Sally Price facts for kids

Sally Price, born Sally Hamlin on September 16, 1943, in Boston, is an American anthropologist. An anthropologist is someone who studies human societies and cultures. She is famous for her work on "primitive art" and how people in Western countries think about it.

Sally Price's Life and Work

Sally Price went to Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati. She then studied at Harvard College, where she focused on French Literature. She graduated in 1965 after spending a year studying in Paris at the Sorbonne.

In 1963, she married Richard Price, who was also studying anthropology. Together, they started doing fieldwork during their summers. Fieldwork means living with and studying a group of people to learn about their culture.

Their early fieldwork included:

• A fishing village in Martinique (1963)
• A village in Andalusia, Spain (1964)
• Among Zinacanteco Indians in Chiapas, Mexico (1965 and 1966)

After these trips, the Prices went to Suriname. They lived for two years in a village called Dangogo, on the upper Suriname River. Here, they studied the Saramaka Maroons. This experience was very important for their future work in anthropology and African American studies.

Studying in the Netherlands

After Suriname, the Prices spent a year in the Netherlands. They worked with Dutch experts on Maroon societies. Later, Sally Price went to graduate school. She earned her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 1982. She spent two more years doing research in the Netherlands. In 2000, she became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Teaching and Research

Sally Price worked at Johns Hopkins for 12 years. Then she spent two years in Paris, teaching and doing research. After that, the Prices returned to the fishing village in Martinique where they first started their fieldwork. This became their home base.

From Martinique, Sally Price took on visiting teaching jobs at many universities. These included the University of Minnesota, Stanford University, Princeton University, and the Universidade Federal da Bahia in Brazil. In 1994, she started teaching part-time at the College of William and Mary. She split her time between the college and Martinique.

In 2014, the French Ministry of Culture honored her. She received the "Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres" award. This award recognized her important work in anthropology and her ideas about museums.

Sally Price's Main Ideas

Sally Price's early work focused on the Maroons of Suriname. One of her books, Co-Wives and Calabashes, looked at how cultural ideas about gender influenced Saramaka women's art. It also showed how their art helped their social life. This book won an award from the University of Michigan.

Later, she became a guest curator for a traveling art exhibition. A curator is someone who organizes art shows. This experience made her think about how Western cultures view non-Western art. Her book Primitive Art in Civilized Places became very popular. It was published in many languages and made people in the art world think differently.

As a Caribbeanist (someone who studies the Caribbean), she helped edit Caribbean Contours. This book was called one of the best books for learning about Caribbean society and politics. With Richard Price, she has written many books on different topics. These include:

• The life of artist Romare Bearden in the Caribbean
• Maroon arts and folktale traditions
• The history of anthropology
• Art forgery (fake art)
• Collecting artifacts (old objects)

Sally Price drew 50 sketches for the book on artifact collecting. Her recent work has taken her to two parts of France. In French Guiana, she continues her ethnographic studies of Maroon culture. Ethnographic studies involve detailed research into people's lives and cultures. In Paris, she has written about the politics behind the creation of Paris’s new museum. This museum displays art from African, Asian, Oceanic, and Pre-Columbian cultures.

Books by Sally Price

• 1980: Afro-American Arts of the Suriname Rain Forest (with Richard Price)
• 1984: Co-Wives and Calabashes
• 1985: Caribbean Contours (edited with Sidney W. Mintz)
• 1988: John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (edited with Richard Price)
• 1989: Primitive Art in Civilized Places
• 1991: Two Evenings in Saramaka (with Richard Price)
• 1992: C’est-à-dire (with Jean Jamin)
• 1992: Equatoria (with Richard Price)
• 1992: Stedman's Surinam: Life in an Eighteenth-Century Slave Society (with Richard Price)
• 1994: On The Mall (with Richard Price)
• 1995: Enigma Variations: A Novel (with Richard Price)
• 1999: Maroon Arts: Cultural Vitality in the African Diaspora (with Richard Price)
• 2003: Les Marrons (with Richard Price)
• 2003: The Root of Roots: Or, How Afro-American Anthropology Got Its Start (with Richard Price)
• 2006: Romare Bearden: The Caribbean Dimension (with Richard Price)
• 2007: Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly