David Zeitlyn

I am a social anthropologist. I have been working with Mambila in Cameroon since 1985, research various topics including traditional religion, sociolinguistics, kinship and history. I also work with Cameroonian photographers and on the history of photography in Cameroon.

In 2003/4 I was the Evans-Prichard lecturer at All Souls College, Oxford, presenting a series of lectures on the life-history of Diko Madeleine, the first wife of Chief Konaka of Somié (see http://mambila.info/Diko_web/).
In 2005, as part of Africa'05, an exhibition of two Cameroonian studio photographers was held at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in a display called 'Cameroon-London'. This led to an exhibition at the Fowler Museum in 2021. Some images from an earlier showing in Cameroon are online at http://www.mambila.info/Photography/Photo_Show/index.html.

Other Interests: I have long standing interests in multimedia and how internet technologies can be used to illuminate and access museum collections and archives. My work on Mambila spider divination as a 'technology of choice making' led to some pioneering observational work on how library users choose which books to read. From this I became involved in how academic research infrastructure is managed. In recent years I have been supervising students working on visual repatriation of early films, ritual in online computer games, the social consequences of the adoption of ICT in Spain and the documentation of endangered languages (the last with funding from AHRC). In a collaboration with staff at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, I used social networking techniques to produce visual representations of the relationships between museum objects and the people who gave them to the museum. I have served on the ESRC's Research Resource Board and on the JISC Digital Content Advisory Group.