Richard Price

Richard Price (born November 30, 1941, in New York City) is an American anthropologist and historian, best known for his studies of the Caribbean and his experiments with writing ethnography. Career Price grew up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and attended the Fieldston School. He received both Bachelors and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University (1963, 1970), having conducted fieldwork in Peru, and then with Sally Price in Martinique, Mexico, Spain, and for two years among the Saramaka Maroons of Suriname. A year studying with Claude Lévi-Strauss in Paris and another in Amsterdam working with Dutch scholars of Maroons preceded his five years of teaching in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. In 1974, he moved to Johns Hopkins University to found the Department of Anthropology, where he served three terms as chair, before leaving in 1986 for two years of teaching in Paris. A decade of freelance teaching (University of Minnesota, Stanford University, Princeton University, University of Florida, Universidade Federal da Bahia), while based in Martinique, ended with an appointment as Duane A. and Virginia S. Dittman Professor of American Studies, Anthropology, and History at the College of William and Mary. He has continued fieldwork with Maroons, notably in French Guiana and Suriname, as well as with his Martiniquan neighbors, into the present. Since the 1990s, he has worked with Saramaka Maroons in defense of their human rights, twice testifying as expert witness on behalf of the Saramakas in cases that they eventually won before the Inter-American Court for Human Rights in Costa Rica. Contributions Price's early contributions, influenced by his teachers Clyde Kluckhohn, Evon Z. Vogt, and Sidney W. Mintz, included the first conceptualization of Maroon (runaway slave) communities throughout the Americas in a comparative framework. His demonstration that people previously considered largely “without history,” such as Saramaka Maroons (the descendants of runaway slaves), in fact possessed rich and deep historical consciousness has influenced historians as well as anthropologists. For this work in what he calls “ethnographic history,” Price's books have won numerous awards: First-Time won the Elsie Clews Parsons Prize of the American Folklore Society and Alabi’s World won the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association, the Gordon K.