Sidney W. Mintz (1922-2015) is widely considered one of the most influential American anthropologists of the 20th and 21st centuries, and a key member of the tradition’s third generation, building on the legacy of Boasian approaches to fieldwork that continue to shape global conversations on the historical transformations of culture. While his contributions to the study of Caribbean socie-ties, peasant economies, and the anthropology of food, are well known, this lecture will explore the subtleties of his thinking about the methods of anthropological re-search. Drawing on his readings of his friends and teach-ers, importantly Alexander Lesser and Ruth Benedict, his occasional writings on ethnography, and his voluminous teaching notes, we will examine how at bottom, Mintz’s conception of anthropological knowledge rested on a Marxian-inspired respect for the dignity of humanity and her labors. These ordinary forms of labor, from the wom-en of Haitian market places to the sugar-cane workers of Puerto Rico, appear in Mintz’s writings as definitive spac-es of cultural knowledge and creativity. But in his careful attention to peoples’ daily work, Mintz also shows how anthropology stands to learn and develop its own practic-es from the variety of human genius. This is perhaps most famously exemplified in his identification of Don Taso as a collaborator, in his descriptions of the latter’s efforts at data collection, and in his reverence for his friend’s ana-lytical brilliance. Such people are not “average” or “exemplary” of some larger social collectivity, he writes, but are rather highly original thinkers in their own right, whose contributions to theorizing the ethnographer’s task Mintz taught us to take seriously.

Andrew Brandel is visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, completing work on a monograph on literary culture in Berlin, co-authored with Clara Han (Johns Hopkins) on the inheritance of witness accounts of catastrophic violence, and a co-edited volume with Anouk Cohen (Centre national de la recherche scientifi-que) on the anthropology of textual practices. From 2011-2013, he was the inaugural Universi-ty Archives Fellow at the Hamburger Archives where he curated the papers of Sidney W. Mintz; his recent work on the history of anthro-pology includes the recent essay “The Art of Conviviality”.