Sidney Mintz and an Anthropology of Capitalist Modernity

Abstract

With the death of Sidney Mintz (November 16, 1922~December 26, 2015), a notable chapter in American anthropological history has ended. He was an important contributor to a small but a distinguished group of anthropologists, who came from the hardships of the Depression and World War II, to build new approaches to anthropology. These world historical events persuaded Mintz to search for ways to integrate anthropological methods of ethnography and concepts of culture with Marxian social theory. These conceptualizations are still, and increasingly relevant, to contemporary reassessments of Japanese colonialism in Korea. Since the 1980s, new perspectives about Japanese colonialism have emerged in the works of such scholars as Bruce Cumings (1981), Mark Driscoll (2010), Carter Eckert (1991), Henry Em (2013), Yu Yŏng-ik (2008), and Andre Schmid (2002), among others. Mintzs anthro- pological project, and its focus on European colonial power in the New World, has many insights that could contribute to the ongoing project of reconceptualizing Japanese colonialism's impact on Korean national history and its peculiar political economy.