Introduction: Biographies of Anthropologists as Anthropological Data

Biographies of anthropologists are widely recognized as useful for the history of science and the discipline. Introducing this special issue “Biographies of Anthropologists,” I argue that they not only provide information about anthropology, but also data for anthropology because they are studies of human agents enmeshed in social and cultural contexts, comparable to life histories of ethnographic informants. Biographies of anthropologists are of similar importance for empirical and theoretical anthropology as ethnographies, grammars, and monographs in archaeology and biological anthropology. They depict cultural dynamics from a person-centered, intimate, experience-near, and diachronic perspective on anthropology's cluster of sodalities.