Inside/Outside

Adventures in Caribbean History and Anthropology

Title Details

Pages: 272

Illustrations: 24 color and 18 b&w images

Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in

Formats

Paperback

Pub Date: 10/15/2022

ISBN: 9-780-8203-6265-6

List Price: $28.95

Hardcover

Pub Date: 10/15/2022

ISBN: 9-780-8203-6305-9

List Price: $120.95

eBook

Pub Date: 10/15/2022

ISBN: 9-780-8203-6266-3

List Price: $28.95

eBook

Pub Date: 10/15/2022

ISBN: 9-780-8203-6875-7

List Price: $28.95

Inside/Outside

Adventures in Caribbean History and Anthropology

The memoir of a prominent twentieth-century anthropologist, historian, and Caribbeanist

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  • Description
  • Reviews

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.

As an intellectual and professional journey, Inside/Outside is fascinating. A personal and intellectual autobiography and odyssey of one of the most productive and influential anthropologists of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is elegantly written and will be of broad interest to students and specialists in history, anthropology, and art history and anyone interested in the culture and history of the Caribbean.

—Stuart B. Schwartz, author of Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina

An engagingly written and deeply thoughtful book.

—Bill Maurer, author of Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law, and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands

Inside/Outside offers a lively, first-person account of twentieth-century intellectual life, in and out of institutions. From his front-row seat as a prominent scholar, Richard Price surveys decades of academic encounters with obvious relish, in the style of a storyteller settling in for a long evening, table groaning with food and drink.

—Peter Redfield, author of Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders

A one-of-a-kind, Richard Price’s book is a well-written, tantalizing, and accessible treatise on academic life that falls well outside the traditional parameters of anthropology. It is, as well, a model of good, careful scholarship that transcends racial and cultural (ethnocultural?) boundaries, thus demonstrating the value and importance of diversity. It will have wide appeal.

—Bernard Moitt, author of Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848

Inside/Outside maintains throughout a pleasing lightness of touch, studding the account of an academic life with a series of sometimes amusing and sometimes jaw-dropping episodes.

—Peter Hulme, ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America

The book will be appreciated by many as a complement to the Prices’ remarkable scholarly oeuvre. Instructors of graduate or advanced undergraduate seminars who already know their work will enjoy assigning this memoir together with their favorite Price publications, as the basis for a whole range of courses on Caribbean anthropology and history of the African diaspora, but also for its insights about careers in anthropology.

—Samuel Martínez, New West Indian Guide

At the heart of Richard Price’s extraordinary career has been a commitment to long-term, in-depth fieldwork and to exploration of ways of conveying cultural knowledge in writing. In immersing himself in the lives of diverse communities and individuals over the years, he has continually reassessed issues of perspective, voice, dialogue, narrative, literary form, power, and ethics in the representation of past and present worlds. Anyone with an interest in processes of ethnographic and historical imagination will find much to consider in the recollections and meditations offered in this book.

—Stephen Stuempfle, Journal of Folklore Research Reviews

[Inside/Outside] offers an explanation and additional impetus to researchers in the fields of (post)colonial and cultural studies. . . . Price shows insatiable desire to understand diverse human experience, to come to terms with new situations and new cultural contexts, and to enjoy the process of discovery.

—Markéta KRÍŽOVÁ, Dejiny – teorie – kritika (History – Theory – Criticism)

About the Author/Editor

RICHARD PRICE has written extensively on the history and culture of African Americans throughout the hemisphere. His prize-winning books include First-Time, Alabi’s World, The Convict and the Colonel, Travels with Tooy, and Rainforest Warriors. He is the coauthor, with Sally Price, of Saamaka Dreaming. He lives on Coquina Key, Florida.