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School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography
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Professor David Zeitlyn

David Zeitlyn
Professor David Zeitlyn

Professor of Social Anthropology

Fellow of Wolfson College

Anthropology of religion, especially divination, visual anthropology (photography), West/Central Africa (especially Cameroon); life writing; uses of technology, decision making processes and futurology, sociolinguistics, visualisation, archives, archiveology, anthropological studies of ICT and research methods.

Contact

Email: david.zeitlyn@anthro.ox.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)1865 612374
Website: David Zeitlyn on Academia

Unique identifiers for my work:
Google Scholar profile
ORCID Researcher id 0000-0001-5853-7351 Scopus Author ID 6602478625
ISNI: 0000 0001 2433 0782
VIAF ID: 22235364

Studying Divination

Recent books:

Co-edited Book 2024: Divination, Oracles, Omens. Bodleian Library Press, ISBN: 9781851246335: "a fascinating, gorgeously visual book with high-quality images of artefacts and manuscripts. Those of us with an interest in divination and the occult will be poring over it for years to come." Mary Hitchman TLS review 28 Feb 2025. 

An Anthropological Toolkit: Sixty Useful Concepts. 2022 Oxford: Berghahn ISBN-13: 9781800735354. A hypertext of the cross references in this book.

Mambila Divination: Framing Questions, Constructing Answers (Routledge Studies in Anthropology) 2020. London: Routledge.  ISBN 9780367199500.

Recorded interview about "Anthropological toolkit" on the New Books Network.

As well as general supervision of doctoral research in Cameroon/Nigeria and indeed anywhere in Africa I am also interested in working with students who would like to research the following topics:

  • Social networks in Photographic Supplies in Nigeria
  • Studio Photographers and Videographers in Cameroon (and elsewhere)
  • Photo elicitation and languages of work
  • Photo sharing from albums to flickr and beyond
  • Photographing "photographers at work". History and current valency / meaning of the trope
  • Social Relations mediating technology
  • sociolinguistics and conversation analysis in anthropology
  • Meaning making
  • Divination: particularly investigating the clients side view eg of tarot cards and other divination systems round the world
  • Varieties of Cameroonian French
  • Pygmies on the Tikar Plain
  • History of Mbouda football club and its photography

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.

Other webpages:

http://staff.anthro.ox.ac.uk/zeitlyn-david/
http://oxford.academia.edu/DavidZeitlyn/
http://mambila.info/ The Virtual Institute of Mambila Studies
A small AHRC funded project on "Facing the Future (with an eye on the Past)" running in 2013.

Evans-Pritchard Lectures 2003/04

In the Autumn of 2003, Professor David Zeitlyn delivered the 2003/2004 Evans-Pritchard Lectures. His subject was 'The life of Diko Madeleine and the History of Somié, Cameroon, in the Twentieth Century'. You can find the links to listen to five of the lectures below.

Lecture 1 (further information)
Lecture 2 (further information)
Lecture 3 (further information)
Lecture 4 (further information)
Lecture 5 (further information)

The final lecture, Summing up a Life?, was not recorded but you can read the transcript here. Further information can be found here.