Sidney Mintz’s Influence on
Me
I was so young when I met
Sid, a freshman in college adapting to the intensely competitive atmosphere at
Johns Hopkins, where I’d come with the intention of being a doctor, as a lot of
people do. We were encouraged to take courses outside of our major, and I chose
an anthropology class, something I had always been interested in but hadn’t
been exposed to. Sid was towards the end of his teaching career, and by far the
oldest professor that I had. But the anthropology class quickly became the most
important course I was taking, and the one in which I found the most
like-minded people. What’s funny is that I didn’t have a clue who Sid was—no
idea about his decades teaching at Yale during the Civil Rights era, no idea
that the book he was having us read (Worker in the Cane) was by this
time a classic of ethnography, no idea about his relationships with people like
Ruth Benedict, Julian Steward, and Eric Wolf. So Sid’s effect on me came just
from what he said, how he taught; I had no preconceptions of him. I knew that
when I read Worker in the Cane, it wasn’t anything like the survey texts
in my other classes: here was almost the entirety of Puerto Rican social
history unpacked in one man’s (Don Taso’s) life story. (It wasn’t until a
decade later that I discovered Sid’s other books, and realized how much broader
in scope he had taken his project regarding the global interconnectedness of
seemingly distinct social and economic histories). Sid also had dry, ironic
sense of humor that I appreciated—I didn’t always get the joke, but I could
tell from the mischievous look in his eyes that he making one.
At the time, I was unaware
of the intellectual rifts that had arisen within anthropology in the late 1980s
and early1990s. I wasn’t even aware that Hopkins was a boutique anthropology
department—sociocultural and linguistic anthropology only—until much later.
When Sid taught the introductory anthropology course, he didn’t in any way
privilege cultural anthropology in coverage or emphasis: equal weight was given
to all four fields of anthropology—so much so that I came out of the class most
interested in biological anthropology. (Perhaps this shouldn’t be so
surprising: when I visited Sid many years later at his home in Cockeysville in
2013, he had current issues of more than one physical anthropology journal on
his coffee table.) Sid said something that semester that changed my life and my
intellectual trajectory: that there is more genetic variation within a given
population than between populations, by which he meant to underscore the social
construction of race. I went home that Christmas and had to give my parents the
disappointing news that I wasn’t going to practice medicine (a career they that
they were familiar with and knew I could support myself with), I was going to
be an anthropologist (a career my parents were unfamiliar with, but about which
they already seemed to have their doubts).
Towards the end of his
life, I finally got the chance to eat and talk about food with Sid and his wife
Jackie when my wife Anna and I visited them at their home outside of Baltimore.
We had a wonderful meal at a local Vietnamese restaurant, which gave rise to
many great conversations about food culture around the world. Sid and Jackie
were warm and gracious hosts, and I had the unique experience of eating with
them at Broadmead, the Quaker community where Sid retired. The food was
delicious, and Sid was still Sid—holding court and delivering an impromptu
ethnography of retirement home dining rooms, focusing particularly on the
people that worked there. It was an amazing experience. Sid was still teaching
me things about humans and about being human over twenty years after that first
class.
And I did finally become a
doctor, of anthropology.
