“Richard Price has had a long and torrential romance with the Saramaka Maroons of Suriname, exploring them and himself through a harvest of mythologies that dissolve all boundaries of time and geographical location. With Tooy as guide and mentor, across three centuries of African exile and resettlement in the Americas, we revisit the recent or forgotten spaces of Price’s near forty years of patient, scholarly research. It is an astonishing performance, rendering these treasures of anthropological materials in a narrative style as lucid and cordial as the best contemporary fiction.”
— George Lamming, author of The Pleasures of Exile
“A tour de force—a tightly argued, incisive contribution to the newly rekindled debate about the role of Africa in the history and social imaginary of African American societies. A major achievement.”
— Stephan Palmie, University of Chicago, author of Wizards and Scientists
“True ethnographic magic. Beautifully written and theoretically sophisticated, it is a model of politically engaged historical ethnography and sustained transcultural dialogue.”
— John Collins, Queens College, CUNY
2008 Victor Turner Prize, Society for Humanistic Anthropology
— Victor Turner Prize
"Anthropologists wait a lifetime for an informant like Tooy who possesses much knowledge and is willing to share it. This work constitutes Price's most complete synthesis of Saramaka worldview to date, and serves as an enduring testament to over 30 years of painstaking, diligent, and innovative research. . . . This is a great book! Persistent readers will be amply rewarded."
— Choice
"It's not the bony skeleton of an anthropology-of-religion text I seek, but the well-muscled and all-enveloping immersion of an ethnography. One of the best is Richard Price's Travels with Tooy. . . . The book glows with knowledge."
— Barbara J. King, Bookslut
Winner of the 2009 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion
— Geertz Prize
Winner of the 2009 Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Memorial Award for Caribbean Scholarship
— Lewis Award
"Yet again we benefit from Richard Price's patient and passionate commitment to the Maroons in general and the Saramak tribe in particular. Price's anthropological imaginaire and his extraordinary eloquence have woven the field notes and transcripts from differing geographic and temporal contexts into an absorbing travelogue."
— Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism