CUNHA, Olívia Maria Gomes Da. Multiple Effects. on Themes, Relations, And Caribbean Compositions

7/26/2019 CUNHA, Olvia Maria Gomes Da. Multiple Effects. on Themes, Relations, And Caribbean Compositions

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391REVIEW, XXXIV, 4, 2011, 391405

Multiple Effects

On Themes, Relations, and Caribbean Compositions

Olivia Gomes da Cunha

Depending on the angle and moment of observation, the Carib-bean can be seen as an incomplete spatiotemporal referencepoint, traversed by multiple and continual transformations. Slowand inconclusive, these are sometimes associated with histories ca-pable of altering its distinct times and spaces of existence. Over thecourse of his historical, ethnographic, and sometimes memorialiststudies, Sidney W. Mintz focuses on three major themes that allowhim to reconcile the apparent discrepancies between his field expe-riences and his analytic approach. At issue in his work are the dif-ferent effects of the regional experiences of slavery, their relations

to the formation of the different modalities of peasant life, andnetworks of commerce and exchange associated with rural prop-erty and labor. Three rural socialities during the 1950s and 60sare juxtaposed on the basis not only of the observers experiences,but also of the things that he knew and had learned. This exerciserequired subjecting the ethnographers memory and the specialistliterature produced later by other observers to a constant perspec-tival exercise. In this way, the knowledge accumulated during dif-

ferent periods of field research and through continual contact withthe vast literature produced by the regions historians could becompared. Consequently, the attempt to identify the connectionsbetween dissimilar instances and viewpoints implies a constant re-positioning: rethinking certain concepts and the form in whichthey populated discussions andonce mediated by new problemsand authorscontinue to provoke fresh debates.

The paths traced by Mintz in the elegantly written Three An-

cient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variationsare numerous andwinding (2010). Pursuing them requires his readers to make theirown choices. In this essay, I wish to explore some effects of thecomparisons undertaken in the recent anthropological literature


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Olivia Gomes da Cunha392

on different aspects of Caribbean societies as imagined by Mintz.Three Colonieswill form part of my analysis, as both a pretext and acompositional exercise, since it provides clues to the choices madeby an important traveler, whose theoretical and methodological ap-

proaches have been receiving much deserved attention and creativere-readings (including, for instance, Carnegie 2006; Scott 2004;Bacca, Khan and Palmi 2009). The present text is definitely notanother critical reading, but rather a modest and incomplete in-ventory of themes that traverse Mintzs book in the manner of inci-dental music. Just as the anthropologist proceeded by highlightinghistorical variations and transformations whose effects can only beperceived comparatively, in this essay I follow Mintzs lead by pro-

posing modulations. I look to emphasize some of the effects of themodulations and comparisons produced by Mintz over more thansix decades. To this end, I set out from Three Colonies,initially high-lighting different themes and spatiotemporal disjunctions that thebook describes and simultaneously aims to controlinsofar as theauthor reads his own writings, re-reads those of his peers, and epis-temologically and methodologically rearranges concepts and ques-tions through what Virginia Dominguez has called the Mintzian

approach (2009). Discussion of these themes reappears in the sec-ond part of my text, considering some of the effects of Mintzsarguments with the notion of relation formulated by MarilynStrathern (1995).

ON THEMES

What regions are often defined by turns in part on what theworld takes from them and brings to them. Much of the book isconcerned with just such things (2010: 183). Put otherwise, a re-gion is a particular configuration of different practices and rela-tions between people, spaces, objects, and cosmologies. In an ob-servation made in some of his bibliographical articles, Mintz writesthatcomposed of dozens of countries and territories, conquered,settled and developed by a dozen different powersthe Caribbeanregion discourages ambitious attempts at comparison (1983: 1).This apparent resistence to analytic comparisons meant that theanthropological approaches that slowly began to focus on local ob-

jects of study took the uncertain path of specific conceptssuch as


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THEMES, RELATIONS, ANDCARIBBEANCOMPOSITIONS 393

kinship, family, slavery, creolization, and their innumerable localderivativesleaving historians to invest more creatively in studiesof the transformation of particular societies, exploring their linksto transatlantic trade and to other colonial experiments in the re-

