Multiple Effects

On Themes, Relations, and Caribbean Compositions

Olivia Gomes da Cunha

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

391

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on different aspects of Caribbean societies as imagined by Mintz.

Three Colonies will form part of my analysis, as both a pretext and a
compositional exercise, since it provides clues to the choices made
by an important traveler, whose theoretical and methodological approaches have been receiving much deserved attention and creative
re-readings (including, for instance, Carnegie 2006; Scott 2004;
Bacca, Khan and Palmi 2009). The present text is definitely not
another critical reading, but rather a modest and incomplete inventory of themes that traverse Mintzs book in the manner of incidental music. Just as the anthropologist proceeded by highlighting
historical variations and transformations whose effects can only be
perceived comparatively, in this essay I follow Mintzs lead by proposing modulations. I look to emphasize some of the effects of the
modulations and comparisons produced by Mintz over more than
six decades. To this end, I set out from Three Colonies, initially highlighting different themes and spatiotemporal disjunctions that the
book describes and simultaneously aims to controlinsofar as the
author reads his own writings, re-reads those of his peers, and epistemologically and methodologically rearranges concepts and questions through what Virginia Dominguez has called the Mintzian
approach (2009). Discussion of these themes reappears in the second part of my text, considering some of the effects of Mintzs
arguments with the notion of relation formulated by Marilyn
Strathern (1995).
ON THEMES
What regions are often defined by turns in part on what the
world takes from them and brings to them. Much of the book is
concerned with just such things (2010: 183). Put otherwise, a region is a particular configuration of different practices and relations between people, spaces, objects, and cosmologies. In an observation made in some of his bibliographical articles, Mintz writes
thatcomposed of dozens of countries and territories, conquered,
settled and developed by a dozen different powersthe Caribbean
region discourages ambitious attempts at comparison (1983: 1).
This apparent resistence to analytic comparisons meant that the
anthropological approaches that slowly began to focus on local objects of study took the uncertain path of specific conceptssuch as

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393

kinship, family, slavery, creolization, and their innumerable local

derivativesleaving historians to invest more creatively in studies
of the transformation of particular societies, exploring their links
to transatlantic trade and to other colonial experiments in the region (Mintz 1977a, 1996).
The centrality of these concepts seems to have resulted from
a particular distribution of intellectual work and problems, not
strictly local, provoked in different generations of regional specialists.1 However, in the case of Mintz, the dissimilar interests of anthropologists and historians were reconfigured, not in the form of
an interdisciplinary dialogue, but as an alternative theory in which
ethnography appears as the outcome of a historical inquiry. Going
to the field, investigating and living with local people, and learning
how ties of affinity, labor relations, and exchange systems actually
occurred all implied a specific way of learning about Caribbean
socialities.
Following the path trodden by other authors of his generation,
Mintz chose to learn about them by observing in detail how they
were mutually implicated with experiences of slavery, modernization, and capitalism. This meant reducing the scale of the object.
Seen from close up, however, the relations between colonial forces
and legislation, trade systems, and other questions fundamental
to comprehending life in the coloniesin the large cities, villages,
and communitiesrevealed new modes of operation. The community studies model was his starting point, but what emerged from
his inquiries was a different set of possibilities for understanding
the forces that determined the singular constitution of small Car
ibbean settlements and the populations living in them. In Mintzs
words, the region is a combination of singular forces and powers
(1983: 1).
Although on one hand, the convergence of themes such as kinship, the peasantry, slavery, and labor in his rich ethnographic material is directly linked to a generational positionthat is, the fact
that Mintz began his relationship with the region as a member
of a diverse group of anthropologists, which included the likes of
Julian Steward et al. (1956), Eric Wolf (1956), and others who were
concerned with recording the rapid transformations taking place
1
A comprehensive analysis of their implications would go beyond the aims of this
text. Partial analyses of some of these consequences appear in Mintz (1996) and Trouillot
(1991, 1992).

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in traditional and agrarian societiesit did not result in any single

