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Since the 1950s, anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz has been at the forefront of efforts to integrate the disciplines of anthropology and history. Author of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History and other groundbreaking works, he was one of the first scholars to anticipate and critique “globalization studies.” However, a strong tradition of epistemologically sophisticated and theoretically informed empiricism of the sort advanced by Mintz has yet to become a cornerstone of contemporary anthropological scholarship. This collection of essays by leading anthropologists and historians serves as an intervention that rests on Mintz's rigorously historicist ethnographic work, which has long predicted the methodological crisis in anthropology today. This book binds on Mintzean interdisciplinarity to provide productive ways to theorize the everyday life of local groups and communities, nation-states, and regions and the interconnections among them. Consisting of theoretical and case studies of Latin America, North America, the Caribbean, and Papua New Guinea, this book demonstrates how Mintzean perspectives advance our understanding of the relationship among empirical approaches, the uses of ethnographic and historical data and theory-building, and the study of these from both local and global vantage points.

Anthropologists widely agree that identities—even ethnic and racial ones—are socially constructed. Less understood are the processes by which social identities are conceived and developed. This book shows how law can successfully serve as the impetus for the transformation of cultural practices and collective identity. Through ethnographic, historical, and legal analysis of successful claims to land by two neighboring black communities in the backlands of northeastern Brazil, the book demonstrates how these two communities have come to distinguish themselves from each other while revising and retelling their histories and present-day stories. The book argues that the invocation of laws by these related communities led to the emergence of two different identities: one indigenous (Xocó Indian) and the other quilombo (descendants of a fugitive African slave community). With the help of the Catholic Church, government officials, lawyers, anthropologists, and activists, each community won government recognition and land rights, and displaced elite landowners. This was accomplished even though anthropologists called upon to assess the validity of their claims recognized that their identities were “constructed.” The positive outcome of their claims demonstrates that authenticity is not a prerequisite for identity. The book draws from this insight a more sweeping conclusion that, far from being evidence of inauthenticity, processes of construction form the basis of all identities and may have important consequences for social justice.

This book consolidates, refines, advances and grounds recent scholarship that challenges familiar platitudes about family farming and rural life in the United States. Its approach yields a depth of information about farming culture not usually found in the literature on rural America. The book takes the reader on a cultural tour of a cherished American institution and landscape: midwestern farm families and their farms. With attention to detail and knowledge borne of first-hand study over many years, the author reveals the pervasive imprint of ethnicity. The book represents one of those rare studies that enrich our social vision and understanding in extraordinary ways. It contributes to the study of agriculture and culture, and its cross-disciplinary approach will engage scholars in many areas. For historians, it is an illustration that different behaviors between American and immigrant farmers, planted over a century ago in the Middle West, have endured to the present.