1Nana Arhin Brempong (Kwame Arhin) (Ph.D. London, D.Litt. Oxford) is Chairman of the National Commision on Culture of Ghana and was formerly Professor and Director at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon. His areas of academic interest are the History of Asante and the transformations in African political and social institutions. Among his publications are Traditional Rule in Ghana: Past and Present (Accra, 1985) and The City of Kumasi Handbook (Cambridge, 1992).

2Michael Herzfeld, D.Phil. (Oxon. 1976, D.Litt. (Birmingham 1989) is Professor of Anthropology (and Curator of European Ethnology in the Peabody Museum) at Harvard University. Recent lectures include the inaugural Distinguished Lecture in European Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1996) and the Munro Lecture at the University of Edinburgh (1997). A past President of both the Modern Greek Studies Association and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, he is currently editor of American Ethnologist. He is the author of Ours Once More (1982), The Poetics of Manhood (1985), Anthropology through the Looking-Glass (1987), A Place in History (1991), The Social Production of Indifference (1992), Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (1997), and Portrait of a Greek Imagination (1997). He was a co-winner of the Chicago Folklore Prize for 1981. He has also been awarded the J. B. Donne Prize on the Anthropology of Art (1989) and the Rivers Memorial Medal (1994) (both from the Royal Anthropological Institute, London), and the J. 1. Staley Prize (School of American Research, 1994). In 1997 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

3Jean Lave (Ph.D. Harvard) is an anthropologist and Professor of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life (Cambridge, 1988) and, with E. Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge, 1991). She was recepient of the American Educational Research Association's 1994 Sylvia Scribner Award.

4Carola Lentz (D.Phil. Hannover 1987, Habil. Berlin 1996) is Professor of Social Anthropology and African Studies at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt-am-Main (Germany). In the 1980s she has conduct ed fieldwork on labour migradon and ethnicity in Ecuador, resulting in numerous articles and several books (among others: Migraciôn e Identidad Étnica, Quito, 1997). Later, her research interest changed to West Africa, where she studied questions of ethnicity, traditional and modern elites, the impact of colonial rule on northern Ghana and the settlement histories and politics of land rights among the Dagara of Ghana and Burkina Faso. Recently published were Die Konstruktion von Ethnizitàt: Eine politische Geschichte Nord-West Ghanas, 1870-1990 (Cologne, 1998) and, edited together with Paul Nugent, Ethnicity in Ghana (London, 1999). Carola Lentz is on the editorial boards of Paideuma, Ethnos and Food and Foodways and a member of the scientific committee of the European Association of Social Anthropology.

5Antónia Pedroso de Lima is Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology, ISCTE (Lisbon), specializing in Kinship Theory and Contemporary Family Relations. She has published on the Portuguese urban family, focusing both on working-class neighbourhoods of Lisbon and on the Portuguese economic elite. She is currently working on a project about major family enterprises and their dynastic families.

6George E. Marcus is professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Rice University. He is co-editor with James Clifford of Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, co-author with Michael Fischer of Anthropology as Cultural Critique, and most recently author of Ethnography Through Thick and Thin. His long-term work on dynastic elites in the United States is reported in the volume, Lives in Trust: the Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth Century America (Boulder, Colorado, 1992). During this fin-de-siècle he has edited a series of annuals, entitled Late Editions and published by the University of Chicago Press. This series probes contemporary change and transformation on a wide range of topics through the presentation of ethnographic interviews. The most recent volumes are Corporate Futures: The Diffusion of the Culturally Sensitive; Corporate Form at Century's End and Paranoia Within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation.

7Nuno Gonçalo Monteiro (Ph.D. Lisbon) is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon and Professor of History at ISCTE (Lisbon). His publications include O Crepúsculo dos Grandes: 1750-1832 (Lisbon 1998). His research interests are in the area of Social History, with particular emphasis on Portuguese elite groups from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

8João de Pina-Cabral (D.Phil. Oxford) is Senior Research Fellow and President of the Scientific Board of the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. He was co-founder and Rector of the Universidade Atlântica (1996-1997). He was founding President of the Portuguese Association of Anthropology. He is an Honorary Member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, having organized its first Conference (Coimbra 1990) and been its Secretary and Treasurer (1995-1996). His publications include Sorts of Adam, Daughters of Eve (Oxford, 1986), Os contextos da antropologia (Lisbon, 1991) and Em Terra de Tufões (Macao, Portuguese edn, 1993; Chinese edn, 1995). He was co-editor of Death in Portugal (Oxford, 1984) and Europe Observed (London, 1992). He has been Malinowski Memorial Lecturer (London School of Economics, 1992) and Distinguished Lecturer of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe (San Francisco, 1992).

9José Manuel Sobral (Ph.D. Lisbon) is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. He has published a number of works in the area of the history of ideas in contemporary Portugal, as well as in the social anthropology of rural society in Central Portugal, including Trajectos: o Présente e o Passado na Vida de uma Freguesia da Beira (Lisboa, 1999).

10Christina Toren has a B.Sc. (Hons) in Psychology from University College London and a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from London School of Economics. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Psychology at Brunei University. She is the author of numerous papers and two books: Making Sense of Hierarchy: Cognition as Social Process in Fiji (London, 1990) and Mind, Materiality and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography (London, 1999).

11Sylvia Yanagisako (Ph.D. Washington) is Professor of Anthropology at Standard University and Chair of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology. She was Director of the Program in Feminist Studies at that University. She is the author of Transforming the Past (Stanford, 1985) and with Jane Collier of Gender and Kinship (Stanford, 1987) and with Carol Delaney of Naturalizing Power (London, 1995).