Richard Price (American anthropologist)
Encyclopedia
Richard Price is an American anthropologist
and historian
, best known for his studies of the Caribbean
and his experiments with writing ethnography
.
, 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
.
, 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. Lewis Award of the Caribbean Studies Association, and the School of American Research’s prestigious J. I. Staley Prize. An essay originally written in 1973 with Sidney Mintz, The Birth of African-American Culture, has had considerable influence on Afro-Americanist historians and anthropologists, sometimes inciting strong controversy about the extent to which enslaved Africans
and their descendants “retained” aspects of their home cultures
and societies
and the extent to which they “created” new cultural and social forms in the Americas. Price’s Travels with Tooy, an ethnography of the imaginaire of a Saramaka healer, attempts to transcend this dichotomy by demonstrating that historical processes of creolization
involved people making creative uses of their varied, specific African heritages in the process of nation-building
in the New World
. In 2008, Travels with Tooy won the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing
, and in 2009, the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award for Caribbean Scholarship and the Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion.
Several of Price’s books have been written with anthropologist and art critic
Sally Price
, including a critical edition of the famous eighteenth-century narrative
of John Gabriel Stedman
and an exploration of the Caribbean paintings of African American
artist Romare Bearden
. Since the 1980s, he has frequently experimented with new forms of writing culture, including experiments with typesetting
and page layout
and authoring books that are in part memoirs
(or highly reflexive anthropology
) and, in one case, an anthropological novel
. Despite the label of postmodern
sometimes applied to his work, he prefers to consider himself an ethnographic historian. Most of Price’s books continue to draw on his continuing ethnography with Suriname Maroons, but one innovative work, The Convict and The Colonel, centers on his four-decades-long relationship with Martinique, where he and Sally Price live for most of each year. His books have been translated into French
, Spanish
, Dutch
, German
, and Portuguese
.
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
and historian
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
, best known for his studies of the Caribbean
Caribbean
The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...
and his experiments with writing ethnography
Ethnography
Ethnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...
.
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 PeruPeru
Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....
, and then with Sally Price
Sally Price
Sally Price is an American anthropologist, best known for her studies of so-called “primitive art” and its place in the imaginaire of Western viewers.- Career :...
in Martinique
Martinique
Martinique is an island in the eastern Caribbean Sea, with a land area of . Like Guadeloupe, it is an overseas region of France, consisting of a single overseas department. To the northwest lies Dominica, to the south St Lucia, and to the southeast Barbados...
, Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
, Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
, and for two years among the Saramaka Maroons
Saramaka
The Saramaka or Saramacca are one of six Maroon peoples in the Republic of Suriname. The word "Maroon" comes from the Spanish cimarrón, itself derived from an Arawakan root; by the early 16th century it was used throughout the Americas to designate slaves who successfully escaped from slavery.-...
of Suriname
Suriname
Suriname , officially the Republic of Suriname , is a country in northern South America. It borders French Guiana to the east, Guyana to the west, Brazil to the south, and on the north by the Atlantic Ocean. Suriname was a former colony of the British and of the Dutch, and was previously known as...
. A year studying with Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"....
in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
and another in Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
working with Dutch
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
scholars of Maroons preceded his five years of teaching in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University
YALE
RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...
. In 1974, he moved to Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins
Johns Hopkins was a wealthy American entrepreneur, philanthropist and abolitionist of 19th-century Baltimore, Maryland, now most noted for his philanthropic creation of the institutions that bear his name, namely the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and the Johns Hopkins University and its associated...
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
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...
, Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
, Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
, University of Florida
University of Florida
The University of Florida is an American public land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant research university located on a campus in Gainesville, Florida. The university traces its historical origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its present Gainesville campus since September 1906...
, Universidade Federal da Bahia
Universidade Federal da Bahia
The Universidade Federal da Bahia is a public university located mainly in the city of Salvador. The largest university of the State of Bahia, and one of the most prestigious Brazilian universities.Students can study there without having to pay tuition fees, as it is a public university...
), while based in Martinique, ended with an appointment as Duane A. and Virginia S. Dittman Professor of American Studies
American studies
American studies or American civilization is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the study of the United States. It traditionally incorporates the study of history, literature, and critical theory, but also includes fields as diverse as law, art, the media, film, religious studies, urban...
