Empirical Futures

Anthropologists and Historians Engage the Work of Sidney W. Mintz

George Baca, Aisha Khan, Stephan Palmié, George Baca, Aisha Khan, Stephan Palmié, Stephan Palmi?

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780807895344
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología cultural y social

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 Martinez, University of Connecticut
Stephan Palmie, University of Chicago
Jane Schneider, City University of New York Graduate Center
Rebecca J. Scott, University of Michigan Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History and other groundbreaking works, he was one of the first scholars to anticipate "globalization studies." Yet 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 a Mintzean approach advances the study of culture, power, and identity. The contributors are George Baca, Frederick Cooper, Virginia R. Dominguez, Frederick Errington, Deborah Gewertz, Juan Giusti-Cordero, Aisha Khan, Samuel Martinez, Stephan Palmie, Jane Schneider, and Rebecca J. Scott. The editors are George Baca, Aisha Khan, and Stephan Palmie.
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MICROHISTORY SET IN MOTION

A NINETEENTH-CENTURY ATLANTIC CREOLE ITINERARY

REBECCA J. SCOTT /

Sidney Mintz’s Worker in the Cane is a model life history, uncovering the subtlest of dynamics within plantation society by tracing the experiences of a single individual and his family. By contrast, Mintz’s Sweetness and Power gains its force from taking the entire Atlantic world as its scope, examining the marketing, meanings, and consumption of sugar as they changed over time. This essay borrows from each of these two strategies, looking at the history of a single peripatetic family across three long-lived generations, from enslavement in West Africa in the eighteenth century through emancipation during the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s to emigration to Cuba, Louisiana, France, and Belgium in the nineteenth century. Tracing the social networks that sustained these people as they moved and identifying the experiences that shaped their political sensibilities can cast light on the dynamics of the achievement of freedom and on the development of vernacular concepts of equality. The pivot point for the story will be New Orleans, where one member of the family helped these concepts take an explicit political and juridical form in the 1868 Louisiana State Constitution. But the story is also part of a larger Atlantic history of rights, given shape by the movement of people and paper across the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic itself.¹

I shall start where I myself began this inquiry, with a document from the Cuban National Archive in Havana. The letter in question is dated September 1899 and is in the papers of General Máximo Gómez, the revered leader of the Cuban independence struggle. It begins simply as a commercial request, in which a merchant named Edouard Tinchant, writing in English from Antwerp to Havana, addresses the general:² “In early and ardent sympathy with the Cuban cause, I have been always and pride myself in being still one of your most sincere admirers. I would be highly honored, should you have the kindness to authorize me to use your illustrious name for a brand of mybest articles, your portrait adorning the labels whereof a proof is enclosed.” So a Belgian cigar manufacturer wants to put a famous Cuban on the label of his cigars. No surprise there. But look how Tinchant tries to give credibility to his importunate request:

Allow me to add as an excuse for the freedom of my request, that I may not be altogether unknown to some of the survivors of the last struggle.They may still remember me as a member of Company C 6th Louisiana Volunteers, Banks Division in 1863; as representative of the 6th Ward of the city of New Orleans, at the Constitutional Convention of the State of Louisiana in 1867-68 and as a cigar manufacturer in Mobile Alabama from 1869 till 1877.

During all these years, I have been a humble but steady contributor to the Cuban fund and manyare your countrymen, the Cubans and your followers to whom I have lent a helping hand.

Tinchant is invoking his previous acquaintance with Cuban revolutionary exiles who found themselves in the Gulf States during the 1860s and 1870s and giving a strong clue to his own politics and identity. The 6th Louisiana Volunteers were a Civil War unit of the Union army recruited among the free and recently freed populations of color in New Orleans, and the 1867-68 Constitutional Convention of the State of Louisiana drafted one of the most radical state constitutions ever seen, with a resounding guarantee that all of the state’s citizens would have the same “civil, political, and public rights.” How on earth did a man from Belgium end up as an elected delegate to such a gathering?

Tinchant probably suspected that Máximo Gómez would ask the same thing, so he hinted at an answer: “Born in France in 1841 I am of Haïtian descent as both my father and mother were born at Gonaïves in the beginning of this century.Settled in New Orleans after the Revolution, my father, although in modest circumstances left Louisiana for France with the only object in view of raising his six sons in a country whereno infamous laws or stupid prejudices could prevent them from becoming men.”

Here, then, was the crux of the matter: an evocation of Haiti’s1804 declaration of independence at Gonaïves and an appeal to the antiracism that Tinchant knew Gómez endorsed, with aparticular emphasis on dignified adulthood and masculinity. With the words of this letter, the merchant Edouard Tinchant was seeking to establish a universe of shared experiences and principles with Gómez, who had been born in the Dominican Republic and had carried the campaign for Cuban independence across the Caribbean and Central America. In effect, the letter provides a glimpse of an Atlantic world in which various struggles over race and rights were intertwined and in which ideas and concepts wereexchanged along with images, memories, and cigars.

Notarial records confirm that Edouard Tinchant’s mother was indeed born in Saint-Domingue in 1799, in the midst of the Haitian Revolution. Her baptism took place not in Gonaïves, however, but in the small town of Cap Dame-Marie, near the city of Jérémie on the western end of the southern peninsula, then under the contested rule of Toussaint Louverture’s rival André Rigaud. Slavery had been formally ended throughout the colony in 1793-94, abolished in the tumult of the slave rebellion and by decree from the French National Convention. Many of the hierarchies to which slavery had given rise nonetheless continued to be inscribed in official documents. The baptismal record of the girl named Elizabeth Dieudonné shows her to have been a“natural child”—one whose parents were not married—though her father, Michel Vincent, a colonist from France, acknowledged paternity.Her mother appears as Marie Françoise dite Rosalie négresse libre (Marie Françoise called Rosalie, free black woman), the term négresse invoking both color and slave ancestry. The baby Elizabeth’s godfather was recorded as le sieur Lavolaille, a ship’s carpenter, the courtesy title sieur suggesting that he was counted as white. The name of the godmother, Marie Blanche veuve Aubert (Marie Blanche widow Aubert), carried neither a title nor a color qualifier.³

The social network that we glimpse at the baptismal font would later frame the child’s departure into exile, as war and uncertainty gripped residents of the region around Jérémie. In May of 1803 Elizabeth’s father contemplated leaving for France—but without Rosalie or her four children. Apparently hoping to secure their freedom in his absence, Michel Vincent (himself the son of a public notary) drew up a legalistic but unofficial document that declared that “Marie Françoise dite Rosalie négresse de nation Poulard” and her four children were his slaves and that he hereby formally conferred freedom on them. In the phrase de nation Poulard the text conveyed Rosalie’s ancestry: She was very likely from the Peul (Fulbe), a predominately Muslim people who lived in the Senegambia region of West Africa.⁴

As a practical matter, then, the freedom of Edouard Tinchant’s mother, Elizabeth, rested not only on the French decrees of abolition and her 1799 certificate of free birth, but also on this fragile 1803 text conferring liberty on her and on her mother. The logic of declaring Rosalie and the children to be slaves in order to free them seems clear. If the authorities of a neighboring nation declined to recognize the validity of the abolition decree of the French Convention, or if the troops sent by Napoléon Bonaparte reimposed slavery in Saint-Domingue, Rosalie could fall back on the right of a slave owner to relinquish a claim to his own “property.” In the end, however, Michel Vincent did not leave for France. Along with many other refugees, Michel and Rosalie fled the fighting in Saint-Domingue and traveled to Santiago de Cuba. There, Rosalie submitted the manumission document to a representative of the French government and asked that it be copied and certified to give it greater force. The French official began his new version by identifying her as Citoyenne, thus conferring upon her the title of French citizen. With this hybrid text, a kind of self-created passport, Rosalie retained her freedom in Santiago, even after the death in 1804 of Michel Vincent. But in 1809 most of the Saint-Domingue refugees wereexpelled from the Spanish colony of Cuba in response to Bonaparte’s invasion of the Iberian peninsula.⁵

The woman who had stood as godmother to Rosalie’s daughter Elizabeth, Marie Blanche widow Aubert, took custody of Elizabeth and boarded a ship for New Orleans. Now designated a woman of color, the widow settled in Faubourg Marigny,close to the river on Rue Moreau. Over the next decade, Elizabeth would be raised in this household. As far as we can tell, Rosalie herself—an African-born woman who ran the risk of re-enslavement if she came to Louisiana—dodged the deportation order and remained for a time in Cuba.⁶

Edouard Tinchant’s father, Jacques Tinchant, appears in the New Orleans notarial records as a free man of color, the natural child of a free woman of color named Suzette Bayot and an unnamed father. Many early refugees from the Haitian Revolution had landed in East Coast ports in the United States, and the 1796 city directory of Baltimore, Maryland, lists a man from Saint-Domingue with the surname Tinchant who may be Jacques’s father. The senior Tinchant appears to have returned to Saint-Domingue around 1802, never to be heard from again. Suzette Bayot settled in New Orleans with the child, and Jacques was raised in the household of the schoolteacher Louis Duhart, yet another Saint-Domingue refugee, with whom Suzette Bayot subsequently had additional children.⁷