gion (Mintz 1977a, 1996). The centrality of these concepts seems to have resulted froma particular distribution of intellectual work and problems, notstrictly local, provoked in different generations of regional special-ists.1However, in the case of Mintz, the dissimilar interests of an-thropologists and historians were reconfigured, not in the form ofan interdisciplinary dialogue, but as an alternative theory in whichethnography appears as the outcome of a historical inquiry. Going

to the field, investigating and living with local people, and learninghow ties of affinity, labor relations, and exchange systems actuallyoccurred all implied a specific way of learning about Caribbeansocialities. Following the path trodden by other authors of his generation,Mintz chose to learn about them by observing in detail how theywere mutually implicated with experiences of slavery, moderniza-tion, and capitalism. This meant reducing the scale of the object.

Seen from close up, however, the relations between colonial forcesand legislation, trade systems, and other questions fundamentalto comprehending life in the coloniesin the large cities, villages,and communitiesrevealed new modes of operation. The commu-nity studies model was his starting point, but what emerged fromhis inquiries was a different set of possibilities for understandingthe 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 kin-ship, the peasantry, slavery, and labor in his rich ethnographic ma-terial is directly linked to a generational positionthat is, the factthat Mintz began his relationship with the region as a memberof a diverse group of anthropologists, which included the likes ofJulian Steward et al. (1956), Eric Wolf (1956), and others who wereconcerned with recording the rapid transformations taking place

1A comprehensive analysis of their implications would go beyond the aims of thistext. 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 singleformula, model, or framework. Concepts such as peasantry andkinship resulted, to a certain extent, in references that providedthe basis for pursuing a particular type of comparison. Socialities

were largely molded from centuries of effects produced by the en-slavement and analogous labor conditions of thousands of peoplemostly coming from Africa, as well as rural areas of Europe andvillages in the European colonies of Asia. The relative dimensionof this evidence highlights one of the most innovative questions ofthe anthropology practiced by Mintz: Slavery was neither a univo-cal phenomenon nor did it precipitate the emergence of similarsocieties (1984c: 196).

The differences that distinguish them, in turn, do not imply his-tories forged separately from the effects of colonial forces, Atlantictrade, the slave economy, and the various forms of occupation ofthe region. The historicities of these different experiences cannotbe taken as isolated social configurations: Rather, they evince di-verse instances, points of view and perspectives stemming from theexperience of distinct forms of slavery and the later substitutionof 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 usto observe details that are seemingly less important or irrelevant,but which can acquire another dimension when compared withexperiences and events in other contexts (Mintz 1995, 2001). Among the cargo that arrived at the ports on the dozens of is-lands and mainland coasts making up the Caribbean from the six-teenth century onward were men and women brought mainly from

the African continent to produce goods, wealth, and labor. Fromthis point of view, i.e., that of the things and people who were theobject of exchange, trade, barter, pillaging, and violence, the mak-ing of the region involves a particular type of relation. Comment-ing on the universalizing premise of the slavery model proposedby Orlando Patterson in 1984, Mintz emphasized the need for it tobe understood in relation to concrete experiences and institutionsrather than to elements encountered in other places, since, he ar-gued, that slavery oppressed is certain. But what did it oppresswith; who else was oppressed, in this and in other ways; what elseinthe system oppressed, together with slavery? (1984c: 196, empha-sis in the original).


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Slavery, known through a diverse range of combinations thatinvolved various degrees of physical and symbolic violence, causedprofound alterations to the way in which experiences supposed-ly marked by dispersal and isolation are capable of transforming

and shaping a region. For Mintz, inquiring into the diversity ofpractices and relations grouped under the label of slavery involvedforegrounding the agents themselves and the actions that madethem recognizable, inverting arguments based on dualist center/periphery type approaches. Consequently the idea of a region as akind of compositionthe Caribbean as an oikoumen,in his semi-nal 1996 textmade from differentiated spatialities and temporali-ties seems to be based on the premise that the contact between

different socialities and different relational modes of subordina-tion and violence analogous to slavery allows us to compare theirunequal trajectories (1996: 29697). Here we are faced not with areplication of the phenomenon, the way in which colonialism andslavery crystallized a particular historical becoming, but the way inwhich duration and intensity can be compared. Insularityactuallythe 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 sameextent (2010: 187)is more than a mere observation of fact: Itamounts to another way of describing the Caribbean as a region.However this does not imply a trivial approach; rather, we need toidentify its consequences. Understanding the Caribbean as a particular type of region,or what I call a composition, turns Mintzs argument concern-ing a specific way of understanding the local contemporary and

historical experiences into a premise or starting point whose com-prehension is essential for us to appreciate not only the wealth ofhis ethnographic material but above all the way in which it is for-mulated always as a relational element. From this point of view, aregion always appears as a plane molded and mediated by peoplesexperiences. Men and women who, directly or indirectly, have orhad their lives and those of their kin transformed by the effects ofthe existence of some kind of institution designated as, assimilatedby, or associated with slavery. The effects of associating or implicating slavery with social ex-periences not identified as such enabled Mintz to set out from expe-riences rather than models. The later arrival of slavery and, more


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precisely, the plantation model with its large enslaved workforcemeant that the specificities of the so-called Spanish Caribbean is-lands, Puerto Rico and Cuba, for example, could be observed. Onthe other hand, what made them singular from the chronological

point of viewthe antiquity of the experience of colonialism andslavery in Puerto Rico compared to the secondary and late slav-ery in Cuba (Tomich 2004)provided elements that allowed themto be compared in terms of their models of ownership, the formsof territorial occupation, the appearance of forms of affinity anddependence associated with kinship, subsistence patterns, com-merce, and dietary habits. The supposed constitutive elementsof slavery thereby acquired greater or lesser importance when

compared with other social experiences involving the formationof communities, labor, land ownership, and religious practices notbased on slavery.2Even so, labor and property seemed to deter-mine the choice of cases. As Jean Besson (2002: 33) and Bill Maurer(1997: 205) pointed out, the anthropological literature devoted asubstantial part of its analytic efforts to the study of the complexrelations of affinity between distinct persons and forms of prop-erty and relation with the land. The innovation of the alterna-

tive model proposed by Mintz lay not in inverting the chronologyof the substitution of slave labor by free labor, but in the percep-tion that their coexistence, in distinct places and in different for-mats, affected the formation of the peasantry and the experiencesof slaves and their descendants. By observing that in places likeJamaica the peasantry was coextensivenot only spatially but alsoculturallywith slave labor and the plantation, Mintz sheds lighton the experiences of the reconstituted peasants (2010: 74), not

only in relation to property and labor, but also to religious prac-tices and the family.

RELATIONS

Plantation slavery, given the work regimen and the useof violence, tended to deemphasize sexual differences to anoticeable degree. . . . But peopleeven slaves and prison-ershave a profound need for social order, for normative

2See, for instance, Nieboer (1900), Patterson (1977), Mintz (1977b).


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practices that will enable them to live together and to in-teract. Though slavery meant abusive treatment for both itsmale and female victims, the slaves developed social codesof their own. Slavery nullified many former gender distinc-

tions. But male and female slaves were perceived as differ-ent by planters and their subalterns during the course ofdaily life on the plantations (2010: 50).

Reviewing his field notes and discussing the questions that ledhim to three different small-scale societies, Mintz begins withthe British empires most lucrative sugar-producing colony in theCaribbean. From the end of the seventeenth century to the start of

the nineteenth, Jamaica was home to the most lucrative and pro-ductive plantation experiences. Mintz reflects on his ethnographicnotes and writings in light of the historiographic literature on theconfiguration of the Jamaican economy and society. The fact thatthe reproduction of the system is directly associated with an in-ternal control mechanismbased on ideas of discipline and racialinequalitydoes not prevent us from observing how the institutionof thepeculium(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 argu-ment might be: What if slavery, not as an institution, but as a setof different arrangements based on forms of subjugation, depend-ency, and labor, were associated with forms of affinity like thosethat anthropology defines as constitutive of kinship relations? The objective of the research in Jamaica in the mid-1950s wasto study the emergence of the markets and villages and their rela-

tion to the peasantry, the appearance of new forms of propertyand household, and finally the maintenance of authority throughthe reinforcement of patterns of morality (1957, 1958, and 1978).From an ethnographic point of view, the observation that the cus-tom was to assign plots of plantation land unsuitable for sugarcaneto individual slaves (2010: 53) allows the researcher to focus onthe ways by which small plots of land were transformed into dif-ferent units for producing food, people, animals, and affinities.

The emergence of slaves as proto-peasants in Jamaica cannot beunderstood separately from the formation of households, the divi-sion of family labor and, above all, the appearance of an internalmarket system (2010: 59). The commercial activities of the slaveslooking to supply small and large properties with local subsistence


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products was not only fundamental in spatial transformation, inthe control of time and in relations with others, both freemen andslaves, but also in the emergence of forms of household and familiescohabiting in the same spaces and sharing the same resources.

The focus on the appearance of the free villages in Jamaicahas an interesting effect when compared with Mintzs proposal toconceive the Caribbean as a complex of spatiotemporal experienc-es directly associated with the slave plantations. Without claimingany major conceptual twist, Mintz, in recalling the questions thatguided the making of the ethnography on the Belnavis family, en-ables us to see the Caribbean as a mosaic of different affinal andexchange relations. By observing from close up what these church-

es and villages represented and what they meant to people living inthem (2010: 62, 64), Mintz questions the prevalence of models thatat the end of the 1950s oriented the historiography of slavery andthe incipient anthropology of peasant societies. What I wanted tolook at in my initial fieldwork in Jamaica was the growth of thosechurch-created villages and what they came to mean to people(2010: 65). Mintz lived with Tom, Leah, Catherine, and ThelmaBelnavis, a family from the settlement of Sturge Town. Using notes

written in 1952, Mintz redescribes what he learned from the situ-ation of the peasant Tom, heir to a small plot of land in an exem-plary area for the free villages experience. A peculiar experience,undoubtedly, since it constituted an example of how slaves andcolored freemen became peasants while still living under the swayof slavery. As Mintz observes, it is this exceptionality that makesCaribbean peasants different from rural workers on other conti-nents.

Becoming a peasantor a protopeasant, the term used byspecialistswhile being formally a slave did not imply suspendingrelations determined by the subordination to a master or land-owner. It meant amassing some kind of resource through subsis-tence production, enabled through collective or family-based workand based on the individual or collective acquisition of lands afteremancipation; constituting a network of solidarity based on kin-ship, religion, and the standards of morality associated with them;and, finally, it meant linking the experience of working the landwith the sale of produce in nearby markets through womens work.The history of the Belnavis family, linked to the singular history ofthe free villages, added to this picture a particular awareness of the


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difference that separated poor Black rural workers whose parentswere slaves and their descendants from a new class of coloredurban citizens and middle-sized landowners. The racial etiquettefound under slavery, which in the post-emancipation period was

tied to the diffusion of Puritan and liberal patterns of moralityand discipline, in the rural areas was dampened by the mediationof churches, missions, and projects intended for the moral andspiritual redemption of slaves and former slaves (Holt 1992; Besson2002; Austin-Broos 1997). The free villages can therefore be seenas a kind of enclave whose singularity resides in the nature of therelations 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 com-munity, their families, and their ancestors. The Belnavis family andtheir neighbors transit discontinuously between the status of free-men and slaves: the community lands, the free villages, the familylandthe small plots of land and, sometimes, houses with sharedyards left by their ancestors. Mintzs ethnography in Sturge Townlater amplified by Jean Bessons research (2002)reveals that it wasthe new labor modalities and arrangements, rather than the forms

of property ownership that emerged post-emancipation, that en-abled the appearance of people like the Belnavis family. However,these labor modalities were not institutionalized forms but, morepertinently, different relations with regard to the past of slaveryand the ancestors, to the community of Christians, to the agricul-tural produce sold at fairs and markets, and to the possibilities ofconstituting a family to gain respect. When Tom Belnavis reflectson 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 thefreedom and possibility to acquire them through work. While, ac-cording to Thomas Holts analysis, Puritan morality and liberal val-ues disseminated during Jamaicas post-emancipation period mayhave indirectly guided missionary work in rural areas, as Mintzobserves, the peasantry livesor at least livedin the shadow ofthe national history (2010: 77). The singularity of the Belnavis family, unrepresentative in na-tional terms, becomes more comprehensible when compared withthe data collected by Mintz in Puerto Rico and Haiti. In Three Colo-nies, the differences between the formation of the peasantry on


