Sally Price - Career

Career

Price attended Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati and then Harvard College, where she majored in French Literature, graduating in 1965 after spending her junior year at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1963 she married anthropology graduate student Richard Price and together they began conducting fieldwork together during summers – in a fishing village in Martinique (1963), in a village in rural Andalusia, Spain (1964), and among Zinacanteco Indians in Chiapas, Mexico (1965 and 1966) as part of a large Harvard-led project in the area. After a brief trip to Suriname to explore the possibility of conducting long-term field research among the Saramaka Maroons of the interior, the Prices returned for a two-year residence in the village of Dangogo, on the upper Suriname River. This experience formed the foundation of much of their subsequent contribution to the discipline of anthropology and the field of African American studies.

Returning from Suriname, the Prices spent a year in the Netherlands, working with Dutch scholars of Maroon societies such as anthropologist A.J.F. Köbben. Their first child (Niko Price, currently Europe Editor for the Associated Press) was born there and their second (Leah Price, Professor of English Literature at Harvard) arrived a year later in New Haven, while Richard Price was teaching at Yale University. It was only later that Sally Price attended graduate school, receiving her Ph.D in Cultural Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 1982. Two subsequent years of research in the Netherlands expanded relations with Dutch colleagues, and in 2000, Sally Price was honored by being elected to the prestigious Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences).

After a dozen years at Johns Hopkins, followed by two years in Paris for a combination of teaching and research, the Prices returned to the fishing village in Martinique where they had begun their careers, establishing it as a base for a series of visiting appointments (at, for example, the University of Minnesota, Stanford University, Princeton University, and the Universidade Federal da Bahia in Brazil). In 1994, Sally Price took on a one-semester-a-year post as Duane A. and Virginia S. Dittman Professor of Anthropology and American Studies at the College of William and Mary, alternating her time between the College and her base in Martinique.