Sidney Mintz, Anthropologist, Died at 93

  Historical

Sidney Wilfred Mintz was born on November 16, 1922 and died on December 26, 2015.

He was an anthropologist.

Sidney best known for his studies of the Caribbean, creolization, and the anthropology of food.

He attended the Brooklyn College, earning his B.A in psychology in 1943.

He gained his PhD at Columbia University in 1951 and conducted his primary fieldwork among sugar-cane workers in Puerto Rico.

He then enlarges his ethnographic research in 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.

Sidney taught for two decades at Yale University before founding the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins University, where he has 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.

Mintz was born in Dover, New Jersey, to Fanny and Soloman Mintz.

Sidney father was a New York tradesman, and his mother was a garment-trade organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World.

He was in the US Army Air Corps for the remainder of World War II.

Sidney Mintz 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.

In Columbia, he was one of a group of students who developed around Steward and Benedict known as the Mundial Upheaval Society.

He was amongst anthropologists such as Marvin Harris, Eric Wolf, Morton Fried, Stanley Diamond, Robert Manners, and Robert F. Murphy was among this group.

Sidney Mintz passed away at 93 yrs old.