#sidney mintz

[accuratepicuresofanthropologists]

Sydney Mintz in the Iron Market in Port-au-Prince, via "The Anthropology of Ourselves: An Interview with Sidney W. Mintz" in Small Axe 19.

[noosphe-re]

Most of us, most of the time, act within plays the lines of which were written long ago, the images of which require recognition, not invention.

Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History

[noosphe-re]

Studying a single food or commodity such as sugar may seem like an incongruous project for an anthropologist who claims to work mostly with living people. Still, it is a rich subject for someone interested in the history and character of the modern world, for its importance and popularity rose together with tea, colonial slavery, and the machine era. Had it not been for the immense importance of sugar in the world history of food, and in the daily lives of so many, I would have left it alone.

Sugar, or sucrose (C12H22O11), is manufactured photosynthetically by green plants. We humans can't make sugar. The best we can do is to extract it, and change its form. We have been doing so zealously, for more than 2,000 years. Sugarcane was domesticated about ten millennia before that, and is the most important plant from which sucrose is extracted. Today, corn sweeteners have begun to overtake sucrose in the West; but cane sugar and beet sugar still have promising futures in the poor, or “less developed” world.  

My work on sugar, Sweetness and Power, situates it within Western history because it was an old commodity, basic to the emergence of a global market. The first time I was in the field I'd been surrounded by it, as I did my fieldwork. That led me to try to trace it backward in time, to learn about its becoming domesticated, and how it spread and gained importance in the growing Western industrial world. I became awed by the power of a single taste, and the concentration of brains, energy, wealth and -- most of all, power -- that had led to its being supplied to so many, in such stunningly large quantities, and at so terrible a cost in life and suffering.

I follow it still – as well as honey, carob, aspartame, estevia, palm sugar, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), and so on. I want to know what will happen with sweetness next: how its desirability confronts the costs it  poses to health, physical appearance, the environment, and the world order.

How do we get from one child's sweet tooth to the history of slavery, of war, and of corporate lobbying in the Congress? And how do we retrace our steps backward, this time to the significance of that child's sweet tooth? Do these issues ever become so powerful that there may be thought of legislating the availability of this or other foods – the health implications of which can be debated? These are the kinds of questions that have arisen in recent years. Alongside them are the shacks of the cane cutters, scattered in so many of the earth’s tropical corners, which deserve at least equal attention from anthropologists. —Sidney Mintz

[aguacerotropical]

Once one begins to wonder where the tropical products go, who uses them, for what, and how much they are prepared to pay for them—what they will forgo, and at what price, in order to have them—one is asking questions about the market. But then one is also asking questions about the metropolitan homeland, the center of power, not about the dependent colony, the object and target of power. And once one attempts to put consumption together with production, to fit colony to metropolis, there is a tendency for one or the other—the “hub” or the “outer rim”—to slip out of focus. As one looks at Europe the better to understand the colonies as producers and Europe as consumer, or vice versa, the other side of the relationship seems less clear. While the relationships between colonies and metropolis are in the most immediate sense entirely obvious, in another sense they are mystifying.

Sweetness and Power, Sidney Mintz

[cynthiabertelsen]

Reflections on a Green-Grape Tart

Photo credit: C. Bertelsen Sugary milky sweetness, that first delicious taste, imprints itself on a baby’s tiny tongue, and seals forever a great love. From the very beginning of life, then, a yearning for that nectar haunts us forever and never leaves us in peace. This primal urge for sweetness led to the scourge of slavery and fuels the modern obesity epidemic. Imagine, for a moment, vast…

Reflections on a Green-Grape Tart

[accuratepicuresofanthropologists]

Very small, but definitely a piece of history: Sidney Mintz from the Guggenheim website. Guggenheim has individual entries for all awardees, often with pictures, some of which are larger than this one.

[dbluegreen]

Baltimore radio host Marc Steiner says that Mintz considered the present a product of the “Africanized world,” given the foundational importance of slavery to not just U.S. history but also to modernity itself. Recent lauded books—Greg Grandin’s The Empire of Necessity (2014), Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014), Ned and Constance Sublette’s The American Slave Coast (2015), Daniel Rassmussen’s American Uprising (2011)—elaborate on Mintz’s understanding that we still live today with the blood of enslaved Africans on our hands.

sarah hill

http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/sidney-mintz-in-memoriam

[danny4xb]

Slave and proletarian together powered the imperial economic system that kept one supplied with manacles and the other supplied with sugar and rum...

‘Sweetness and Power’ by Sidney W. Mintz

(this is part of a longer passage on the use of sugar - esp. in combination with tea - as part of the British industrial diet. It emphasises the role of bourgeois economic power and taste making in the rise of sugar consumption in Britain. The sentence continues “...but neither had more than a minimal influence over it [the economic system].” In context I have no problem with it, but I like the edited quote? I think it’s the money shot of the whole book. It’s a corrective to the school of imperial minimisers who try to compare conditions of industrial workers with the colonised and enslaved. Always remember who got the rum and who got the manacles.