The 1822 marriage in New Orleans of Jacques Tinchant to Elizabeth Dieudonné thus united representatives of the two main groups of refugees from Saint-Domingue: those who fled in the early 1790s to cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and those who traveled from Saint-Domingue to Cuba and from there to New Orleans in 1809. In the status-conscious world of antebellum New Orleans, both parties to the marriage carried the stigma of color alongside the designation of freedom. The bride signed the marriage contract with the name Marie Dieudonné, borrowing her mother’s first name and using her own second name, not the surname—Vincent—that her father’s mention in the 1799 baptismal record might have enabled her to claim. As they subsequently moved up in the world, however, the couple eschewed the informality of the simple name “Marie Dieudonné” and went to a notary to “rectify” the name. Claiming (implausibly,given her signature on the original contract) that she had never been called Marie, Jacques Tinchant’s wife provided a copy of her baptismal record and certified that her proper name was Elizabeth Dieudonné Vincent. The notary took the baptismal record as sufficient evidence that Elizabeth had been “acknowledged” by her father. The adoption of a paternal surname, in turn, moved her a step away from the presumption of illegitimacy visited upon manyfree people of color.⁸

The bride brought some property to the union, provided by her godmother and by the late Jean Lambert Détry, born in Brussels,the godmother’s partner. In a “mystic testament”—a secret document prepared privately and left under seal with a notary—Lambert Détry had identified the young Marie [Elizabeth] Dieudonné as his goddaughter. This seems not to have been technically accurate, but perhaps long years of living with her godmother, the widow Aubert, had given him this status de facto. In addition to the promise of funds from the bequest of Lambert Détry, the marriage contract conferred upon the newlyweds ownership of a slave named Gertrude, aged about twenty-two, and of Gertrude’s daughter.⁹

It was common for free people of color in New Orleans to be entangled with slavery in several different ways—sometimes benefiting directly from ownership, sometimes facilitating the freedom of slaves to whom they were bound through ties of kinship or shared experience. About a decade after their marriage, the couple took steps to manumit the slave Gertrude, signing their names to the final notice of freedom in 1833.¹⁰ But manumission of one slave could be matched by the acquisition of others. In the mid-1830s the city of New Orleans was expanding rapidly, and Jacques Tinchant and his half-brother Pierre Duhart, both usually identified in the notarial records as f.m.c. (free man of color) or h.c.l. (homme de couleur libre), were buying land downriver in the suburbs of Faubourg Marigny, New Marigny, and Franklin. In 1835 they agreed to combine their holdings and constituted themselves as a société to build on these lands. Over the next three years they sold deep, narrow lots to a variety of purchasers, many of them men and women of color. Blaise dit Blaise Léger, nègre libre, for example, paid $400 for a lot in Faubourg Franklin measuring 34 feet on Washington Street and 117 feet on Morales Street.¹¹ The next year, Tinchant and Duhart spent $1,000 to purchase an enslaved black man named Giles alias Clark, about twenty-one years of age. Thus, while Jacques Tinchant had in 1833 freed one of the two slaves of his wife’s marriage portion, he now held a half-interest in another “person with a price.”¹²

The business dealings of Jacques Tinchant are open to various interpretations. From one vantage point, Tinchant was a carpenter turned builder and developer, transforming white-owned rural land on the edge of the city into house lots and houses for a multiracial clientele.¹³ For example, the parcel that he and Duhart sold to the free black man Blaise Léger in October of 1835 was plantation land that they had purchased from Nicolas Noël Destrehan in January of the same year. But if we look through the notarial records we also find that Léger had recently been manumitted in accordance with the last will and testament of Jean Lambert Détry, the same Belgian carpenter who had provided for Jacques Tinchant’s wife a decade earlier. So the sale of a small house lot to Léger appears to h...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• SPACE, TIME, AND HISTORY - THE CONCEPTUAL LIMITS OF GLOBALIZATION
• BEYOND SUGAR REVOLUTIONS - RETHINKING THE SPANISH CARIBBEAN IN THE SEVENTEENTH ...
• MICROHISTORY SET IN MOTION - A NINETEENTH-CENTURY ATLANTIC CREOLE ITINERARY
• ABSTINENCE AND POWER - THE PLACE OF PROHIBITION IN AMERICAN HISTORY
• EVIDENCE AND POWER, SWEET AND SOUR
• JEALOUS WOMEN IN THE CANE
• TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF EXCESS - WANTING MORE (WHILE GETTING LESS) ON A ...
• CONTRIBUTORS /