For a half century, Richard Price’s innovative research and writing has attracted many accolades in the fields of anthropology, history, folklore studies, and Caribbean studies. Though he is best known for his work with the Saamaka (Saramaka) Maroons of Suriname, he has also conducted fieldwork in Guyane (French Guiana), Martinique, Spain, Mexico, and Peru. In Inside/Outside, Price (hereafter RP) offers a lively account of his wide-ranging career, much of it carried out in collaboration with anthropologist Sally Price (hereafter SP), his wife and research partner. This book is filled with intriguing reflections on the circumstances surrounding research and publications and on how scholarship is facilitated by institutions and collegial networks.
Born in New York City in 1941, RP pursued undergraduate studies at Harvard, where he enrolled in a freshman seminar in anthropology taught by Clyde Kluckhohn. When he expressed interest in becoming an anthropologist, Kluckhohn advised him to first focus on the humanities (he majored in history and literature). A year later, Kluckhohn died from a heart attack and Evon Vogt became his main teacher and mentor in anthropology. By the summer after his junior year, RP was researching fishing magic in Martinique (with a National Science Foundation grant). By the end of his senior year, he had won a five-year fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health for graduate studies in anthropology. He intended to spend an initial year in Paris studying with Alfred Métraux, but when he arrived at the Gare du Nord, he was met instead by Claude Lévi-Strauss, who informed him that Métraux had recently committed suicide. Lévi-Strauss then offered him a year of seminars and personal sessions, during which he became intrigued by the master’s insistence on close attention to ethnographic details and historical particularities as a foundation for structural analysis. Lévi-Strauss also arranged for a portion of his senior thesis on Martiniquan fishing to be published in L’Homme in 1964 (his first publication).
RP’s subsequent studies for a Ph.D. in anthropology at Harvard ranged from work with Vogt in Mexico to camaraderie with fellow graduate students Pierre Maranda and Elli Köngäs-Maranda, who introduced him to comparative folktale analysis. However, it was Sidney Mintz who guided his pursuit of Caribbean studies, first while a visiting professor at MIT and then from his home base at Yale. With Mintz’s encouragement, he and SP carried out fieldwork in 1967-1968 in a Saamaka village deep in the Suriname rainforest, a transformative experience for the young couple.
RP’s first teaching job was at Yale. A few years later, however, he accepted an invitation from Johns Hopkins to establish an anthropology department at its campus and persuaded Sidney Mintz to join him. The two (along with historian Jack Greene) went on to develop the university’s well-known program in Atlantic history and culture, which produced such distinguished Caribbeanists as Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Kenneth Bilby, and Brackette Williams. Following a tense period at Hopkins in the mid-1980s, RP and SP resigned their positions and transitioned to life as independent academics, with a busy schedule of teaching appointments, fellowships, lectures, and projects across the Americas and Europe. Their primary home was now a seaside village in Martinique, near where they had spent a summer in the 1960s. Much of their fieldwork during this period was carried out in Guyane, due to their expulsion from Suriname in the wake of the country’s violent political conflicts of the 1980s. In 2018 RP and SP moved to a house on Tampa Bay, where they have continued their work, including serving as book review co-editors for the New West Indian Guide, which publishes approximately 100 reviews a year.
Between 1973 and the present, RP has published over twenty books (some co-authored with SP). A few can be mentioned here. First-Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People (1983) won the American Folklore Society’s Elsie Clews Parsons Prize. “First-Time” refers to the world of the Saamaka Maroons during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and their successful war of liberation from Dutch plantation society. Knowledge of First-Time is the foundation of Saamaka identity, a basis for negotiating land rights and clan politics, and a source of ritual power. While RP was prohibited from studying First-Time in the 1960s, during the 1970s he was able to compile an extensive body of oral accounts of this formative period. In his book, he juxtaposes oral narratives with his own commentary (which incorporates Dutch archival sources). Complementing this examination of the construction of history is Two Evenings in Saramaka (co-authored with SP, 1991), which offers detailed documentation and analysis of collective performances of folktales during two wakes in the 1960s. The Prices’ recordings of folktales and other verbal genres (117 tapes) are deposited at Indiana University’s Archives of Traditional Music.
An example of RP’s research in Martinique is The Convict and the Colonel: A Story of Colonialism and Resistance in the Caribbean (1998), an inquiry into the life of a wood-sculptor and folk hero named Médard Aribot (1901-1973). Drawing on oral history, images of Médard’s sculptures and self-built houses, archival materials, and reflections on his research experience, RP creates a rich account of memory, folklore, political struggle, and identity formation in French colonial and departmental Martinique. Another multifaceted study of an unusual individual is Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination (2008). Tooy Alexander (d. 2015) was a Saamaka captain, spiritualist, and raconteur who lived in a shantytown on the outskirts of Cayenne (capital of Guyane). Through a deep intellectual exchange over many years, Tooy guided RP “into a world of gods and demons, of wonders, delights, and magical cures that rivaled that of Wagner’s ring” (173). With its expansive ethnographic and historical investigations, this book is another eloquent version of RP’s life-long project of tracing the cultural creativity of African-descended peoples in the Americas.
At the heart of RP’s extraordinary career has been a commitment to long-term, in-depth fieldwork and to exploration of ways of conveying cultural knowledge in writing. In immersing himself in the lives of diverse communities and individuals over the years, he has continually reassessed issues of perspective, voice, dialogue, narrative, literary form, power, and ethics in the representation of past and present worlds. Anyone with an interest in processes of ethnographic and historical imagination will find much to consider in the recollections and meditations offered in this book.
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[Review length: 1054 words • Review posted on April 8, 2023]