand the new taste for it precipitated. In a certain sense, sugar had been largely opaque to historians and anthropologists of the Caribbean. Despite its obvious ubiquity in the story of the colonial relation between Europe and the Caribbean, sugar functioned largely as the occasion for the story about the slave trade and plantation slavery. As an object itself as the commodity-form realized by slave labour in an increasingly capitalist world-market it was very nearly invisible. The originality of Sweetness and Power lies in fundamentally altering this in such a way as to make sugar visible as a hinge drawing the Caribbean and Europe together into a constitutive relationship. The complex story Mintz tells, then, is partly of course a story about the production of sugar. In this chapter, we follow the evidence for sugar production from the ancient domestication of sugar-cane in New Guinea through its cultivation in India, the islands of the Mediterranean (Sicily, importantly), the coast of Andalusia, Morocco, and the Atlantic islands (Madeira, the Canaries, and So Tom), to its transplantation to the New World by Columbus on his second voyage in 1493. This is the beginning of sugars modern history, and traces the disappointments of the Spanish in their early experiments in Santo Domingo at the end of the fteenth century, the successes of the Portuguese in Brazil in the sixteenth century, and most dramatically the seventeenth-century explosion of sugar in the British Caribbean islands. It is here, in the African slave-based plantations
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of Barbados and Jamaica especially, that, from 1655 onwards, sugar production begins its meteoric and world-transforming rise. However, that story of sugar and modernity is also a story about consumption; indeed it is a story about the integral relationship between production and consumption of this commodity, one of the rst capitalist objects, Mintz tells us (tobacco and tea being others), that conveyed with their use the complex idea that one could become different by consuming differently.46 As Mintz says, while some sugar was always consumed in the Caribbean by its (slave) producers, the real locus of consumption was not there but in Europe rst of all in Britain, the fastest-expanding commodity economy in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And consequently sugar has a cultural history that is not only the history of its cultivation by slaves (prior to the various emancipations) and free labour (after these emancipations). That cultural history traces the story of the cultivation of the taste for sugar, the aesthetic and ideological construction and encouragement of a demand for it, and the changes in the diet of Europeans it brought about. And in Mintzs detailed account, it is the story of the transformation of sugar from a rarity in the seventeenth century, to a luxury in the eighteenth century, to a commonplace indeed a necessary item of mass consumption by the nineteenth century (an inexpensive good that continued to seem like a luxury, imparting an aura of privilege to those who served it and to whom it was served).47 Indeed, it is a famous aspect of Mintzs argument about the transformation of consumption that, in the form of jams, treacle puddings, tarts, buns, sweetened tea, and so on, sugar provided a cheap calorie-rich substitute for the English working classes during the Industrial Revolution. In short, then, Mintz is telling a story about what sweetness comes to mean in the modern lives of ordinary labouring people in Britain: from a concept that has little meaning before the seventeenth century, by the nineteenth the quality of sweetness becomes something to be coveted by a broad cross-section of British society and not just in matters of diet, but as a way of describing a desirable quality especially in people and the arts. Needless to say, when it appeared in the middle 1980s Sweetness and Power was much discussed and much reviewed.48 And sometimes sharply disagreed with too, as in Michael Taussigs critique of the conception of history and meaning it (and Wolfs Europe and the People without History) embodied.49 Taussig argued that in failing to attend to the dimension of fetishism so important to Marxs account (and of course the subject of an important early book of his own),50 Mintzs understanding of the commodity-form was less a diagnosis than a symptom of capitals historical self-understanding. Mintz, he suggested, had merely rehearsed the great narrative of Capitalism and consequently, and in a wholly spurious way, metonymic connections were made to appear as causal ones. Taussig makes a powerful case, one with which I am not wholly unsympathetic. But what interests me for present purposes here is less