, Anthropology, and History at the College of William and Mary
College of William and Mary
The College of William & Mary in Virginia is a public research university located in Williamsburg, Virginia, United States...
. He has continued fieldwork with Maroons, notably in French Guiana
French Guiana
French Guiana is an overseas region of France, consisting of a single overseas department located on the northern Atlantic coast of South America. It has borders with two nations, Brazil to the east and south, and Suriname to the west...
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
Human rights
Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...
, twice testifying as expert witness
Expert witness
An expert witness, professional witness or judicial expert is a witness, who by virtue of education, training, skill, or experience, is believed to have expertise and specialised knowledge in a particular subject beyond that of the average person, sufficient that others may officially and legally...
on behalf of the Saramakas in cases that they eventually won before the Inter-American Court for Human Rights
Inter-American Court of Human Rights
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights is an autonomous judicial institution based in the city of San José, Costa Rica. Together with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, it makes up the human rights protection system of the Organization of American States , which serves to uphold and...
in Costa Rica
Costa Rica
Costa Rica , officially the Republic of Costa Rica is a multilingual, multiethnic and multicultural country in Central America, bordered by Nicaragua to the north, Panama to the southeast, the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Caribbean Sea to the east....
.
Contributions
Price’s early contributions, influenced by his teachers Clyde KluckhohnClyde Kluckhohn
Clyde Kluckhohn , was an American anthropologist and social theorist, best known for his long-term ethnographic work among the Navajo and his contributions to the development of theory of culture within American anthropology.-Early life and education:...
, Evon Z, Vogt
Evon Z. Vogt
Evon Zartman Vogt, Jr. was an American cultural anthropologist. Born in Gallup, New Mexico, he was a professor at Harvard University his entire career, serving as Chairman of the Department of Anthropology, Co-Master of Kirkland House , and Chairman of the Center for Latin American Studies...
, and Sidney W. Mintz
Sidney Mintz
Sidney Wilfred Mintz is an anthropologist best known for his studies of Latin America and the Caribbean. Mintz studied at Brooklyn College earning his B.A in 1943. He got his doctoral degree from Columbia University under the supervision of Julian Steward and Ruth Benedict...
, included the first conceptualization of Maroon
Maroon (people)
Maroons were runaway slaves in the West Indies, Central America, South America, and North America, who formed independent settlements together...
(runaway slave) communities throughout the Americas
Americas
The Americas, or America , are lands in the Western hemisphere, also known as the New World. In English, the plural form the Americas is often used to refer to the landmasses of North America and South America with their associated islands and regions, while the singular form America is primarily...
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
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
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
American Folklore Society
The American Folklore Society is the US-based professional association for folklorists, with members from the US, Canada, and around the world. It was founded in 1888 by William Wells Newell, who stood at the center of a diverse group of university-based scholars, museum anthropologists, and men...
and Alabi’s World won the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association
American Historical Association
The American Historical Association is the oldest and largest society of historians and professors of history in the United States. Founded in 1884, the association promotes historical studies, the teaching of history, and the preservation of and access to historical materials...
, the Gordon K. Lewis Award of the Caribbean Studies Association, and the School of American Research’s prestigious J. I. Staley Prize. An essay originally written in 1973 with Sidney Mintz, The Birth of African-American Culture, has had considerable influence on Afro-Americanist historians and anthropologists, sometimes inciting strong controversy about the extent to which enslaved Africans
Slavery in the Spanish New World colonies
Slavery in the Spanish colonies began with the enslavement of the local indigenous peoples in their homelands by Spanish settlers. Enslavement and production quotas were used to force the local labor to bring a return on the expedition and colonization investments...
and their descendants “retained” aspects of their home cultures
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
and societies
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
and the extent to which they “created” new cultural and social forms in the Americas. Price’s Travels with Tooy, an ethnography of the imaginaire of a Saramaka healer, attempts to transcend this dichotomy by demonstrating that historical processes of creolization
Creolization
Creolization is a concept that refers to the process in which new African American cultures emerge in the New World. As a result of colonization there was a mixture between people of indigenous, African, and European decent, which became to be understood as Creolization...
involved people making creative uses of their varied, specific African heritages in the process of nation-building
Nation-building
For nation-building in the sense of enhancing the capacity of state institutions, building state-society relations, and also external interventions see State-building....
in the New World
New World
The New World is one of the names used for the Western Hemisphere, specifically America and sometimes Oceania . The term originated in the late 15th century, when America had been recently discovered by European explorers, expanding the geographical horizon of the people of the European middle...
