Saamaka Dreaming- anthropological fieldwork in the 1960s among Afro-American Maroons.

What is it about?

The Prices’ intimate exposition of their first two years living with fiercely anti-white Saamaka Maroons in the 1960s reveals much about how anthropology has changed. It’s a disciplinary memoir about classic fieldwork in the step-off-the-boat tradition, where the research questions are secondary to an immersive experience in otherness, an elsewhere, distant now in time as much as space and culture. Dreaming depicts, in a manner that at once fascinates and disturbs, the openly non-egalitarian world of these descendants of rebel slaves, filled with strong-willed, independent characters. The interplay of sexual desire and obligation, the communal life of non-liberal subjects with assigned roles, provides the backdrop for dramas that range from spiritual to medical and, quite literally, from birth to death. How the young anthropologists grow into this distinctly unfamiliar universe and make their peace with their often-reluctant hosts is at once a moving human story, a portrait of a remarkable African-American people, and a thought-provoking revelation about the development of the discipline.

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