Sidney W. Mintz

Worker in the cane : a Puerto Rican life history

Worker in the Cane is both a profound social document and a moving spiritual testimony. Don Taso portrays his harsh childhood, his courtship and early marriage, his grim struggle to provide for his family. He tells of his radical political beliefs and union activity during the Depression and describes his hardships when he was blacklisted because of his outspoken convictions. Embittered by his continuing poverty and by a serious illness, he undergoes a dramatic cure and becomes converted to a Protestant revivalist sect. In the concluding chapters the author interprets Don Tasos experience in the light of the changing patterns of life in rural Puerto Rico.

A note on the definition of peasantries

More important than an abstract definition of ‘the peasantry’ is the development of typologies of rural socio‐economic groupings. Such typologies should facilitate controlled comparisons between societies whose rural sociology reveals broadly similar structures. They might include the following features: the internal composition of the so‐called peasant sector; the relationships of different parts of that sector to other, non‐peasant rural groups; the social‐relational uses made of traditional cultural forms in rural community life, for handling linkages between different parts of the peasantry and between peasants and non‐peasants; and the historical development of the peasant sector.

Men, Women, and Trade

This paper1 considers one aspect of the relationship between social organization and certain sorts of economic activity, using a particular setting, the internal market system in peasant societies (Mintz, 1959), as a frame of reference. The argument proceeds from the well-known fact that, in many of these market systems, much or even most of the distributive activity is carried on by women, and these women often engage in commerce more or less independently of the economic undertakings of their husbands. In such cases, husband and wife participate in distinguishably different risk structures, an arrangement having particular relevance to the nature of family life and culturally determined sex-role differentiation. Furthermore, since husbands and wives in such cases may carry on not only independent but also different economic pursuits, it would not be surprising if some of the attitudes related to the kind of economic activity also differed along sexual lines. Productive and distributive undertakings require different skills; probably they evoke different temperamental responses as well. One might claim that the tests of success for the middleman are different in character from the tests of success for the

The rural proletariat and the problem of rural proletarian consciousness

‘The rural proletariat’ has been employed as a sociological category to describe Caribbean populations for nearly 25 years, but confusion about such populations persists. Proletarianisation, the definition of rural proletariats, and the Marxist conception of consciousness, as applicable to such groups, are discussed in the following paper. The Cuban case is described to exemplify the European bias of some analysts, and the difficulties created by an uncritical transfer of western conceptions of class and of class consciousness to a colonial agrarian situation. A special effort is made to conceptualise the rural proletariat in terms of its relationships to the peasantry, and of the ‘concealment’ of landless workers in peasant communities.

Slavery and the Rise of Peasantries

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the peasantry as process rather than as a typological category. In improving ones understanding of the post-slavery peasantries, two processes will have to be dealt with—two intersecting and chronologically overlapping processes, which take for granted the internal differentiation of each planter group. One such process is the struggle to contain and to supplement the labor power of the potential peasantry; the other is the movement toward technical improvement, based on the pace of scientific achievement and on availabilities of intensified capital inputs. The two processes may occur as between say, big planters and small, or (what may be simply a different way of saying the same thing) as between old planters and new. They may reveal themselves in one region of a colony or in the whole colony; as between planters in one colony (Barbados) and another (Jamaica) of the same power; as between one planter group (such as, English) and another (Spanish, or French); or even as between the Caribbean region and other regions. At each such level of competition, the relevant forces are somewhat different; at each such level, the question as to the relationship between local productive arrangements and the world economy is precisely what must be investigated and tested.

Labor and Sugar in Puerto Rico and in Jamaica, 1800–1850

The islands of Puerto Rico and Jamaica, which lie roughly at the same latitude and less than 600 miles apart at their nearest points, share a number of remarkable similarities in general physical environment. Strikingly in contrast to the similarities in topography, climate, flora and fauna are the differences in the cultures of the two islands. One of the reasons for this cultural disparity has to do not with the cultures of the colonial powers, but with the persistence of a strong peasantry in one island (Jamaica), and a relatively weak peasantry in the other (Puerto Rico). This difference stems in large part from the individual histories of the two islands, histories predominantly determined by the colonial aims and policies of, in one case, Spain and Great Britain; in the other, Spain and the United States. The present paper purports to treat principally one brief period (1800–1850) during which a sharp divergence in the colonial objectives of the respective controlling powers affected the cultures of Jamaica and Puerto Rico accordingly. It was during this half-century that Puerto Rico repeated a historical experience which Jamaica had undergone nearly 150 years earlier: the development of a sugar plantation economy.

Living fences in the Fond-des-Nègres Region, Haiti

Most of the land on the plateau is held in small plots, such that production, whether for export or for local consumption, is carried out on peasant holdings. The peasantry traditionally devotes some part of its land to the cultivation of coffee for export. Since law forbids the cutting of coffee trees, and since world market prices in recent years have not encouraged the expansion of coffee cultivation, variations in the amount produced have been conditioned mainly by changes in climate, hurricane damage, and the apparently reduced labor investment cultivators have been willing to make in their coffee lands. Though it is not possible to obtain statistical confirmation, it seems certain that the production of crops for subsistence and for internal exchange has risen during the past ten years. Sisal production, which expanded sharply in the region around the start of this decade, is now declining, in accord with the decline in world market prices. Probably the Fond-des-Negres region

Understanding and Participant Observation in Cultural and Social Anthropology

There was a time when cultural and social anthropologists did not do participant observation. Sir James Frazer, famous anthropologist of yesteryear, was once asked if he ever lived amongst savages. It is reported that he held up his hands “as though to ward off even the thought” and answered “God forbid!”1

Did the Puerto Rico Project Have Consequences? A Personal View

Those of us who participated as fieldworkers in the Puerto Rico Project gathered regularly at the University of Puerto Rico (Río Piedras) during the eighteen months we were in the field to compare notes, discuss our work together, and advance our research cooperatively. During that time a distinct difference between our integration in the communities where we were working and in the university community where we gathered became apparent to some of us. It was a coefficient of the class and other differences that separated the university faculty from the working men and women among whom some of us lived in the field, and it was reflected in political differences, among others. A substantial fraction of the university faculty was strongly committed to political independence, whereas a large majority of rural dwellers supported the Popular Democratic Party, then in power. It was not surprising that these differences were linked to others, such that some of us felt we were more fully accepted by the laboring classes among whom we lived than by the intellectuals whom we knew at the university. I try here to show how our fieldwork made visible (and troublesome) these sharp political divisions.

Finding the Individual in the Global

Abstract This paper brings together two strands of anthropological theory that may be fruitfully combined but that are combined only rarely: globalization and the individual life history. Globalization, the paper argues, is not new, despite the rhetoric with which it is described in much of anthropology today; it has been taking place at least since the discovery of the New World by Europeans, after which unprecedented ruptures between people and places began occurring on a grand scale. These ruptures are still occurring, of course: the life history can serve as a means of documenting the ongoing social transformations of people undergoing processes of global migration. Through the individual voices of life history, the human and cultural meanings of globalization in the recent past can be made manifest.