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epending on the angle and moment of observation, the Caribbean can be seen as an incomplete spatiotemporal reference
point, traversed by multiple and continual transformations. Slow
and inconclusive, these are sometimes associated with histories capable of altering its distinct times and spaces of existence. Over the
course of his historical, ethnographic, and sometimes memorialist
studies, Sidney W. Mintz focuses on three major themes that allow
him to reconcile the apparent discrepancies between his field experiences and his analytic approach. At issue in his work are the different effects of the regional experiences of slavery, their relations
to the formation of the different modalities of peasant life, and
networks of commerce and exchange associated with rural property and labor. Three rural socialities during the 1950s and 60s
are juxtaposed on the basis not only of the observers experiences,
but also of the things that he knew and had learned. This exercise
required subjecting the ethnographers memory and the specialist
literature produced later by other observers to a constant perspectival exercise. In this way, the knowledge accumulated during different periods of field research and through continual contact with
the vast literature produced by the regions historians could be
compared. Consequently, the attempt to identify the connections
between dissimilar instances and viewpoints implies a constant repositioning: rethinking certain concepts and the form in which
they populated discussions andonce mediated by new problems
and authorscontinue to provoke fresh debates.
The paths traced by Mintz in the elegantly written Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations are numerous and
winding (2010). Pursuing them requires his readers to make their
own choices. In this essay, I wish to explore some effects of the
comparisons undertaken in the recent anthropological literature
review, xxxiv,
4, 2011, 391405
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practices that will enable them to live together and to interact. Though slavery meant abusive treatment for both its
male and female victims, the slaves developed social codes
of their own. Slavery nullified many former gender distinctions. But male and female slaves were perceived as different by planters and their subalterns during the course of
daily life on the plantations (2010: 50).
Reviewing his field notes and discussing the questions that led
him to three different small-scale societies, Mintz begins with
the British empires most lucrative sugar-producing colony in the
Caribbean. From the end of the seventeenth century to the start of
the nineteenth, Jamaica was home to the most lucrative and productive plantation experiences. Mintz reflects on his ethnographic
notes and writings in light of the historiographic literature on the
configuration of the Jamaican economy and society. The fact that
the reproduction of the system is directly associated with an internal control mechanismbased on ideas of discipline and racial
inequalitydoes not prevent us from observing how the institution
of the peculium (Edwards apud Mintz 2010: 53) makes room for the
emergence of relatively autonomous social institutions and forms.
In other words, the question that seems to guide the authors argument might be: What if slavery, not as an institution, but as a set
of different arrangements based on forms of subjugation, depend
ency, and labor, were associated with forms of affinity like those
that anthropology defines as constitutive of kinship relations?
The objective of the research in Jamaica in the mid-1950s was
to study the emergence of the markets and villages and their relation to the peasantry, the appearance of new forms of property
and household, and finally the maintenance of authority through
the reinforcement of patterns of morality (1957, 1958, and 1978).
From an ethnographic point of view, the observation that the custom was to assign plots of plantation land unsuitable for sugarcane
to individual slaves (2010: 53) allows the researcher to focus on
the ways by which small plots of land were transformed into different units for producing food, people, animals, and affinities.
The emergence of slaves as proto-peasants in Jamaica cannot be
understood separately from the formation of households, the division of family labor and, above all, the appearance of an internal
market system (2010: 59). The commercial activities of the slaves
looking to supply small and large properties with local subsistence
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these three islands are explored in relation as much to the transformations across the region and the trade in slaves and raw materials and their effects on local regimes of productionwhich can
undoubtedly be apprehended from different viewpointsas to institutional models. Family, godparents, forms of coexistence, the
placed occupied by ancestors in the symbolic and spatial territory
of the house, the configuration of domestic space and family arrangements, the division of labor and the sale of the agricultural
surplus produced by kin, and the formulations concerning gender,
respect, honor, and masculinity are all mutually implied themes,
although their relevance varies according to context. In Haiti, for
example, Mintzs focus on the practices involved in selling farm
produce and agricultural surpluses produced by family labor enabled the place of women in what we could call the peasant economy to emerge as a distinct point of view (1982). Seen through
womens interactions, movements, values, and calculations in the
markets with suppliers, intermediaries, buyers, and consumers, the
distances between rural and urban areas and between domains
like those of the home and public had to be rethought. Understanding the peasant economy in rural Haiti at the start of
the 1960s entailed a reanalysis of what Robert Redfield called the
continuum between the rural and urban, an approach sensitive
to the vicissitudes in the formation of small rural properties.
The reluctance of the Belnavis family and their neighbors from
the free villages to accept work in the plantations was not simply
a resistance to the intensification of capitalism. The ethnographic
account of their refusal becomes more salient when Mintz turns
from explanations for changes in the flow of commodity and land
markets to detailed explications of the moral and political meanings of the references to hard work in itself. The same applies to
the case of Taso, his interlocutor in Jauca, Puerto Rico, but through
other relations (Mintz 1984a). Taso was a rural laborer involved in
a variety of jobs ranging from planting crops to work in the industrialized sugar processing plant. A peasant and proletarian, in the
words of Mintz, Taso meshed so neatly with the events that had
marked the history of Puerto Ricos sugar industry that one might
say his life could almost have been predicted from that history
(2010: 154). Even so, working in an area undergoing rapid capitalist expansion and subjected to a strong U.S. presence, the experiences of Taso and the people of Jauca are very different from
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concepts like slavery, modernity, peasantry, and so many others frequently populated Mintzs writings in an openly unstable
form and were always accompanied by a meticulous exercise in
decomposition? I meant those models that figured in the agendas
and explications of long-term processes and that mobilized Mintzs
criticism to culturalism. For Mintz, concepts such as slavery, modernity, peasantry had to be tested and apprehended through experience. Though Mintz did not make use of native concepts derived from his field encounters, the experiences of people like Taso
and Nana and Tom Belnavis at least served as a basis for a (self-)
critique or, in Charles Carnegies apt expression, an anthropology
of ourselves (2006).
I think it is possible for us to approach the historical anthropology formulated by Mintz as a particular type of what Marilyn
Strathern called an anthropology of the relation (1995), given
that the apprehensions of different temporalities and experiences
in societies like Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico were comprehended as too partial or incomplete to explain the transformations that
traverse the modern Caribbean. The evidence derived from them
was or is not sufficiently representative or emblematic of the forms
assumed by slavery and post-emancipation in the Caribbean. They
are merely instances through which one can learn about the local
effects of movements of transformation that become territorialized
unequally. Neither are local experiences, if and when combined,
sufficiently representative of slavery or the emergence of the peasantry in the region. Likewise, it is impossible to conceive them as
a mosaic of particular experiences. On the contrary, Mintz calls
our attention to the necessary framing that should precede any
attempt to measure forms of exploitation in the field, the work in
the plantations, or the system of racial differentiation in any given
context. In Three Ancient Colonies, Mintz pursues various kinds of
comparison, composing themes that should be conceived as relations.
Here we can cite a passage from a book by Strathern, The Relation: Issues in Complexity and Scale, in which the author, focusing on
the notion of kinship, situates her own approach in response to the
complexity of arrangements that can define what society is and the
kind of phenomena that the concept encompasses or excludes. Applicable to different orders and types of connectionbetween people, groups, societies, social structures and systemsthe notion
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