The University of North Carolina Press

Empirical Futures

Anthropologists and Historians Engage the Work of Sidney W. Mintz

Edited By George Baca, Aisha Khan and Stephan Palmié

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.

Contributors to this volume build 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, Empirical Futures 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.

Contributors:

George Baca, Goucher College

Frederick Cooper, New York University

Virginia R. Dominguez, University of Illinois

Frederick Errington, Trinity College

Deborah Gewertz, Amherst College

Juan Giusti-Cordero, University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras

Aisha Khan, New York University

Samuel Martínez, University of Connecticut

Stephan Palmié, University of Chicago

Jane Schneider, City University of New York Graduate Center

Rebecca J. Scott, University of Michigan

About the Author

George Baca is assistant professor of anthropology at Goucher College. Aisha Khan is associate professor of anthropology at New York University. Stephan Palmié is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago.