Richard Price (born November 30, 1941, in New York City) is an American anthropologist and historian, best known for his studies of the Caribbean and his experiments with writing ethnography.
He received both Bachelors and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University (1963, 1970), having conducted fieldwork in Peru, and then with Sally Price in Martinique, Mexico, Spain, and for two years among the Saramaka Maroons of Suriname.
In 1974, he moved to Johns Hopkins University to found the Department of Anthropology, where he served three terms as chair, before leaving in 1986 for two years of teaching in Paris.
[1] Price's early contributions, influenced by his teachers Clyde Kluckhohn, Evon Z. Vogt, and Sidney W. Mintz, included the first conceptualization of Maroon (runaway slave) communities throughout the Americas in a comparative framework.
[2] His demonstration that people previously considered largely “without history,” such as Saramaka Maroons (the descendants of runaway slaves), in fact possessed rich and deep historical consciousness has influenced historians as well as anthropologists.