A Review of Inside/Outside: Adventures in Caribbean History and Anthropology

 

Richard Price never explains why he chose the title Inside/Outside for his engaging memoir, but it fits perfectly in at least two respects. We could read it as an informal way of referring to the classical method of modern ethnography, “participant observation,” of which Price has been such a skilled practitioner for more than half a century. At the same time the phrase suggests the author’s equivocal relationship with the academic world where he slowly moved over several decades from “inside” to “outside,” a trajectory his book charts in some detail.

“Adventures” is an appropriate word too, since 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 such as being met at the Gare du Nord at the beginning of a year’s study in France to be told, by Claude Lévi-Strauss no less, that his original supervisor had just committed suicide but that CLS would be stepping in. Price also recounts tracking down the 98-year-old woman who had been the keeper of the papers of John Gabriel Stedman, author of one of the most important works in the history of slavery, at an old people’s home in rural Lincolnshire. More chillingly, he tells of receiving a (not very) veiled death threat from a Surinamese government official after he’d testified as an expert witness for the Saamaka Maroons before the Inter-American Court for Human Rights.

Price’s academic career, much of it undertaken in partnership with his art historian wife, Sally Price, had a glittering start: at the age of 32 he was invited to create a new department of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, with his own full professorship, chairmanship and seven faculty positions. It quickly became the leading training institution for Caribbean anthropologists. However, all narratives require obstacles and, in this case, they come in the form of two broken relationships, one with the country where he undertook his early fieldwork, Suriname, torn by civil war and military dictatorship, the other with Price’s mentor and colleague, Sidney Mintz. Hurt and puzzled in equal measure, Price returns again and again to the fall-out with Mintz which led to his departure from John Hopkins in his early 40s, never again to hold a full-time academic position.

Given the imprecise boundaries of the category “Latin America,” Price could easily be considered a Latin Americanist, given that much of his work has focused on Martinique and Guyane (French Guiana) , where a “Latin” language is dominant. What the memoir reveals, however, is the less obvious influence of Latin American literature on his writing. The first book Mintz gave him was Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World, an imaginative choice for a budding anthropologist. The lesson worked. Price began to realize that different historical or ethnographic situations demanded different literary forms and that the ethnographer or historian should search out or even invent new ways of writing. Here his guides have been writers such as Carpentier, Borges, Cortázar, García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, whose narrative experiments with time (The Green House) and with voice (Conversation in the Cathedral) he singles out as particular inspirations.

After leaving John Hopkins, and so with no pressing professional obligations, literary experimentation flourished, with Price authoring a long series of path-breaking books. Patience was needed to learn about Saamaka history, the bedrock of their identity: in effect he was only ready to learn when the Saamaka thought he was ready to learn. The results were First-Time:The Historical Vision of an Afro‑American People (1973) and Alabi’s World (1990), which have already taken their places as anthropological classics. There followed explorations of Martinique in books like The Convict and the Colonel, which the novelist George Lamming called “a superb calaloo of a book … that explores the underlying insanity of the colonial experience.” More recently has come a series of books co-authored with his wife that are in part memoirs (or highly reflexive anthropology) and, in one case, an anthropological novel.

Mid-career academics will no doubt be intrigued to read of how the Prices fared after their departure from full-time teaching. He quotes an earlier self-assessment: “We’re materially poorer and have no security. But we have our independence—and the freedom to write and

think and experiment as we wish.” Interestingly, his own discipline of anthropology basically ignored him while others—history, African American studies, Latin American studies for Richard, art history and women’s studies for Sally—embraced them and their interdisciplinary work.

What followed was a base in Martinique, where they spent most of the year, and a mixture of freelancing and part-time teaching, including a longish stint at the College of William & Mary where they taught one semester a year. Their one regret—probably shared by many who have retired, early or otherwise, from the academic world—is losing the opportunity to mentor graduate students. In some recompense they’ve had more time for Caribbean friendships with the likes of Edouard Glissant, Nancy Morejón, George Lamming, Maryse Condé and Derek Walcott.

The world of U.S. academia doesn’t emerge well from Inside/Outside. One of the last incidents recounted in the book concerns some teaching done by the Prices for a graduate class in the history of anthropology “at a major university.” After the end of the assignment, they were reprimanded in a formal letter for having used “derogatory language. . . that caused a great deal of harm to students” and were obliged to write a letter of explanation to the university. Their offense had been to closely paraphrase sentences from their own books, uttering words now apparently considered unspeakable in a classroom. “It is hard for us to imagine,” Price concludes, “teaching classes in an ambience where words are policed rather than debated by students.” Amen to that.