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these three islands are explored in relation as much to the trans-formations across the region and the trade in slaves and raw ma-terials and their effects on local regimes of productionwhich canundoubtedly be apprehended from different viewpointsas to in-

stitutional models. Family, godparents, forms of coexistence, theplaced occupied by ancestors in the symbolic and spatial territoryof the house, the configuration of domestic space and family ar-rangements, the division of labor and the sale of the agriculturalsurplus 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, forexample, Mintzs focus on the practices involved in selling farm

produce and agricultural surpluses produced by family labor en-abled the place of women in what we could call the peasant econ-omy to emerge as a distinct point of view (1982). Seen throughwomens interactions, movements, values, and calculations in themarkets with suppliers, intermediaries, buyers, and consumers, thedistances between rural and urban areas and between domainslike those of the home and public had to be rethought. Un-derstanding the peasant economy in rural Haiti at the start of

the 1960s entailed a reanalysis of what Robert Redfield called thecontinuum between the rural and urban, an approach sensitiveto the vicissitudes in the formation of small rural properties.

The reluctance of the Belnavis family and their neighbors fromthe free villages to accept work in the plantations was not simplya resistance to the intensification of capitalism. The ethnographicaccount of their refusal becomes more salient when Mintz turnsfrom explanations for changes in the flow of commodity and land

markets to detailed explications of the moral and political mean-ings of the references to hard work in itself. The same applies tothe case of Taso, his interlocutor in Jauca, Puerto Rico, but throughother relations (Mintz 1984a). Taso was a rural laborer involved ina variety of jobs ranging from planting crops to work in the indus-trialized sugar processing plant. A peasant and proletarian, in thewords of Mintz, Taso meshed so neatly with the events that hadmarked the history of Puerto Ricos sugar industry that one mightsay his life could almost have been predicted from that history(2010: 154). Even so, working in an area undergoing rapid capital-ist expansion and subjected to a strong U.S. presence, the expe-riences of Taso and the people of Jauca are very different from


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those of the Belnavis family. The sharp decline of the plantationafter the end of slavery and its later regrowthin particular and indissimilar forms in Cuba and Puerto Rico (Tomich 2004)compli-cates any attempt at comparison. The concentration of land and

the territorialization of the sugar industry in Puerto Rico point tothe formation of almost proletarian rural workers, whose relationswith big landowners and the rural elites involve complex separa-tions between spaces of affinities that recurrently take kinship astheir main idiom. Violence appears as the other side of the samecoin, the sign of a more radical distancing, a breaching of the stan-dards of morality and honor that assures people like Taso the rec-ognition and respect of their peers.

ON COMPOSITION

In a passage inPartial Connections(1991: 9), Strathern describesthe modern ethnographer as a complex figure. The relation imag-ined with his or her object of study presumes large units, sets, andwholes. Having gathered various kinds of material, he or she imag-

ines a social structure can be conceived as a whole by synthesiz-ing a disparate set of data. The ethnographer presumes to un-derstand not only the relations in which he or she participates butalso those not known but presumed to be fundamental to knowingany given society. I began this essay proposing to identify some ofthe themes studied by Mintz in order to observe their effects whenplaced in comparison. One of these effects resides precisely in thefact 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 inthe present textthe latter authors own concerns with themes andconcepts like relation, part, whole, scale, and effect. Notonly did these appear frequently in Mintzs vast body of work, theyalso reappear in Three Colonies,destabilizing any approach that in-sists on the totalizing character of modern analyses. Although Mintzian Marxism allowed ample room for econom-ic transformations, the production and circulation of goods andpeople, labor, and the reproduction of social structures, it was sub-ordinated to a variety of empirical data capable of destabilizingthe 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 oth-ers frequently populated Mintzs writings in an openly unstableform and were always accompanied by a meticulous exercise indecomposition? I meant those models that figured in the agendas

and explications of long-term processes and that mobilized Mintzscriticism to culturalism. For Mintz, concepts such as slavery, mo-dernity, peasantry had to be tested and apprehended through ex-perience. Though Mintz did not make use of native concepts de-rived from his field encounters, the experiences of people like Tasoand Nana and Tom Belnavis at least served as a basis for a (self-)critique or, in Charles Carnegies apt expression, an anthropologyof ourselves (2006).

