Watch this lecture on Haiti from renowned anthropologist Sidney Mintz. Mintz is, with good reason, one of the pioneer scholars in anthropological studies of the Caribbean and African-Americans. Mintz's lecture here focuses on history, giving an overview of Haiti's history from the colonial days to the present. Though performs more introductory than anything else to Haitian history, Mintz's lecture is useful for disseminating information on important themes in Haitian history: race, slavery, peasantry formation, coffee's importance in the export economy, despotism and the predatory state, and the market system.
The rest of the lecture covers Mintz's research in Haiti, and it is quite enlightening for the role and importance of the peasantry in Haiti's economic history and systems of exchange. The significance of women in Haitian markets and trade is also covered in this lecture, traveling to regional markets, sleeping in the markets, carrying food and other goods, linking the rural and urban economies. These market women, overtaxed and facing precarious situations, invigorate the Haitian economy and reveal women's economic autonomy.The dire times in Haiti since Mintz's initial research in the 1950s have reduced the Caribbean peasantry to a slow, gradual death. Mintz, who conducted research in Puerto Rico and Jamaica as well, knows this better than anyone, even as women have kept their importance as market actors in Haiti.
Later in the lecture, Mintz touches on the subject of cultural creolization, emphasizing survival, trauma, and a new setting that prompted the process of creolization. The Q&A section is quite interesting, too, largely because of the tense exchange between Mintz and Skip Gates. One might take issue with Mintz claim that Haiti has not attracted many immigrants historically, however.
After watching this lecture, check out his thoughts about Puerto Rico. Lots of useful historical and anthropological data on Puerto Rico from the 1500s to 1900s, especially Mintz's research in Jauca in the late 1940s. He personally observed and witnessed the aftermath of US conquest of Puerto Rico and the rise of sugar plantations financed by American capitalism. The utter depths of Puerto Rican poverty, low wages for workers on the modernized plantations, and case study of Mintz friend certainly illuminates the experience of what Mintz calls 'rural proletarians.' Clearly, the people of the coastal lowlands in areas like Jauca were far from peasants like Mintz studied in Haiti or Jamaica.
Mintz also offers useful commentary on the differences in gender and racial norms in Haiti, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. In Haiti, women were economically autonomous, while in Puerto Rico, women who worked outside the house in Jauca were employed in the sugarcane estates. Women who did not work outside the house, did domestic work. All women in that region were denied mobility and the community in Jauca was obsessed with virginity and being moral Catholics, even if nobody went to church or was legally married. Moreover, in terms of race, one can see how US rule has imposed a specifically US brand of racism and classification while local forms of Puerto Rican racial classification continue to define blackness differently in ways that inhibit broad-based Afro-Puerto Rican movements (a point I have read elsewhere in discussions of racial inequality in Brazil).
After watching this lecture, check out his thoughts about Puerto Rico. Lots of useful historical and anthropological data on Puerto Rico from the 1500s to 1900s, especially Mintz's research in Jauca in the late 1940s. He personally observed and witnessed the aftermath of US conquest of Puerto Rico and the rise of sugar plantations financed by American capitalism. The utter depths of Puerto Rican poverty, low wages for workers on the modernized plantations, and case study of Mintz friend certainly illuminates the experience of what Mintz calls 'rural proletarians.' Clearly, the people of the coastal lowlands in areas like Jauca were far from peasants like Mintz studied in Haiti or Jamaica.
Mintz also offers useful commentary on the differences in gender and racial norms in Haiti, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. In Haiti, women were economically autonomous, while in Puerto Rico, women who worked outside the house in Jauca were employed in the sugarcane estates. Women who did not work outside the house, did domestic work. All women in that region were denied mobility and the community in Jauca was obsessed with virginity and being moral Catholics, even if nobody went to church or was legally married. Moreover, in terms of race, one can see how US rule has imposed a specifically US brand of racism and classification while local forms of Puerto Rican racial classification continue to define blackness differently in ways that inhibit broad-based Afro-Puerto Rican movements (a point I have read elsewhere in discussions of racial inequality in Brazil).
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