formula, model, or framework. Concepts such as peasantry and
kinship resulted, to a certain extent, in references that provided
the basis for pursuing a particular type of comparison. Socialities
were largely molded from centuries of effects produced by the enslavement and analogous labor conditions of thousands of people
mostly coming from Africa, as well as rural areas of Europe and
villages in the European colonies of Asia. The relative dimension
of this evidence highlights one of the most innovative questions of
the anthropology practiced by Mintz: Slavery was neither a univocal phenomenon nor did it precipitate the emergence of similar
societies (1984c: 196).
The differences that distinguish them, in turn, do not imply histories forged separately from the effects of colonial forces, Atlantic
trade, the slave economy, and the various forms of occupation of
the region. The historicities of these different experiences cannot
be taken as isolated social configurations: Rather, they evince diverse instances, points of view and perspectives stemming from the
experience of distinct forms of slavery and the later substitution
of these forms by other dynamics of labor, power, occupation of
space, exchange, and social reproduction (Trotman et al. 2006).
When compared, they can be comprehended as scales that allow us
to observe details that are seemingly less important or irrelevant,
but which can acquire another dimension when compared with
experiences and events in other contexts (Mintz 1995, 2001).
Among the cargo that arrived at the ports on the dozens of islands and mainland coasts making up the Caribbean from the sixteenth century onward were men and women brought mainly from
the African continent to produce goods, wealth, and labor. From
this point of view, i.e., that of the things and people who were the
object of exchange, trade, barter, pillaging, and violence, the making of the region involves a particular type of relation. Commenting on the universalizing premise of the slavery model proposed
by Orlando Patterson in 1984, Mintz emphasized the need for it to
be understood in relation to concrete experiences and institutions
rather than to elements encountered in other places, since, he argued, that slavery oppressed is certain. But what did it oppress
with; who else was oppressed, in this and in other ways; what else in
the system oppressed, together with slavery? (1984c: 196, emphasis in the original).

themes, relations, and caribbean compositions

395

Slavery, known through a diverse range of combinations that

involved various degrees of physical and symbolic violence, caused
profound alterations to the way in which experiences supposedly marked by dispersal and isolation are capable of transforming
and shaping a region. For Mintz, inquiring into the diversity of
practices and relations grouped under the label of slavery involved
foregrounding the agents themselves and the actions that made
them recognizable, inverting arguments based on dualist center/
periphery type approaches. Consequently the idea of a region as a
kind of compositionthe Caribbean as an oikoumen, in his seminal 1996 textmade from differentiated spatialities and temporalities seems to be based on the premise that the contact between
different socialities and different relational modes of subordination and violence analogous to slavery allows us to compare their
unequal trajectories (1996: 29697). Here we are faced not with a
replication of the phenomenon, the way in which colonialism and
slavery crystallized a particular historical becoming, but the way in
which duration and intensity can be compared. Insularityactually
the differentiation between time and intensity that makes elements
(institutions, events, etc.) common even though incommensurable,
that is, subjected to similar large historical forces but not to same
extent (2010: 187)is more than a mere observation of fact: It
amounts to another way of describing the Caribbean as a region.
However this does not imply a trivial approach; rather, we need to
identify its consequences.
Understanding the Caribbean as a particular type of region,
or what I call a composition, turns Mintzs argument concerning a specific way of understanding the local contemporary and
historical experiences into a premise or starting point whose comprehension is essential for us to appreciate not only the wealth of
his ethnographic material but above all the way in which it is formulated always as a relational element. From this point of view, a
region always appears as a plane molded and mediated by peoples
experiences. Men and women who, directly or indirectly, have or
had their lives and those of their kin transformed by the effects of
the existence of some kind of institution designated as, assimilated
by, or associated with slavery.
The effects of associating or implicating slavery with social experiences not identified as such enabled Mintz to set out from experiences rather than models. The later arrival of slavery and, more

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396

precisely, the plantation model with its large enslaved workforce

meant that the specificities of the so-called Spanish Caribbean islands, Puerto Rico and Cuba, for example, could be observed. On
the other hand, what made them singular from the chronological
point of viewthe antiquity of the experience of colonialism and
slavery in Puerto Rico compared to the secondary and late slavery in Cuba (Tomich 2004)provided elements that allowed them
to be compared in terms of their models of ownership, the forms
of territorial occupation, the appearance of forms of affinity and
dependence associated with kinship, subsistence patterns, commerce, and dietary habits. The supposed constitutive elements
of slavery thereby acquired greater or lesser importance when
compared with other social experiences involving the formation
of communities, labor, land ownership, and religious practices not
based on slavery.2 Even so, labor and property seemed to determine the choice of cases. As Jean Besson (2002: 33) and Bill Maurer
(1997: 205) pointed out, the anthropological literature devoted a
substantial part of its analytic efforts to the study of the complex
relations of affinity between distinct persons and forms of property and relation with the land. The innovation of the alternative model proposed by Mintz lay not in inverting the chronology
of the substitution of slave labor by free labor, but in the perception that their coexistence, in distinct places and in different formats, affected the formation of the peasantry and the experiences
of slaves and their descendants. By observing that in places like
Jamaica the peasantry was coextensivenot only spatially but also
culturallywith slave labor and the plantation, Mintz sheds light
on the experiences of the reconstituted peasants (2010: 74), not
only in relation to property and labor, but also to religious practices and the family.
RELATIONS
Plantation slavery, given the work regimen and the use
of violence, tended to deemphasize sexual differences to a
noticeable degree. . . . But peopleeven slaves and prisonershave a profound need for social order, for normative
2