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Mintzs alleged hermeneutic naivet (the unreflected-upon master narrative informing his account) than the fact that Sweetness and Power might be usefully read as constituting an answer to questions about the anthropology of modern life that have animated and propelled his work from the beginning. These questions concern anthropologys seemingly chronic inability to inhabit the simultaneity of a connected-yet-differentiated temporality, to live (and to live up to living) in the time of its own present without the as if of the Others alterity.51 The Puerto Rico project had already suggested to Mintz the measure of this anthropological dilemma. For as the rst part of the non-West to be annexed by the West, the Caribbean has always been modern, if paradoxically so; Caribbeans have always-already been inserted into a modern complex of unequal global power, and as such they have always-already been an integral part of the present of another story elsewhere. Looking on from Caamelar, Puerto Rico, it would have been hard to suppress entirely or for long the recognition of a temporally coeval connection between the sugar-cane workers labour on the plantations of modernitys margins and the sweetness that modernitys centres took so much for granted. In a certain sense it was Taso Zayas and his compadres who rst pointed Sidney Mintz in the direction of an anthropology of modern life because it was through them that Mintz began to discern the fundamental connectedness of the modern world, and in particular, the fundamental connectedness between the Caribbean and Europe and (more lately) North America. From a narrow lens, sugar might appear to be the prosaic product of obscure rural proletarians, but in fact, as Mintz argued, the anthropology of just such homely, everyday substances may help to clarify both how the world changes from what it was to what it may become, and how it manages at the same time to stay in certain regards very much the same.52 Mintz, I have already said, has often lamented the trivialization of the Caribbean by anthropologists, its seeming transparency, and therefore unworthiness, as an object for serious scholarly scrutiny and analysis. Neither seemingly exotic and abstruse, nor of world strategic importance, the Caribbean has been the subject of a good deal of mediocre anthropological research and writing. But the point of Sweetness and Power, and of the kind of historical anthropology it practises, is to provide the capstone argument for the naivet and ignorance involved in the marginalization of the Caribbean in North Atlantic scholarship. The place of sweetness in the making of modern Europe is impossible to understand without understanding the place of sugar in the making of the Caribbean. Mintz had to see the latter before he could see the former. In this sense, Sweetness and Power is a powerful work of humanity and vindication. For it is, in the end, the story of how African slaves and their descendants on the plantations of Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the Caribbean helped to remake not only their own lives at the edges of the modern world, but also the sensibilities
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of taste that constitute the self-understanding of that modern world itself at its very core. CODA Sidney Mintz tells the story of his mother, a political radical, visiting him once in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for a vacation. Driving back from the airport they passed through a large slum that ran along a stretch of brackish water. My mother [recalls Mintz] gazed silently out of the window until I 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.53 The relational contrast is all. It is not hard to see that this acute sense of the embeddedness of objects-in-relationships has breathed through Mintzs attempts to discern and articulate the Caribbeans contrast and the implications of this for an anthropology of modern life. As I have tried to suggest, it is a virtue of Mintzs historical-mindedness that he has always been self-conscious about the moment at which he began his anthropological vocation, and about the place of the Caribbean in helping to turn the discipline away from its attachment to the primitive and toward the study of modern or contemporary people. A good deal has happened in the Caribbean since The People of Puerto Rico and even Sweetness and Power, and a good deal too has happened in anthropology since the onset of the terminal exhaustion of the nation-state projects in the region that had their beginnings at roughly the same time as Mintzs career. Something new perhaps is wanted now. But whether or not a new and distinctive anthropology of the Caribbean can emerge will depend in part on what we are willing to learn from the example of Mintzs vocation, in particular his insistence that Caribbean difference is neither self-evident nor transparent, but has, rather, to be elaborated by a patient and meticulous labour.
NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 The epigraph is taken from Sidney Mintzs Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture, Goodbye Columbus: Second Thoughts on the Caribbean Region at Mid-Millennium, delivered at the Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick in May 1993 and subsequently published by them as a pamphlet. 2 I develop this theme in somewhat different directions in David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: the Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, Durham, 2004.
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3 Sidney W. Mintz, Foreword to Jean Besson, Martha Braes Two Histories: European Expansion and Caribbean Culture-Building in Jamaica, Chapel Hill, 2002, pp. xvxvi. 4 Julian H. Steward, Robert A Manners, Eric R. Wolf, Elena Padilla Seda, Sidney W. Mintz, and Raymond L. Scheele, The People of Puerto Rico: a Study in Social Anthropology, Urbana, 1956. Perhaps the most comprehensive study of this work remains Antonio LauriaPerricelli, A Study in Historical and Critical Anthropology: the Making of The People of Puerto Rico, unpublished doctoral dissertation, New School for Social Research, 1989. See also Review/Revista Interamericana 8: 1, spring 1978, guest-edited by Ronald J. Duncan, comprising the contributions to a symposium held at Inter American University in San Germn, Puerto Rico, March 1977, to reconsider The People of Puerto Rico. 5 Thomas C. Patterson, A Social History of Anthropology in the United States, New York, 2001, chap. 4. 6 Franz Boas, The History of Anthropology, Science 20, 1904, pp. 51324. 7 See Sidney Mintz, American Anthropology in the Marxist Tradition, in On Marxian Perspectives in Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Harry Hoijer, 1981, ed. Jacques Maquet and Nancy Daniels, Malibu, Undena [for UCLA Department of Anthropology], 1984, pp. 1415. 8 See, usefully, Stanley Diamond, On the Origins of Modern Theoretical Anthropology, American Anthropologist 66: 1, February 1964, pp. 1279. 9 Paul Radin (18831959), The World of Primitive Man, New York, 1953; Stanley Diamond (19221991), In Search of the Primitive: a Critique of Civilization, New Brunswick, 1974. Diamond told me that he had himself initially been a member of the Puerto Rico Project but left it early. 10 There is now a considerable literature dealing with the relation between the universities, government intelligence-gathering agencies, and the foundations. See, for example, Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War, ed. Christopher Simpson, New York, 1998. 11 See Julian H. Steward, Area Research: Theory and Practice, New York, 1950; and Introduction, People of Puerto Rico, pp. 127. 12 Eric Wolf, Remarks on The People of Puerto Rico, Revista/Review Interamericana 8: 1, spring 1978, p. 17. 13 Ren Velzquez, Julian H. Stewards Perspective on Puerto Rico, Revista/Review Interamericana 8: 1, spring 1978, p. 51, writes: Steward, together with Leslie White and Robert Redeld, Americanized anthropology in the United States. They shifted the emphasis from non-material to material aspects of culture and returned for theoretical inspiration to the nineteenth century American evolutionist Lewis H. Morgan (his emphasis). 14 For a useful discussion see Eleanor Leacock, Marxism and Anthropology, in The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses, ed. Bertell Ollman and Edward Vernoff, New York, 1982. 15 See William Roseberry, Historical Materialism and The People of Puerto Rico, Review/Revista Interamericana 8: 1, spring 1978, pp. 2636. 16 There was also a folklorist interest in the Caribbean in the 1920s, it is important to remember, out of which came Martha Beckwiths Black Roadways: a Study of Jamaican Folk Life, Chapel Hill, 1929. Beckwith, who taught at Vassar College, was a student also of Native American dance forms and Hawaiian mythology. 17 One thinks of such work of Melville Herskovits as: The Negro in the New World: the Statement of a Problem, American Anthropologist 32, 1930, pp. 14555; (with Frances S. Herskovits), Rebel Destiny: Among the Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana, New York, 1934; Life in a Haitian Valley, New York, 1937; The Myth of the Negro Past, New York, 1941; and (with Frances S. Herskovits), Trinidad Village, New York, 1947. 18 See Walter Jackson, Melville Herskovits and the Search for Afro-American Culture, in Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others: Essays on Culture and Personality, ed. George Stocking Jr, Madison, 1986; David Scott, That Event, this Memory: Notes on the Anthropology of African Diasporas in the New World, Diaspora 1: 3, 1991, pp. 26184. See also Richard Price and Sally Price, The Root of Roots: How Afro-American Anthropology got its Start, Chicago, 2003. 19 See Sidney W. Mintz, Introduction to Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past, Boston, 1990. 20 There are now, of course, a variety of books dealing with the post-war rise of development as a paradigm for solving the problems of the Third World. See, for example, Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: the Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, 1995.