. In 2008, Travels with Tooy won the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing
Victor Turner
Victor Witter Turner was a British cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals and rites of passage...
, and in 2009, the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award for Caribbean Scholarship and the Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion.
Several of Price’s books have been written with anthropologist and art critic
Art criticism
Art criticism is the discussion or evaluation of visual art.Art critics usually criticize art in the context of aesthetics or the theory of beauty...
Sally Price
Sally Price
Sally Price is an American anthropologist, best known for her studies of so-called “primitive art” and its place in the imaginaire of Western viewers.- Career :...
, including a critical edition of the famous eighteenth-century narrative
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
of John Gabriel Stedman
John Gabriel Stedman
John Gabriel Stedman was a distinguished British–Dutch soldier and noted author. He was born in the Netherlands in 1744 to Robert Stedman, a Scot and an officer in Holland's Scots Brigade, and his wife of Dutch noble lineage, Antoinetta Christina van Ceulen. He lived most of his childhood in...
and an exploration of the Caribbean paintings of African American
African American
African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
artist Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden was an African American artist and writer. He worked in several media including cartoons, oils, and collage.-Education:...
. Since the 1980s, he has frequently experimented with new forms of writing culture, including experiments with typesetting
Typesetting
Typesetting is the composition of text by means of types.Typesetting requires the prior process of designing a font and storing it in some manner...
and page layout
Page layout
Page layout is the part of graphic design that deals in the arrangement and style treatment of elements on a page.- History and development :...
and authoring books that are in part memoirs
Memoir
A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...
(or highly reflexive anthropology
Reflexivity (social theory)
Reflexivity refers to circular relationships between cause and effect. A reflexive relationship is bidirectional with both the cause and the effect affecting one another in a situation that does not render both functions causes and effects...
) and, in one case, an anthropological novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
. Despite the label of postmodern
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
sometimes applied to his work, he prefers to consider himself an ethnographic historian. Most of Price’s books continue to draw on his continuing ethnography with Suriname Maroons, but one innovative work, The Convict and The Colonel, centers on his four-decades-long relationship with Martinique, where he and Sally Price live for most of each year. His books have been translated into French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
, German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, and Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
.
Books
- 1973. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (edited and with an introduction by Richard Price)
- 1975. Saramaka Social Structure: Analysis of a Maroon Society in Surinam
- 1976. The Guiana Maroons: A Historical and Bibliographical Introduction
- 1980. Afro-American Arts of the Suriname Rain Forest (with Sally Price)
- 1983. First-Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People
- 1983. To Slay the Hydra: Dutch Colonial Perspectives on the Saramaka Wars
- 1988. John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (Newly Transcribed from the Original 1790 Manuscript, Edited, and with an Introduction and Notes, by Richard and Sally Price)
- 1990. Alabi's World
- 1991. Two Evenings in Saramaka (with Sally Price)
- 1992. Stedman's Surinam: Life in an Eighteenth-Century Slave Society (with Sally Price)
- 1992. The Birth of African-American Culture (with Sidney W. Mintz)
- 1992. Equatoria (with Sally Price)
- 1994. On the Mall (with Sally Price)
- 1995. Enigma Variations (with Sally Price)
- 1998. The Convict and The Colonel
- 1999. Maroon Arts: Cultural Vitality in the African Diaspora (with Sally Price)
- 2003. Les Marrons (with Sally Price)
- 2003. The Root of Roots: Or, How Afro-American Anthropology Got Its Start (with Sally Price)
- 2006. Romare Bearden: The Caribbean Dimension (with Sally Price)
- 2008. Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination
- 2011. Rainforest Warriors: Human Rights on Trial
External links
- http://www.richandsally.net
- Richard Price at the College of William and Mary