Dr. Anwarullah Chowdhury is a Professor and founder Chairman of the Department of Anthropology in the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He was also a Professor and Chairman of the Department of Sociology, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and finally the Vice-Chancellor of the same University. Professor Chowdhury was a fulltime member of th Grants Commission of Bangladesh and also a Visiting Professor in the Minnesota State University at Mankato, USA during the academic year 20002001. He was also a Visiting Fellow at the IDS, University of Sussex, England in 1979-80. He also served as the Ambassador of Bangladesh to the Kingdom of Bahrain in the recent past. Professor Chowdhury published twelve books and a large number of articles in the national and international journals. More than 20 students completed their M. Phil and Ph.D. research under his supervision. The present work is the revised version of his Ph.D. thesis and this was based on his research in a village of Dhaka District in the early seventies of the last century. He followed the method of participant-observation in conducting this research.