See, for instance, Nieboer (1900), Patterson (1977), Mintz (1977b).

themes, relations, and caribbean compositions

397

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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products was not only fundamental in spatial transformation, in

the control of time and in relations with others, both freemen and
slaves, but also in the emergence of forms of household and families
cohabiting in the same spaces and sharing the same resources.
The focus on the appearance of the free villages in Jamaica
has an interesting effect when compared with Mintzs proposal to
conceive the Caribbean as a complex of spatiotemporal experiences directly associated with the slave plantations. Without claiming
any major conceptual twist, Mintz, in recalling the questions that
guided the making of the ethnography on the Belnavis family, enables us to see the Caribbean as a mosaic of different affinal and
exchange relations. By observing from close up what these churches and villages represented and what they meant to people living in
them (2010: 62, 64), Mintz questions the prevalence of models that
at the end of the 1950s oriented the historiography of slavery and
the incipient anthropology of peasant societies. What I wanted to
look at in my initial fieldwork in Jamaica was the growth of those
church-created villages and what they came to mean to people
(2010: 65). Mintz lived with Tom, Leah, Catherine, and Thelma
Belnavis, a family from the settlement of Sturge Town. Using notes
written in 1952, Mintz redescribes what he learned from the situation of the peasant Tom, heir to a small plot of land in an exemplary area for the free villages experience. A peculiar experience,
undoubtedly, since it constituted an example of how slaves and
colored freemen became peasants while still living under the sway
of slavery. As Mintz observes, it is this exceptionality that makes
Caribbean peasants different from rural workers on other continents.
Becoming a peasantor a protopeasant, the term used by
specialistswhile being formally a slave did not imply suspending
relations determined by the subordination to a master or landowner. It meant amassing some kind of resource through subsistence production, enabled through collective or family-based work
and based on the individual or collective acquisition of lands after
emancipation; constituting a network of solidarity based on kinship, religion, and the standards of morality associated with them;
and, finally, it meant linking the experience of working the land
with the sale of produce in nearby markets through womens work.
The history of the Belnavis family, linked to the singular history of
the free villages, added to this picture a particular awareness of the

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399

difference that separated poor Black rural workers whose parents

were slaves and their descendants from a new class of colored
urban citizens and middle-sized landowners. The racial etiquette
found under slavery, which in the post-emancipation period was
tied to the diffusion of Puritan and liberal patterns of morality
and discipline, in the rural areas was dampened by the mediation
of churches, missions, and projects intended for the moral and
spiritual redemption of slaves and former slaves (Holt 1992; Besson
2002; Austin-Broos 1997). The free villages can therefore be seen
as a kind of enclave whose singularity resides in the nature of the
relations that signal its differencerelations to the past of slavery,
to the land and forms of property and to labor (communitarian,
partnership-based, etc.) involving members of the religious community, their families, and their ancestors. The Belnavis family and
their neighbors transit discontinuously between the status of freemen and slaves: the community lands, the free villages, the family
landthe small plots of land and, sometimes, houses with shared
yards left by their ancestors. Mintzs ethnography in Sturge Town
later amplified by Jean Bessons research (2002)reveals that it was
the new labor modalities and arrangements, rather than the forms
of property ownership that emerged post-emancipation, that enabled the appearance of people like the Belnavis family. However,
these labor modalities were not institutionalized forms but, more
pertinently, different relations with regard to the past of slavery
and the ancestors, to the community of Christians, to the agricultural produce sold at fairs and markets, and to the possibilities of
constituting a family to gain respect. When Tom Belnavis reflects
on the land that he inherited or soldor as Mintz writes in his
diary, Tom talks about how working hard enables him to sleep
(2010: 81)he emphasizes not the things obtained per se, but the
freedom and possibility to acquire them through work. While, according to Thomas Holts analysis, Puritan morality and liberal values disseminated during Jamaicas post-emancipation period may
have indirectly guided missionary work in rural areas, as Mintz
observes, the peasantry livesor at least livedin the shadow of
the national history (2010: 77).
The singularity of the Belnavis family, unrepresentative in national terms, becomes more comprehensible when compared with
the data collected by Mintz in Puerto Rico and Haiti. In Three Colonies, the differences between the formation of the peasantry on

