30 pages • 1 hour read
Sidney W. MintzSweetness and Power
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1985A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Introduction Summary
Sidney Mintz, American anthropologist and author of Sweetness and Power, introduces the work by discussing his own experiences conducting anthropological fieldwork in sugar-growing and manufacturing centers in Puerto Rico and the insights this work yielded for his research. He then lays out a roadmap for subsequent chapters and for the book as a whole, the purpose of which is “to explain what sugar reveals about a wider world, entailing as it does a lengthy history of changing relationships among peoples, societies, and substances” (xxiv-xxv). By examining the historical relations within sugar production and consumption, Mintz hopes to contribute to an “anthropology of the present” or an “anthropology of modern life” (xxvii).
With this introduction, the author teases his focus and interests for the rest of the book: the relationship between the English sugar-consuming metropolis and the Caribbean sugar-producing colonies; the history of sugar production culminating in the Caribbean plantation system; the historically changing uses and meanings of sugar different classes of society, and the future and possibilities of the discipline of anthropology.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Food, Sociality, and Sugar”
Our food preferences, how we eat, and our feelings about food “speak eloquently to the question of how we perceive ourselves in relation to others” (4). Mintz provides the example of the !Kung bushmen of Africa who deliberately dispersed freshly hunted eland meat throughout the community in ways that demonstrated “who one was, how one was related to others, and what was entailed” (5). Historically, food has been one of the most socially significant aspects of human life.
This book focuses on sugar in the form of sucrose extracted from sugarcane and how the meanings associated with its use gradually changed in the centuries since sucrose was first introduced into the English diet. By the year 1650, sugar was a staple of the wealthy and noble British classes that “figured in their medicine, literary imagery, and displays of rank” (6). Virtually everybody in England was a sugar-eater by 1800, and sugar provided nearly one-fifth of all calories for the English diet by the dawn of the 20th century. Mintz does not see this as an inevitable process brought on by the human predisposition for sweetness; rather, he explores how sugar became centrally important for the British by examining the cultural context of its consumption and the meanings that sugar held for Britons of different classes.
The author explains that historically, people typically gained nourishment from one type of staple vegetable food accompanied by a complementary side food. He invokes the example of the Bemba people in Africa for whom the critically important ubwali, a form of maize, “stands for food itself” (10). This staple food’s complement, umunani, makes the staple ubwali more interesting to eat but does not itself truly count as food for the Bembas. Likewise, a green onion garnish or an herbal mix is not considered to be food for modern Western consumers, in contrast to the main chicken roast. A genuine staple food like ubwali “provides the raw materials out of which much of the meaning in life is given voice” (11) for traditional peoples.
Introduction and Chapter 1 Analysis
The author positions this study as a contribution to a modern anthropology that centers change, including how things change and why things stay the same, rather than an obsession with the deep past. Mintz accomplishes his anthropology of the present by exploring the history of sugar, its production in the Caribbean, and sugar consumption on the English mainland. He hopes to demonstrate that insisting on pure ancient “primitive” societies and refusing to explore our present historical moment is not the way forward for the discipline of anthropology.
Mintz’s commitment to a class-based analysis of sugar indicates that he grounds his study in Marxist intellectual principles. Beyond his interest in contextualizing sugar’s growing popularity within the rise of capitalism, the author’s focus on the changing meanings of sugar for the British populace—and in particular, his declaration that “meaning, in short, is the consequence of activity” (14)—comes out of a central Marxist tenet: Labor is the source of value. Along the same lines, he warns that “not to ask how meaning is put into behavior, to read the product without the production, is to ignore history once again” (14). This is a reference to commodity fetishism, a Marxian concept describing a concern about the hidden labor that underlies production and ultimately creates the goods’ value.
The author rejects biological determinism as an explanation for the popularity and various uses of sugar: “That there are links between fruit eating, the sensation of sweetness, and the evolution of the primates is persuasive. That they ‘explain’ the heavy consumption of refined sugar by some peoples in the modern world is not” (15-16). Mintz emphasizes the central role of cultural practices in bolstering and facilitating our species-wide predisposition for sweetness. Relatedly, foods that are newly introduced in a society “enter into pre-existing social and psychological contexts and acquire—or are given—contextual meanings by those who use them” (6). In the present study, humans are assumed as active agents; they do not simply absorb culturally ascribed meanings in their relationships with food and with each other. Rather, humans create new meanings and adjust to them as the foods or products, like sucrose, are put to different uses such as for preservation, as a status symbol, or as a sweetener.
