Stephan Palmié

Let me begin by expressing my thanks to all of you who have organized this feast in celebration of Sid’s life. I imagine he might have had his thoughts on how we eventually might do that – not that anyone would have thought the moment would ever come! But sadly, it did, and so I hope that I and we all will live up to his expectations.  I also want to thank those of you, first and foremost Jackie, who asked me to write Sid’s obituary for the AA, and to speak to you today. It is an honor I would gladly have foregone. Who wouldn’t rather hear Sid crack a joke than listen to me? But a great honor it is nonetheless, and I am not quite sure how I ever earned it.

I first came across the name “Sidney W. Mintz” when I was on an exchange program at San Francisco State University in 1980-81 and picked up Whitten and Szwed’s 1971 collection Afro-American Anthropology for 50 cents at a yardsale in the Mission district. To this day, I think of the “Foreword” Sid wrote for that collection not only as smartest piece in the entire volume, but as the best 50 cents I ever spent. Remember, back then you couldn’t just go online to get at least parts of a text off of the web! You really had to find the books. And that yard sale was just my luck. Needless to say, Sid has been one of my intellectual heroes ever since.

It took another nine years or so before I ever met him. Both he and I have told that story many times – and since it happens to be a good story, I’ll tell it again today. But let me first say that Sid apparently even included it in the many, many letters of recommendations that he wrote for me. I know this because at one point – I guess he felt that I was a sufficiently big boy now – he sent me a copy of one such letter which featured just that story. So I think he would like me to retell it here – even though some of you may already know it.

It has a rather anguished beginning. I had defended my Ph.D. in the summer of 1989, and someone at the University of Erlangen-Nurnberg who appreciated my interest in the Caribbean had happened to get a sizeable grant for a conference on “Slavery in the Americas”, large enough to invite Americans. Would I happen to have some names for him? Ask Mintz, I said, that would be terrific. He did, and Sid reportedly replied “well, if you fly me over…”. Jackie surely knows this response. I think Sid just could not say no. Until very, very late in his life, he said yes to everything – and then worried incessantly over how in the world he could do all that! Parts of what I am telling you today is based on a re-reading of the 12 years of correspondence with Sid that still live on my University of Chicago server. For all I know, the rest is either gone now, or is decaying in the form of thermopaper faxes that we used to write each other before the days of the internet. But a constant refrain in these emails is how worried he was not to have a significant contribution – and the emphasis is on significant – ready for whatever event he had managed to book himself for.

I, in the meantime, had been writing a critique, based on my Cuban materials, of his and Rich Price’s “rapid early synthesis” model in the origins of Caribbean slave cultures. It was a very respectful critique, but I was still scared out of my wits to have to defend it face to face with the great Sidney W. Mintz. I even sent him a copy beforehand to ask if he disapproved. I imagine Sid read it, but I don’t think I ever heard back before we first met in a drafty old castle turned conference venue in Franconia, just a few miles from what, then, was the German-German border. You could almost hear the iron curtain rustling in the wind.

On the morning of November 9, 1989, Sid presented an early version of what eventually became the title chapter in “Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom”. Before he did, he remarked how fast it goes from being the youngest speaker at such meetings to suddenly being the oldest. I don’t know if that was strictly true (the grumbling old Swede Magnus Mörner may have had a year or two up on him). It didn’t much register with me, then, but boy has it begun to make sense in the meantime! At any rate, since Sid didn’t take me apart in the discussion of my paper, and since there was a panel of literary scholars after lunch, I suggested we drive around a bit in the countryside and look for a Wirtshaus to have lunch.  

Sid was game. We found a quaint enough village inn, and Sid ordered a plate of smoked Schinkenspeck (I thought “isn’t he Jewish? Should I tell him that it’s pork?” But of course he knew exactly what he wanted). We had some bone dry Franconian Riesling with it, and a lovely conversation. Sid may have sung a little song like “Am Brünnlein vor dem Tore” that he learned in his high school German classes. I may well be imagining this, but Sid knew dozens of these songs.

