D Zeitlyn
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 11998 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | D Zeitlyn |
| NOMBRES | D |
| APELLIDO | Zeitlyn |
| FIRMA | ZEITLYN D |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5853-7351 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 87 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 349 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 86 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1990 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 10 |
Trading Zones Between Thick and Thin
Referring to the work of historian of science Peter Galison, I argue that anthropology requires thin description as an essential counterpart for thick description. Thin accounts provide the scaffolding within which thick descriptions sit. Galison uses the idea of a “trading zone” connecting different communities who, despite their differences (possibly including different ontologies), manage to coordinate joint activity. This idea works well for …
Intimacy in a violent context
All archives have silences, which may come to resonate, even if they may never speak. What is unsaid or unsayable may be understood and appreciated even if never enunciated and never heard. The photographs of the Cameroonian photographer Jacques Toussele from 1960 to 1980 were taken against a background of violence: the uprising of the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), which started before Cameroonian independence and continued for the nex…
Bounding an archiving
Archival research is haunted by the question of how complete are the archival fonds being consulted. In this article, we describe how we have used a combination of pattern-matching and face-recognition to evaluate the completeness of the Jacques Toussele photographic archive which was established as part of the Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library. A random set of scanned prints from the archive was matched with originating negati…
What is going on and who is responsible? Scholarship on conflict on the Mambila Plateau. A response to Lenshie et al. 2021
This is a response to Lenshie et al. (2021) paper in African Identities ‘Ethnic groups across Nigeria – Cameroon border territories: contested autochthony and contentious ethnic identities in Mambilla Plateau, Nigeria’. We are concerned that their characterization of the previous literature is inaccurate and that their discussion of their own data does not respond to the complexities they themselves have documented
An argument for sparsity
I consider the influence of the language used in anthropological analysis (the metalanguage). If in principle there are at least as many anthropologies as there are languages, then we must allow the possibility of seven thousand or so more or less incommensurable anthropologies. However, incommensurability need not follow: not only can sparse theory aid comparison but it can also help establish partial (incomplete) commensurability. The parsimony…
Structured output methods and environmental issues
Participatory methods for researching human–environmental interactions seek detailed inputs on all manner of issues, but the outputs are often only understandable to the technically literate. On the other hand, participatory methods that involve the co-design of structured outputs (maps, models, games, stories, etc.) can be used to represent and integrate the knowledge and views of participants authentically and can be interpretable to both ‘scie…
Berdamai dengan Keterbatasan Epistemologis
Following the proliferation of digital media usage, the world has seen an increasing amount of digitally-mediated lives in everyday contexts. While anthropological scholarship has started to address this ever-growing subject, anthropologists are mainly preoccupied with human engagements in virtual worlds that have their own tangible and embodied sense of spatiality (e.g., online role-playing and gaming communities). In so doing, anthropologists h…
The Rhetoric of Kinship
Archiving ethnography? The impossibility and the necessity
I review the conflicting injunctions to archive and not to archive anthropological field materials (data). There are ethical contradictions: some ethics codes tell us to destroy data after a period of time, others to save for the long term. I discuss the responsibilities researchers have to different groups of people and how these may conflict. I illustrate beneficial long-term uses of field data from my own work with Mambila people in Cameroon a…
Archiver l’ethnographie ? Entre impossibilité et nécessité
Dans cet article, j’étudierai les injonctions contradictoires concernant le fait d’archiver ou non des données anthropologiques récoltées sur le terrain. On se retrouve face à des contradictions d’ordre éthique, car certaines règles suggèrent de détruire les données après un certain temps, et d’autres de les conserver à long terme. Je m’intéresserai aux responsabilités qu’ont les chercheurs envers différents groupes et à la façon dont elles se co…
Preuve archéologique de l’augmentation et de l’effondrement de la population entre ~2500 et ~500 ans cal. BP en Afrique centrale occidentale
Des études paléoenvironnementales antérieures ont montré que des changements majeurs de la végétation et de l’environnement se sont produits en Afrique centrale à partir de l’Holocène moyen (ex. Maley & Brenac 1998). Plusieurs d’entre elles mettent en évidence une origine humaine et supposent que les grandes migrations de population, les innovations techniques (par exemple, la technologie de la fonte du fer) et/ou de nouveaux choix dans les prati…
