David Zeitlyn

David Zeitlyn is Professor is Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He has been working with Mambila people in Cameroon since 1985 on various research topics including traditional religion, sociolinguistics, kinship and history. In 2003/4 he 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 village (see http://www.mambila.info/Diko_Web/). In recent years he started to work with Cameroonian photographers. In 2005 this led as part of Africa′05, to an exhibition of two Cameroonian studio photographers at the National Portrait Gallery, London in a display called ′Cameroon-London′. Some images from an earlier showing in Cameroon are online at http://www.mambila.info/Photography/Photo_Show/.  More recently he has worked with the British Library′s ′Endangered Archives Programme′ to create an archive of the contents of the studio of Toussele Jacques, a photographer from Mbouda in Cameroon.

He has long standing interests in multimedia and how internet technologies can be used to illuminate and access museum collections and archives. His 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.