I didn’t know the story then, but in some published interview Sid talks about how kind Robert Redfield was to him after Sid published a paper demolishing Redfield’s Yucatec folk-urban continuum by noting that Redfield had failed to mention that what held all four communities together was their differential insertion in the global henequen industry. Sid wrote that paper right out of graduate school, and I have often though that he took my critique of the overreliance on Rich Price’s Suriname data in An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past very much in Redfield’s kind and gentlemanly spirit. During that lunch he also told me about his mother’s Wobbly past, and how she, late in her life, asked him that when – not if! – the Great Proletarian World Revolution comes, he should go to the cemetery and stomp on her grave three times.

Of course, my decrepit car broke down on the way back to the conference venue, thereby inaugurating a kind of pattern that would occasionally repeat itself over the years when I gave Sid a ride. He thought very poorly of my capacity to acquire reliable means of transportation. He even talks about my “dilapidated car” in the letter of recommendation I mentioned. I think we missed a couple of panels, but we arrived in time for a reception sponsored by the French consulate which had sponsored parts of the conference. Champagne was flowing in truly unexpected quantities, and after a while the French cultural attaché gave a rousing speech which – despite (or because!) of my Huguenot name I didn’t understand. All I kept hearing was “le mur…le mur…”. People were visibly getting agitated, so I asked a woman standing next to me what she thought this was all about. You probably know the answer by now: the Berlin Wall had come down.

Soon after, everyone rushed to the TV sets in their rooms, suddenly more interested in the history that was unfolding in the present rather than in the past that slavery was. The conference eventually produced a fine volume, but it really was toast after that evening. As Sid later wrote, it was “An unforgettable meeting: the Wall was coming down while we were in session. People kept tiptoeing out to watch, to listen, or to weep, in the midst of our papers.” By the time I drove back to Munich, thousands of little East German Trabbant cars had begun to pile onto the highway heading west. The West German government had given special permit for shops to stay open on a Sunday, but all along the way, enterprising Westerners were selling bananas out of the trunks of their cars. Were they offering the “Taste of Capitalist Freedom”? Perhaps. But as we now know, the price was high, both in the literal and figurative sense. As was revealed in the press soon after, most of the western impromptu vendors sold their bananas at a 3-500% mark-up over regular store prices.  

Two years later Sid came to spend a semester in Munich, where he (among other things) learned the etiquette of eating Weisswürst in the locally approved fashion. As he wrote me in 2003 “You'd be surprised how often I think about those sausages in the Marktplatz, and the rote Gruetze at Koenigshof. (Did I ever tell you about the lady who once wrote -- and published -- a poem dedicated to me because I once said "Moechte Ich" instead of "Darf Ich" when asking to sit down in Koenigshof?)” – i.e. “do I want to sit down?” instead of “may I sit down?”. I am afraid this is not the occasion to go into Sid’s homemade German, but it always cracked me up with what zest and relish he reinvented that language on the spot. He was utterly intrepid in that way and while he had had formal instruction in German, and knew Yiddish, I imagine that this is how he must have started out in Spanish and Kreyol – entirely unafraid of making a (however charming) fool of himself. Remember, as he once wrote, neither he nor Eric Wolf knew any Spanish when they shipped out to Puerto Rico in 1947!

I have no good sense of what exactly that time in Munich meant to him. All I know was that it seems to have been a lot. As he often said, like many Eastern European Jews of their generation, his parents thought German culture was the acme of civilization, and were utterly crushed by the savage barbarism unleashed by the deadliest, best organized, and most immoral branch of European fascism that emerged from the homeland of Goethe, Beethoven, von Humboldt, Marx, and, yes, Boas.  I showed him the university building still scarred by machine gun volleys fired not by American troops in WWII (Munich capitulated without a shot), but by the “white” free corps troops that brutally crushed the 1919 socialist revolution led by a bunch of poets and syndicalists. I also took him to the pool hall where Hitler used to hang out when still a failed art student, and to the academy of music which once was the “Braune Haus”, the Nazi headquarters in what was then the “Hauptstadt der Bewegung”.  Jackie, who visited Sid in Munich probably knows more about what all of this meant to Sid than I do. But what I think I can say is that it may have helped him come to terms with some aspects of a history that he, but not I, actually lived through. All I know is that he sent me a photo of the two of us, taken at his retirement party at the AAA meetings in San Francisco, inscribed “in fond memories of Munich: Life is good”.

