Peter Shapello is a village dentist in Albania until one day he recieves a visit that changes his life - and an offer he can't refuse. He will become the double for Albania's Great Leader, Enver Hoxha, the man who stands in for him on official engagements. As the unnamed narrator of Biografi goes in search of Shapello, the bizarre reality of his country reveals itself. A highly original travel book first published in 1993, Biografi is about the creation of new lives, apparitions and subversive histories. It is at once an adventure quest and a tour de force of imaginative writing - mysterious, shocking, poignant and sometimes grimly funny.

Under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, all Albanian citizens had their own biografi, a file that was maintained (and often falsified) by the secret police. The information contained in a person's biografi could have devastating effects. When Lloyd Jones visited Albania in 1991, six years after the dictator's death, he heard rumours of a village dentist who, resembling Hoxha in looks and build, had been forced to give up his identity and become the dictator's double. Jones' quest to find Petar Schapallo gives shape not only to an intriguing traveller's tale, but a story about identity-changed, lost or falsified-in a country where identity was strictly controlled.

The Tropenmuseum possesses a unique music collection from Flores. The more than 300 musical instruments, 350 musical recordings, 300 photographs and slides were collected and documented by the renowned ethnomusicologist Jaap Kunst in the 1930s and by his student, the missionary Father Pi Rozing, in the 1950s-1960s. The author of the present bulletin, Paula Bos, followed in their footsteps, collecting musical instruments and documenting them for the Tropenmuseum during her stay on Flores in 1994. In "Biographies of Florenese musical instruments and their collectors," the collections of Kunst, Rozing and Bos are compared from the viewpoint of the "biography of objects," considering the musical instruments in the light of social change in Florenese society and developments in musical culture from the thirties onward. It focuses on the meaning that the Florenese musical instruments have for the Florenese themselves. As the biographies of objects are closely related to the biographies of their collectors, this bulletin also describes and analyses the viewpoint from which Kunst, Rozing and Bos conducted their fieldwork and their methods of collecting musical instruments. The bulletin contains a case study of one particular instrument, the "foi meze" flute, carried out by Paula Bos, in which the "biography of objects" viewpoint is elaborated more extensively.