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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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401

those of the Belnavis family. The sharp decline of the plantation

after the end of slavery and its later regrowthin particular and in
dissimilar forms in Cuba and Puerto Rico (Tomich 2004)complicates any attempt at comparison. The concentration of land and
the territorialization of the sugar industry in Puerto Rico point to
the formation of almost proletarian rural workers, whose relations
with big landowners and the rural elites involve complex separations between spaces of affinities that recurrently take kinship as
their main idiom. Violence appears as the other side of the same
coin, the sign of a more radical distancing, a breaching of the standards of morality and honor that assures people like Taso the recognition and respect of their peers.
ON COMPOSITION
In a passage in Partial Connections (1991: 9), Strathern describes
the modern ethnographer as a complex figure. The relation imagined with his or her object of study presumes large units, sets, and
wholes. Having gathered various kinds of material, he or she imagines a social structure can be conceived as a whole by synthesizing a disparate set of data. The ethnographer presumes to understand not only the relations in which he or she participates but
also those not known but presumed to be fundamental to knowing
any given society. I began this essay proposing to identify some of
the themes studied by Mintz in order to observe their effects when
placed in comparison. One of these effects resides precisely in the
fact that Mintzs descriptions and ideas not only do not conform to
the caricature of modernist anthropology formulated by Strathern
(1992), they also anticipateat various points not fully covered in
the present textthe latter authors own concerns with themes and
concepts like relation, part, whole, scale, and effect. Not
only did these appear frequently in Mintzs vast body of work, they
also reappear in Three Colonies, destabilizing any approach that insists on the totalizing character of modern analyses.
Although Mintzian Marxism allowed ample room for economic transformations, the production and circulation of goods and
people, labor, and the reproduction of social structures, it was subordinated to a variety of empirical data capable of destabilizing
the model itself. But which models if, as I have tried to show, key

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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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403

of relation became absorbed into the analysis and production of

anthropological knowledge through the possession of two types of
property (1995, 1999). The first, designated holographic by the
author, has obvious implications in relation to the continuous exercise undertaken by Mintz. Strathern argues that this holographic
property not only enables the notion of relation to be apprehended through the field context in which it is observed, but also, in
counterpart, means that parts, fragments, and isolated data from
certain phenomena observed in the field are seen to contain information from the whole. In the authors words, at whatever level
or order, the demonstration of a relationship, whether through resemblance, cause and effect, or contiguity, reinforces the fact that
through relational practicesclassification, analysis, comparison
relations can be demonstrated (1995: 18). The second effect or
property enables us to see the various scales of a relation or connection, the dimensions making it complex. In other words, provides us the capacity to interconnect relations of different types, to
make explicit contrasts between types of relation. One example of
this mode of conceiving relations is the persistent attention paid
by Mintz to the different ethnic-racial models and their equally
distinct relations with the experience of slavery. 3 These relations
provided a rich example of complex phenomena, insofar as their
comparison enables us to observe side-by-side orders and scales
of implication, resilience, and dissimilar meanings and, at the same
time, to consider their differences (Strathern 1995: 19).
What most approximates Mintzian anthropologyopenly rooted in the modern tradition that, in Stratherns observations, elects
the notion of relation as a fundamental analytic device (Scott 2004;
Carnegie 2006)to an anthropology of the relation is his attention to the necessary combination of models with empirical data.
In other words, it is as if the holographic and complex properties
of the relations observed in the region were always insufficient and
Stratherns observations, directed at the effects produced by the anthropology of
kinship in the modern anthropological tradition, could be better explored were we to
turn to other writings by Mintz on domestic social structure, marriage, and legitimization of children in the Caribbean, especially the Final Note produced for the conclusion to a special issue of Social and Economic Studies, edited with William Davenport in
1961, a text in which the author establishes the then unthinkable connection between
structural and historical analysis. In this text, examining different perspectives on the
formation of the family in the British Caribbean, Mintz compares approaches linked to
Boasian culturalism and British structural functionalism.
3

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404

incomplete. Among the various levels of complexity that traverse

field experiences, especially when revisited through a memoirbased experiment, is the presence of other forms of knowledge
produced by other disciplines (Strathern 1991: 22). Instead of trying to control them, Mintz submits them equally to comparison.
They thereby compose the repertoires, agendas, empirical data,
and discourses on the region. This is the case of historiographic
knowledge, in large part produced long after the ethnographers
field experiences. In Three Colonies, these elements work to destabilize earlier conclusions while simultaneously being submitted to
them. They do not function as evidence of what David Trotman et
al. have called pan-Caribbean historiography (2006). They merely comprise ways of seeing, remaining insufficient to explain the
ways in which the region operates as a whole. The anthropology
practiced by Mintz, recaptured through memory and the use of
old field notebooks in Three Colonies, is nothing other than an experiment in composition, affording, ever attentively and always in
relation, different ways of seeing phenomena, places, events, and
people.

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