ABSTRACT
As for most anthropologists trained in the Malinowskian tradition of fieldwork, the field hovered on the horizon of my student years as a perfectly magical place, far removed from the mundane realities of life in modern cities and offering untold of opportunities for discovery and intellectual creation. Biographies where the social and cultural context is a mere backdrop to the story of a life or is simply subsumed into the story and therefore hardly extant are not uncommon. Consider, for instance, how gender is often subsumed in the biographies of men, where this significant social fact and its social and cultural ramifications in their lives is an unexamined given. For biography to be anthropology, a critical examination of the culture in question is essential. Anthropology has of course a rich store of theoretical insights and ethnographic knowledge which lend themselves readily and productively to such an undertaking in biographical description and analysis.
