Sidney Mintz

Sidney Wilfred Mintz was an American anthropologist best known for his studies of the Caribbean, creolization, and the anthropology of food. He received his doctorate from Columbia University in 1951 and conducted his primary fieldwork among sugar-cane workers in Puerto Rico, later extending his ethnographic research to Haiti and Jamaica to produce historical and ethnographic studies of slavery and global capitalism, cultural hybridity, Caribbean peasants, and the political economy of food commodities. He taught for two decades at Yale University before helping found the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins University, where he spent the rest of his career, and his history of sugar, Sweetness and Power, is considered one of the most influential publications in cultural anthropology and food studies.