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.
This experience formed the foundation of much of their subsequent contribution to the discipline of anthropology and the field of African American studies.
Returning from Suriname, the Prices spent a year in the Netherlands, working with Dutch scholars of Maroon societies such as anthropologist A. J. F.
[2] It was only later that Sally Price attended graduate school, receiving her Ph.D in Cultural Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 1982.
Price's early work, which focused on the Maroons of Suriname, included Co-Wives and Calabashes, "an analysis of the ways that cultural ideas about the genders influence Saramaka women's art and artistic activity and the complementary contributions that these artistic activities make to their social life,"[5] which won the University of Michigan’s Alice and Edith Hamilton Prize in Women’s Studies.