Beginning with a high schooler mesmerized by a stay on the Navajo and Hopi reservations and running through the founding of a major university department and the aftermath of a decision, a decade later, to forego permanent academic affiliations, Richard Price’s story is told with honesty, humor, and insight into the inner workings of academic politics from the 1960s to the present.
Inside/Outside relates his life as an anthropologist, historian, and Caribbeanist—from conducting predawn discussions with Maroon historians deep in the rainforest of Suriname to editing the world’s first book series on Atlantic history and culture; from weekly meetings with Claude Le´vi-Strauss in Paris to long-term collaboration with Sidney Mintz; from adventures at sea with Martiniquan fishermen to negotiating the ivory towers of Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins; from explorations of the art of Romare Bearden to number crunching from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. It is a tale of life experiences and often-unconventional life decisions, inside (and outside) the academic world. Readers look over Price’s shoulders—and those of his wife and research partner, Sally Price—as he developed the ideas for some of the twentieth- and twenty-first century’s most important books in the fields of history, anthropology, and Caribbean studies.