I think it is possible for us to approach the historical anthro-pology formulated by Mintz as a particular type of what MarilynStrathern called an anthropology of the relation (1995), giventhat the apprehensions of different temporalities and experiencesin societies like Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico were comprehend-ed as too partial or incomplete to explain the transformations thattraverse the modern Caribbean. The evidence derived from themwas or is not sufficiently representative or emblematic of the forms

assumed by slavery and post-emancipation in the Caribbean. Theyare merely instances through which one can learn about the localeffects of movements of transformation that become territorializedunequally. Neither are local experiences, if and when combined,sufficiently representative of slavery or the emergence of the peas-antry in the region. Likewise, it is impossible to conceive them asa mosaic of particular experiences. On the contrary, Mintz callsour attention to the necessary framing that should precede any

attempt to measure forms of exploitation in the field, the work inthe plantations, or the system of racial differentiation in any givencontext. In Three Ancient Colonies, Mintz pursues various kinds ofcomparison, composing themes that should be conceived as rela-tions.

Here we can cite a passage from a book by Strathern, The Rela-tion: Issues in Complexity and Scale,in which the author, focusing onthe notion of kinship, situates her own approach in response to thecomplexity of arrangements that can define what society is and thekind of phenomena that the concept encompasses or excludes. Ap-plicable to different orders and types of connectionbetween peo-ple, groups, societies, social structures and systemsthe notion


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of relation became absorbed into the analysis and production ofanthropological knowledge through the possession of two types ofproperty (1995, 1999). The first, designated holographic by theauthor, has obvious implications in relation to the continuous ex-

ercise undertaken by Mintz. Strathern argues that this holographicproperty not only enables the notion of relation to be apprehend-ed through the field context in which it is observed, but also, incounterpart, means that parts, fragments, and isolated data fromcertain phenomena observed in the field are seen to contain infor-mation from the whole. In the authors words, at whatever levelor order, the demonstration of a relationship, whether through re-semblance, cause and effect, or contiguity, reinforces the fact that

through relational practicesclassification, analysis, comparisonrelations can be demonstrated (1995: 18). The second effect orproperty enables us to see the various scales of a relation or con-nection, the dimensions making it complex. In other words, pro-vides us the capacity to interconnect relations of different types, tomake explicit contrasts between types of relation. One example ofthis mode of conceiving relations is the persistent attention paidby Mintz to the different ethnic-racial models and their equally

distinct relations with the experience of slavery.3These relationsprovided a rich example of complex phenomena, insofar as theircomparison enables us to observe side-by-side orders and scalesof implication, resilience, and dissimilar meanings and, at the sametime, to consider their differences (Strathern 1995: 19).

What most approximates Mintzian anthropologyopenly root-ed in the modern tradition that, in Stratherns observations, electsthe notion of relation as a fundamental analytic device (Scott 2004;

Carnegie 2006)to an anthropology of the relation is his atten-tion to the necessary combination of models with empirical data.In other words, it is as if the holographic and complex propertiesof the relations observed in the region were always insufficient and

3Stratherns observations, directed at the effects produced by the anthropology ofkinship in the modern anthropological tradition, could be better explored were we toturn to other writings by Mintz on domestic social structure, marriage, and legitimiza-

tion of children in the Caribbean, especially the Final Note produced for the conclu-sion to a special issue of Social and Economic Studies, edited with William Davenport in1961, a text in which the author establishes the then unthinkable connection betweenstructural and historical analysis. In this text, examining different perspectives on theformation of the family in the British Caribbean, Mintz compares approaches linked toBoasian culturalism and British structural functionalism.


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incomplete. Among the various levels of complexity that traversefield experiences, especially when revisited through a memoir-based experiment, is the presence of other forms of knowledgeproduced by other disciplines (Strathern 1991: 22). Instead of try-

ing 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 historiographicknowledge, in large part produced long after the ethnographersfield experiences. In Three Colonies,these elements work to desta-bilize earlier conclusions while simultaneously being submitted tothem. They do not function as evidence of what David Trotman etal. have called pan-Caribbean historiography (2006). They mere-

ly comprise ways of seeing, remaining insufficient to explain theways in which the region operates as a whole. The anthropologypracticed by Mintz, recaptured through memory and the use ofold field notebooks in Three Colonies,is nothing other than an ex-periment in composition, affording, ever attentively and always inrelation, different ways of seeing phenomena, places, events, andpeople.

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CUNHA, Olívia Maria Gomes Da. Multiple Effects. on Themes, Relations, And Caribbean Compositions

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