Jean Price-Mars was born on 15 October 1876 in Grande-Rivière-du-Nord, in northern Haiti. His father took charge of his early schooling and instilled in him an appreciation of Haitian folklore, told in the mother tongue. He studied at the Lycée Grégoire in Cap-Haïtien and the Lycée Pétion in Port-au-Prince, and in 1899 won a scholarship to study medicine in Paris, a course he completed in 1921 or 1922.
Alongside medicine he built a career as a teacher, diplomat and politician. He served as secretary of the Haitian legation in Washington in 1909 and as chargé d'affaires in Paris from 1915 to 1917. In 1919 he published La Vocation de l'élite, which criticised the Haitian elite for imitating France and looking down on their own people.
In July 1915 the United States occupied Haiti, and the occupation lasted until 1934. It was in response to the occupation, and the active resistance of Haiti's peasants, that Price-Mars wrote his masterpiece. Published in 1928, Ainsi parla l'oncle, or So Spoke the Uncle, was the first systematic study of the culture of Haiti's mass of people. It valued Vodou, oral tradition, folklore and the Creole language, and argued that Haiti's culture was rooted in Africa.
He accused the Haitian elite of what he called collective bovaryism, the wish to see themselves as something other than they were, or, as he put it, as coloured Frenchmen. The book launched the indigéniste movement in Haitian literature, called for a national literature drawn from the people's own folklore, and was followed by Une étape de l'évolution haïtienne in 1929. In 1941 he founded the Institute of Ethnology, and was its first president and chair of sociology until 1947.
Price-Mars withdrew his candidacy for the presidency in 1930, led Senate opposition to the new president and was forced out of politics for a time, but was elected to the Senate again in 1941. He received the Légion d'honneur in 1956 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Paris in 1957. Léopold Senghor acknowledged him as a spiritual father of Négritude. He died in Pétion-Ville on 1 March 1969, aged 92. His son Louis Mars became the first Haitian psychiatrist.
- Author of Ainsi parla l'oncle, 1928
- Pioneer of Haitian ethnology and the indigéniste movement
- Founder and first president of the Institute of Ethnology, 1941
- Physician, diplomat and senator
- Spiritual father of Négritude according to Senghor
- Know where you come from. Price-Mars argued that Haitians had to value their African roots.
- Resist cultural imitation. He called on an elite to stop copying France and to learn from its own people.