Sidney Mintz

Sidney Wilfred Mintz (November 16, 1922 – December 27, 2015) was an anthropologist best known for his studies of the Caribbean, creolization, and the anthropology of food. Mintz received his PhD at Columbia University in 1951 and conducted his primary fieldwork among sugar-cane workers in Puerto Rico. Later expanding his ethnographic research to Haiti and Jamaica, he produced historical and ethnographic studies of slavery and global capitalism, cultural hybridity, Caribbean peasants, and the political economy of food commodities. He taught for two decades at Yale University before helping to found the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins University, where he remained for the duration of his career. Mintz' history of sugar, Sweetness and Power, is considered one of the most influential publications in cultural anthropology and food studies.

Early life and education

Mintz was born in Dover, New Jersey, to Fanny and Soloman Mintz. His father was a New York tradesman, and his mother was a garments-trade organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World. Mintz studied at Brooklyn College, earning his B.A in psychology in 1943. After enlisting in the US Army Air Corps for the remainder of World War II, he enrolled in the doctoral program in anthropology at Columbia University and completed a dissertation on sugar-cane plantation workers in Santa Isabel, Puerto Rico under the supervision of Julian Steward and Ruth Benedict. While at Columbia, Mintz was one of a group of students who developed around Steward and Benedict known as the Mundial Upheaval Society. Many prominent anthropologists such as Marvin Harris, Eric Wolf, Morton Fried, Stanley Diamond, Robert Manners, and Robert F. Murphy were among this group.