Jean Price-Mars

Louis Jean Antoine Price-Mars was born on 15 October 1876 at Grande-Rivière-du-Nord, in the northern department of Haiti, into a wealthy landowning family of the region's political elite. His father, Jean Eléomont Mars, was a deputy and an exporter of coffee, mahogany, and hardwood, and the household — shaped by an atmosphere of religious tolerance — nurtured in the boy an early appreciation for Haitian folklore and popular culture.

Educated at the Lycée Grégoire in Cap-Haïtien and the Lycée Pétion in Port-au-Prince, he traveled to France to study medicine and to pursue humanities and social sciences at the Sorbonne, the Collège de France, and the Trocadéro. He entered public life young, serving as secretary of the Haitian legation in Washington in 1909 and as chargé d'affaires in Paris during the early years of the United States occupation.

In 1923 he joined fellow intellectuals in founding the Société d'Histoire et de Géographie d'Haïti, later serving as its president. His 1928 masterwork, Ainsi parla l'oncle (So Spoke the Uncle), overturned a generation of elite self-contempt by affirming the African roots of Haitian culture and defending Vodou as a full religion; it became the cornerstone of the Indigenist movement and a foundation of Négritude. In 1941 he founded the Institute of Ethnology, and in 1956 he presided over the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists.

He died on 1 March 1969 at Pétion-Ville, honored as the father of Haitian ethnology. May the uncle who taught a nation to speak its own name be forever remembered with pride.