Sid-in-action:
a personal reminiscence
How to sum up in a few
words my relationship to Sid Mintz? Without his support and interventions
over the years I might not have continued as an anthropologist, I certainly
wouldn’t have had the itinerary I’ve had(more of this later), and we would not
have had the many occasions to see one another and travel together,
strengthening and enriching ties that began, in a rather routine manner, at
Yale’s graduate school when, as a student who knew he wanted to work on Morocco
but found no one in that small department specializing in the Arab world, I
heard of a certain Sidney Mintz who, it seemed, had wrestled with Iran, or at
least with some Iranians, and who was a recognized authority in two fields I
was interested in, economic anthropology and marketplaces.
Here I want to focus on
Sid-in-action, that is, his way of being in the world, as I have seen it over
the years.
First, his teaching.
Towards the end of my time at Yale, Sid suggested I attend one of his
undergraduate classes, to give me some idea of what this sort of teaching
involved. I was astounded by what I saw-- as physically impossible as
this sounds, he held considerably more than a hundred undergraduates in the
palm of his hand, now releasing them into peals of laughter, now grasping them
with a gripping story. I knew this was a performance that, whatever the
course of human evolution, I wouldn’t be able to emulate in a million years.
Second, his insatiable
geographical curiosity. I have been with Sid and Jackie in many
locations: in New Haven and Baltimore, of course; in New York too; in Paris and
London as well; and, even more remotely from Sid’s and my respective
birthplaces in New Jersey and Brooklyn, in Tunisia. And some time after
Sid and Jackie visited us in Tunisia, the four of us(Sid, Jackie, my wife Lilia
and I) wandered around the Lakes in Italy. Lilia remembers this excursion
better than I do – our short side trip to Switzerland where Sid searched for a
suit that would carry him through another set of distinguished lectures at his
next stop, and Sid’s enjoyment in Italy of the variety of foods and beautiful
scenery. I do remember Sid uttering a characteristic humorous line, “As
long as I get an occasional good piece of fish, a nice slice of melon and can
accompany it with grappa, you can keep all of the 16th century church paintings
to yourselves.”
But these places where our
paths came together are only a few of the many places I have felt Sid’s
presence, felt sometimes even when he was absent. Once, after I gave a
talk in Germany, a German former student of Sid’s approached me, wanting to
talk only about Don Taso und Don Sidney. On another occasion I was
in Morocco, experiencing the irony of presenting in Sweetness and Power’s
arguments to a room filled with top executives from Morocco’s main sugar
company and then visiting the Casablanca sugarloaf factory -- Caribbean sugar
plantation workers would certainly have felt a deep kinship with these
industrial workers who now, in their Casablanca bookstores, can find copies of Al-Halawa
wa as-Sulta, thanks to Lilia who coordinated the Arabic translation of Sweetness
and Power. And were it not for Sid and Jackie’s solid ties with the
Chinese anthropologist Chee-Beng Tan, Lilia and I would not have had the
opportunity to lecture in China on a number of occasions over the past few
years.
Third, Sid’s (and Jackie’s)
hospitality. Several times I turned up in Baltimore with little warning,
only to find myself invited to Thanksgiving and/or birthday dinners; or found
myself on the East coast at Christmas-time and shared family dinners with
Sid and Jackie(and Lilia and our daughter Maha)
On one occasion, I
surprised Sid by turning up at a food lecture he was giving in London – I had
come from Tunis to attend a friend’s wedding and much enjoyed the look on Sid’s
face when he saw me in the audience. Sid returned that surprise ten-fold
by inviting me to a wonderful meal the next evening at Claudia Rhoden’s, where
I overheard more discussion of tamarind between Sid and Sami Zubaida than I
would ever have thought possible.
Fourth, and finally –
although I could go on – a few words about what we might call Sidney Mintz’s
“ground game”, that is, what I have seen or surmised of his manner in the
field. From Sid and Jackie’s visit to Tunisia I saw a new side of Sid,
leading me to write, in a published comment on one of Sid’s articles, “I’m sure
that anyone who has seen Sidney in the field (or on any sort of unfamiliar
terrain), and has observed his penetrating curiosity, seen his physical
dexterity, his attention to detail and, perhaps above all, his great good
humor, openness, and generosity -- in sum, his wonderful capacity to establish
a strong, winning presence wherever he is -- cannot fail to think, ‘here is the
real item, the truly gifted fieldworker’.”
In Tunisia, ever the
anthropologist, Sid tried to convince me to write about the fish market we
visited(he failed); and as Lilia remembers, when she explained to him the
historical and architectural importance of the famed Sadiki school, he helped
her understand why a huge tree listing over the building didn’t fall and
shatter the edifice. At our hotel in the southern town of Tozeur, Sid
gracefully requested that we be served local specialties rather than the usual
European fare, and we then enjoyed radhkha(a kind of salad) and mtabga(a
dish resembling pizza), typical of the region. We wandered all around
Tunisia and it was delightful to see how easily, how naturally, Sid sat down to
lunch on a curb by the side of the road, enjoying some cheese and bread, or
engaged a local vendor in a detailed discussion of the merchandise -- just as
he might have done, some 40 years earlier, in Puerto Rico, or Jamaica, or
Haiti.
As I look back on both our
lives I find it intriguing to imagine how much less interesting and less
fulfilling my own might have been if not for Sid. In one decisive
instance this happened in an unexpected and completely unintended way. I
was a few years out of graduate school and teaching in the Anthropology Dept at
Brooklyn College – Sid’s alma mater by the way. It was time for the
department to undergo an outside evaluation and, when I suggested Sid for the
role, the senior faculty enthusiastically approved. Unfortunately, our
department at Brooklyn College had many serious problems and I and other junior
faculty members were very frank in our discussions with Sid and the other
evaluator. The final evaluation report reflected many of our
criticisms and, a short time later, I and another junior colleague were given
notice that our contracts were being terminated, with the official pretext
being the New York City financial crisis of the late 1970s that led to the
dismissal of many city employees. However, because my colleague and I
were terminated out of seniority order(against the “last in, first out” rule),
we both believed that our terminations were in retaliation for our testimony to
the evaluators and, in my case, for my supposedly privileged relationship with
Sid. My colleague immediately took another position in California, I
submitted a grievance procedure through our union, used some of my free time to
work on a book manuscript, and then went to Europe, Berlin in particular, while
the grievance procedure worked its way through the system.
By the following spring,
when I won the grievance procedure, reinstatement, and a year’s back pay, I had
decided to take a job with Amnesty International in London as Head of their
Middle East Research Department, and the course of my life deviated radically
from what otherwise might have been – who knows? -- perhaps a life of teaching
and tenure at a college only a few miles from where I had been born. I
find a peculiar justice in the fact that someone I came to admire so greatly
over the years introduced, unintentionally, such a crucial and irreversible
rupture in my life, opening up unpredictable opportunities that, whatever the
ultimate outcome, have at least helped get me to the fortunate space I occupy today,
not least that I am here to write this note of gratitude.
I’d like to end by giving Sid the last word, almost: in the article I
referred to above, Sid wrote, referring to anthropologists, that “Our
predecessors not only told the world but also showed the world that all peoples
are equal—equally human, equal in what they are, equal in what they have done
for humankind.” The last word, almost, because I must add that Sidney
Mintz was a little more equal than most of us: an exemplary, exceptional figure
-- generous, curious, productive, gregarious, profound (the praising adjectives
could go on and on) – in sum, a model for us all.