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21 Gordon K. Lewis, Puerto Rico: Freedom and Power in the Caribbean, New York, 1963, p. 20. 22 Lewis, Puerto Rico, pp. 1434. See also Lauria-Perricelli, The Making of The People of Puerto Rico. 23 Sidney W. Mintz, Worker in the Cane: a Puerto Rican Life History, New Haven, 1960. 24 Sidney W. Mintz, Caamelar: the Contemporary Culture of a Rural Puerto Rican Proletariat, unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation, Columbia University, February 1951; and Caamelar: the Subculture of a Rural Sugar Plantation Proletariat, in The People of Puerto Rico, ed. Steward and others. 25 Mintz, Caamelar, p. 315. 26 As previous note. 27 Sidney Mintz, The Role of Puerto Rico in Modern Social Science, Review/Revista Interamericana 8: 1, spring 1978, p. 7. 28 Mintz, Role of Puerto Rico, p. 14. 29 John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 14001800, second and expanded edition, New York, 1998. 30 Most comprehensively in the short book written with Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: a Caribbean Perspective, Philadelphia, 1976, republished (with a new Preface) as The Birth of African American Culture: an Anthropological Perspective, Boston, 1992. 31 Sidney W. Mintz, The Caribbean as a Socio-Cultural Area, Journal of World History 9: 4, 1966, pp. 9145. 32 Mintz, The Caribbean as a Socio-Cultural Area, p. 918. 33 Sidney W. Mintz, Enduring Substances, Trying Theories: the Caribbean Region as Oikoumen, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2: 2, June 1996, p. 295. 34 Mintz, Enduring Substances. In Mintzs thinking about the new time-consciousness of modernity he is clearly indebted to E. P. Thompsons famous essay, Time, Work discipline and Industrial Capitalism, Past and Present 38, 1967, pp. 5697. 35 Mintz, Enduring Substances, pp. 2956. 36 C.L.R. James, From Toussaint LOuverture to Fidel Castro, in The Black Jacobins, second edition, New York, 1963, p. 392. 37 For more of this argument see David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, chap. 3. 38 Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: the Place of Sugar in Modern History, New York, 1985. 39 The Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University came into being in the academic year 19745 in the context of a commitment (supported by the Rockefeller Foundation) to build what was called the Atlantic Program in History, Culture, and Society (launched in 1973) at the university. Richard Price also moved from Yale University with Mintz to be part of this project. For two decades this department was the premier training institution for Caribbeanist anthropologists. 40 See Sherry Ortners remarks on this moment in her well-known essay, Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties, Comparative Studies in Society and History 26: 1, 1984, pp. 13844. 41 Dell Hymes, Introduction to Reinventing Anthropology, ed. Hymes, New York, 1972, pp. 67. 42 I am thinking of the well-known essay by Andr Gunder Frank, The Development of Underdevelopment, Monthly Review 18, 1966, pp. 1731; and volume one of Wallersteins The Modern World-System, New York, 1974. 43 See Sidney Mintz, On the Concept of a Third World, Dialectical Anthropology 1: 1,1976, pp. 27782; and his The So-called World System: Local Initiative and Local Response, Dialectical Anthropology 2: 4, 1977, pp. 25370. 44 Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History, Berkeley, 1982. 45 Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p. xv. 46 Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p. 185. 47 Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p. 173. 48 Among the more interesting reviews, see Stanley J. Stein in American Historical Review 91: 2, 1986, pp. 3623; Clark G. Ross in Ethnohistory 34: 1, 1987, pp. 1035; and John A. Marino in Journal of Modern History 50: 3, 1987, pp. 54951. 49 See Michael Taussig, History as Commodity, Critique of Anthropology 9: 1, 1989, pp. 723. This was a review essay on both Eric Wolfs Europe and the People without History
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and Mintzs Sweetness and Power. Mintz and Wolf responded vigorously to Taussig in Reply to Taussig, Critique of Anthropology 9: 1, 1989, pp. 2531. 50 See Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, Chapel Hill, 1980. 51 This is the problem, remember, that Johannes Fabian takes up in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, New York, 1983. 52 Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p. xxvii. 53 See Mintz, American Anthropology in the Marxist Tradition, pp. 1819.

Sidney Mintz's Caribbean - Scott

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Modernity that Predated the Modern: Sidney Mintzs Caribbean by David Scott

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