SIDNEY MINTZ
My Last Teacher
Sidney Mintz was my last teacher. He was more
than icing on what was already a good cake. Yet he was that too. I returned to
Princeton University in the fall of 1975 from 2 years of dissertation research
in the Kula Ring when I first saw Professor Mintz; for reasons having to do
with the Anglo-French background that defined me to that point he was not in my
genealogy of morals, those lines of affiliation that tended to define who one
was and what they thought. I believe he spent the 1975-76 academic year at
Princeton and part of that entailed him bringing what I understood to be his
students to give occasional public lectures. So one day there he was
introducing one of his students. In my mind he was nattily dressed, something
like grey slacks, blue sports coat, an impression that is fixed in my mind for
many of our subsequent encounters. In
the 80s and 90s I sometimes confused him for David Schneider when seen from a
distance at AAA meetings.
Our next meeting was in the late 1970s or
perhaps very early 80s when he came to lecture at UVa where I was a struggling
Assistant Professor. David Sapir had told us that Sid was one of the best
teachers he had ever experienced and we would find his lecture a cross between
good intellectual fun and substantive interest. Sweetness and Power must have been close to done for he rehearsed
some of its themes, principally the effects sugar had on its consumers. Sapir
was correct. I was in a running phase then and knew that Frank Shorter had used
diluted Coca Cola for drinking when running marathons; and Ravindra Khare added
information about how rickshaw runners could continue their activities by
imbibing sweet tea, sometimes until they expired. Not only did the sweetness
provide needed energy when the body was close to exhaustion, but the caffeine
in Coke and tea helped the body convert muscle to sugar so that it could
literally consume itself. Hence marathoners sometimes urinate blood in the
hours and days after they have run an exhausting race. What was noteworthy
about the encounter is that amongst a department emphatically committed to the analysis of symbols Mintz got us to
think about whole human beings, cultural agents acting with operating bodies.
What I had not anticipated, but what Sapir knew
but could hardly say, was Sid’s personal warmth. Within minutes we strangers
interacted as if we were intimate friends.
And that I needed then. I was hired at UVa to
be the next economic anthropologist/materialist/Marvin Harris stand-in who
would receive the department’s butt of jokes then not get tenure. That,
however, was not the role I chose to play. Those were the days when a European,
largely French Althusserian Marx was sweeping the English-speaking world of
anthropology. I had used the ‘mode of production’ language in my dissertation
and was fashioning an understanding of Marx filtered through Martin Nicolas’s
Foreword to The Grundrisse. This
wasn’t the ‘Marvin Harris’ that then also circulated in the discipline. And I
knew I was in over my head, especially as I became familiar with the world of
Marxist criticism that was beyond the horizon of American Anthropology and much
American scholarship.
So, one summer day I called Sid to see if I
might come to Baltimore for a chat. Yes, was of course the answer and I did.
I’m not much of a talker so I don’t think we actually exchanged many words. But
I only needed a few. He realized I was a young scholar still figuring out who I
was, a problem I believe he once had because then, or some later time, I
learned from him what it meant to be a Caribbeanist when he was a young
anthropologist—almost nothing given the discipline’s sway then. But the conversations
clarified the issues: Was I going to be a Marxist or an Anthropologist? A
sophisticated theorist or an ethnographer trying to understand something? That day, and various short follow-up letters
or brief conversations through the years defined what I was and how I was going
to help make other people become what they were to be.
In 2011 students whom I’d influenced at UVa
held a little session at the Montreal AAA meetings to honor me. Remembering
words from Marshall Sahlins about the importance of passing fertility back to its sources, I
wrote all of my teachers then still alive to thank them for what I could pass
on. Sid responded this way (10/6/2011 1:10 PM):
Dear Fred,
I am of course
greatly moved by your letter. I can say first of all that when I reached the
point that you are now at, the people who'd done most to help me were mostly
gone. The last I felt that
way about was John Murra, to whom I'd remained close until his death (and
since).
But I have
tried to do what you're doing, when possible, in what I actually write.
I've been
howling at the moon the last 20 years or so about how anthropology is one discipline;
about how culture is a key concept; and even about
how "essentializing" is a useful intellectual activity, not
a contemptible one, especially if we want to teach, to remember, to discuss.
Your thanks is the evidence that we really are one discipline, that we do learn
from our elders, that we have a great deal to be proud of as a discipline,
including our ability to criticize ourselves and survive our criticism.
All of this is
not being taught enough or thought about enough, I think.