There’s a lot about politics – both academic and properly speaking – in the correspondence that I still have access to. I don’t think this is the occasion to delve into the former. Sid always was often remarkably, sometimes quite shockingly, candid about what he thought of some of our colleagues, especially if he felt they were neglecting their charge as pedagogues, or saw their vocation as discoverers of the latest continental philosophe du jour, rather than as ethnographic empiricists. Remember: as he stated in an interview, “theory is not a word I use lightly”. Not that he wasn’t a theorist. On the contrary. But Sid wanted theory to emerge from concrete data, not the other way around. To this day, my favorite example is his remark about the state of don Taso’s dental health as an analytic (he wouldn’t have put it that way) for the workings of the capitalist world system.

He also wanted us to teach, rather than to philosophize, and he repeatedly came down hard on colleagues who seemed to leave their graduate students adrift. I know Sid would have liked such comments to stay “entre nous”, and so they will. Let me just say that he always emphasized that he felt that his undergraduate teaching was the most important thing he ever did. There are conflicting accounts of how G. W. Bush ever got a B in Sid’s famous Yale introductory lecture course, skulls and crossbones notwithstanding (Sid himself once said that Margaret Mead was filling in for him at the time). My favorite anecdote about that course comes from Virginia Dominguez, and I haven’t tired of passing it on to my own students. Sid is lecturing about race and its biological non-existence. A student pipes up – more out of puzzlement than petulance, says Virginia: “but Professor Mintz, I think I know a Jew when I see one”. “That may be so”, Virgina reports Sid saying. “But do you know one when you don’t see one?”

I realize that I may have taken up more time that I am supposed to. But with this anecdote in mind, let me close on an exchange that I had with Sid at the time that I was writing a rather skeptical piece about so-called recreational genomic services targeted towards African Americans some ten years ago. Here Sid goes:

Did I ever tell you that I have a nice but kind of screwy cousin in Mexico who has been genealogizing the Mintzes for 75 years or so? What she has discovered might be interesting if you were a Mintz, but I cannot imagine why anyone who wasn't would give a fart in a high wind. Well, some years ago I was reading this walking-tour-of-Karl-Marx-in-London pamphlet, and discovered he was descended from a 14th-century rabbi in Padua named Levi-Mintz, so of course I rushed it off to my cousin in hopes of driving her up the wall.
But meanwhile some real jerk on the faculty here named ["deleted"] (if his
name is really [deleted], as my mother would say, I am czar of all the Russias) tells me that he is related to me through a family named Katzenellenbogen -- who are, in fact, related to Marx! Does that make me prime meat for your study? Because Marx is one of the few people -- besides those African Cohens -- that I wouldn't mind being related to.

I wrote back that even though my family managed to successfully pass Nazi scrutiny of their Aryanness, I remember my father saying that on the Austrian side of his family there were people named Katzenellenbogen. Here’s what Sid replied:

Great Scot! You mean that you, too, are a Katzenellenbogen?! Schrecklich!
Why would a cat have an elbow, anyway? And what bestiality would one have to perpetrate to get named after it?

But of course, Sid knew as well as I, that both of us were related to some Katzenellenbogens: just as we all here can claim more or less distant relations to Karl Marx, the Queen of England, Barak Obama, Fidel Castro, and – alas, Donald Trump. If you really want it, all this is just a mouthswab away: a result, we might say, of what my friend Karen Fields, with a nod to E.P.’s Zande ethnography, calls the work of American “racecraft”. Schrecklich, perhaps. But if you go beyond the artifice of invidious taxonomies it is also a testimony to what Sid never tired of exploring: our common humanity. And that, I think is an apt point of concluding.

The world isn’t the same without Sid in it. Our memories of him will now have to do. But even though the occasion is a sad one, there’s one thing that we should celebrate, and it is the luck we had that our lives intersected with his. I’ll let Sid have the last word on this. Here’s what he wrote me about 5 years ago:

Fortune is SO important. And I didn't really become aware of its importance until I was, like, grown up -- your age, say. I thank some materialist deity for my astonishing good fortune all of the time. But being the fallible and ungrateful creatures we are, I curse my bad luck, too. I just count my blessings more.

We must never stop bowing thankfully to Providence, even as we are able to write this way to each other.

Mahler takes the words of Brentano and Van Arnim and writes gorgeous music: Die Gedanken sind frei, sie fliegen vorbei, sie fliegen vorbei -- die Gedanken sind frei!