Sally Price (anthropologist)

In 2014 she was decorated by France's Ministry of Culture as "Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres" for her "contribution déterminante au rayonnement de la recherche anthropologique et au développement de la réflexion sur les musées de société."

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.

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. 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 Price was elected foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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 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.

Sally Price, born Sally Hamlin (16 September 1943) in Boston, is an American anthropologist, best known for her studies of so-called "primitive art" and its place in the imaginaire of Western viewers.