Language ecology, language endangerment, and relict languages
As a contribution to the more general discussion on causes of language endangerment and death, we describe the language ecologies of four related languages (Bà Mambila [mzk]/[mcu], Sombә (Somyev or Kila) [kgt], Oumyari Wawa [www], Njanga (Kwanja) [knp]) of the Cameroon-Nigeria borderland to reach an understanding of the factors and circumstances that have brought two of these languages, Sombә and Njanga, to the brink of extinction; a third, Oumya…
Divination and Ontologies
The way types of divination move round the planet means it is not helpful to simply attribute one unitary ontology to specific techniques or to groups of practitioners. Explaining divination in terms of ‘ontology’ homogenizes cognitive and conceptual multiplicity, and pre-empts the possible outcomes of divination. Moreover, this contradicts the fundamentally open nature of divination, and the fact that in many forms of divination the reformulatio…
Archaeological Evidence for Population Rise and Collapse between ~2500 and ~500 cal. yr BP in Western Central Africa
Des études paléoenvironnementales antérieures ont montré que des changements majeurs de la végétation et de l’environnement se sont produits en Afrique centrale à partir de l’Holocène moyen (ex. Maley & Brenac 1998). Plusieurs d’entre elles mettent en évidence une origine humaine et supposent que les grandes migrations de population, les innovations techniques (par exemple, la technologie de la fonte du fer) et/ou de nouveaux choix dans les prati…
Mambila Divination
This book offers a major contribution to the study and analysis of divination, based on continuing fieldwork with the Mambila in Cameroon. It seeks to return attention to the details of divinatory practice, using the questions asked and life histories to help understand the perspective of the clients rather than that of the diviners. Drawing on a corpus of more than 600 cases, David Zeitlyn reconsiders theories of divination and compares Mambila …
Archive
Linguists have a responsibility to themselves, their peers, and successors to make research data available, and not to squander time, effort, and resources by not storing recordings carefully so that they are consultable and amenable to analysis/re‐analysis in the future. This means archiving is important. Those making recordings from subjects outside the academy need to think about how permissions for archiving are managed. Ethical guidelines of…
Mambila Divination
Mambila divination
Ritual, fusion, and conflict
Herder–farmer conflicts in West Africa have caused thousands of deaths in recent years. Many conflicts are triggered by localized events that rapidly spiral out of control. What leads specific interpersonal conflicts to scale up into intergroup violence? We propose that such conflicts are rooted in identity and ritual dynamics. We present evidence that participants in Mambila traditions of masquerade initiation in Cameroon report especially stron…
Cite, plagiarize, pass-off
Haunting, Dutching, and Interference
I consider three ways of thinking about time, especially the future, that are new to anthropology. The concepts of interference and haunting illuminate how pasts and futures interact so that consideration of "historicity" needs to be complemented by "futuricity." Discussion of promissory notes and Dutch betting (hedging bets) prompts reassessment of forward planning, including prophecy and prediction. Scenario planning is viewed as a way of "dutc…
Des archives pour l’anthropologie
Derrida et Foucault ont fourni des clefs pour comprendre les archives. Ils voient les archives comme hégémoniques, caractéristiques des façons de penser, des modes de colonisation et de contrôle des citoyens. Cependant ils montrent aussi clairement que les archives peuvent être lues de façon subversive. Avec de la patience, une contre-lecture permet la mise au jour des voix (quelque fois des noms) des subalternes et autres exclus des archives. En…
Photo History by Numbers
In this paper I provide baseline estimates for the scale of black-and-white photography as a locally run, commercial undertaking in Cameroon both before and after independence. In categorizing, starting with short 19th and 20th centuries, I end by suggesting a better division is between an era of Colonial Photography (roughly 1865-1955) and a shorter period of larger-scale Administrative Photography (1955-1985), the so-called "Golden Age of the S…
Testing Google Scholar bibliographic data
We present some systematic tests of the quality of bibliographic data exports available from Google Scholar. While data quality is good for journal articles and conference proceedings, books and edited collections are often wrongly described or have incomplete data. We identify a particular problem with material from online repositories
Ethno-Ornithology of the Mushere of Nigeria
Mushere children’s ethno-ornithology was surveyed from October to November 2015 to find out their level of bird knowledge—as well as whether and how children valued and learned about birds—in order to determine the potential role such knowledge might play in Mushere biodiversity conservation. Methods included picture elicitation exercises, free-listing, and semi-structured interviews. Our results revealed a limited knowledge of birds in Mushere c…
Anthropology in and of the Archives
Derrida and Foucault provide key starting points to understanding archives. They see archives as hegemonic, characterizing ways of thought, modes of colonization, and the control of citizens. However, they also make clear that archives can be read subversively. With patience, counter-readings allow the excavation of the voices (sometimes names) of subaltern and otherwise suppressed others from the archive. By reading along and across the archival…
Looking Forward, Looking Back
This paper surveys the disparate literatures on time, and the relative paucity of metaphors available (based on spatial analogues or mirroring past and future onto one another). Parallels between approaches to the past and future are considered and different intellectual traditions surveyed in futurology, memory, history (chronotopes), archaeology and philosophy. Causation across time, how the past affects the present, how the future may affect p…
Pronouns and People
Divinatory Logics
This paper is about the logics of how practitioners and their clients use divination in their ongoing involvement with everyday life. It asks philosophical questions of the implications of praxis and suggests that the answers are not always what philosophers might expect. I distinguish two uses or aspects of divinatory usage: that concerned with the present or past, diagnosis, and that concerned with the future, prognosis or prediction. Divinator…
Professor Garfinkel Visits the Soothsayers
Reconstructing Kinship, or, the Pragmatics of Kin Talk
This article argues that kinship terminologies are best studied in their full linguistic context; the data should be collected from naturally occurring conversation rather than elicited with frames, and recognition must be given to the fact that people choose which expressions to use. Other means are available for talking to or about kin: in any language there are many ways of referring to people. These include the use of kin terms, names, nickna…
Understanding anthropological understanding
In this article I argue for a merological anthropology in which ideas of `partiality' and `practical adequacy' provide a way out of the impasse of relativism which is implied by postmodernism and the related abandonment of a concern with `truth'. Ideas such as `aptness' and `faithfulness' enable us to re-establish empirical foundations without having to espouse a simple realism which has been rightly criticized. Ideas taken from ethnomethodology,…
Social Networks and the Creation of the Pitt Rivers Museum
We consider how far different `networks of connection' have structured the relationships between curators, collectors and objects at the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University. Museum collections are generated through complicated, fluctuating circulations of people and things that are literally endless and, when there is a high standard of computerized documentation, network analysis can be a stimulating and revealing methodological tool. Networ…
Spiders in and out of Court, or, 'the long legs of the law
Both Banen and Mambila in Cameroon use spiders in divination. The intellectual practice of the divinatory technique is related to the different sociological contexts of divination. Relative freedom of interpretation and the posing of questions overnight among the Banen correlate with its political unimportance. Conversely among the Mambila the interpretation of the diviner is rule-bound, and many simple questions may be asked in quick succession.…
Finding Meaning in the Text
Some systems of divination are used to select particular sections of text, which are typically arcane and erudite, in which lies the answer to the particular, pressing problems of the client. Celebrated examples of such systems are the Chinese I Ching and the Yoruba Ifá. Werbner's work on Kalanga and Tswapong divination provides a case-study of the detailed praxis in such systems. Diviners have a multiple role when a divination technique selects …
African Crossroads
Chapter 1. The Catalyst: Chilver at the Crossroads S. Ardener Chapter 2. The Grassfields and the Tikar I. Fowler and D. Zeitlyn Chapter 3. The Person, Ethnicity and the Problem of Identity in West Africa R. Fardon Chapter 4. Political Relations and the Eastern Marches of Adamawa in the late 19th Century P. Burnham Chapter 5. Mythic Transformation and Historical Continuity: the Duala of Cameroon and German Colonialism, 1884-1914 R. A. Austen Chapt…
The Distribution of Person-Referring Expressions in Natural Conversation
(1995). The Distribution of Person-Referring Expressions in Natural Conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction: Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 61-92
Ethnogenesis and Fractal History on an African Frontier
This paper explores the notion of fractals – structures that display a similar degree of complexity at whatever scale they may be viewed – in relation to investigating African history. A case study of developing ethnicities in the Mambila region of the Nigeria–Cameroon borderland is presented from a fractal perspective: five levels of the history of this region, covering different time, population and physical scales, as well as different objects…
The Talk Goes Outside
In this paper the sociological implications of loud argument are considered, by taking a case study from the Mambila in Cameroon. Meetings of rotating credit societies are non-traditional forums where power and status are in dispute. These meetings contrast with both domestic arguments and with disputes held in the Chief's court. Rotating credit society meetings usually include arguments but these are dismissed as being unimportant by local infor…
Ritual, fusion, and conflict
Herder–farmer conflicts in West Africa have caused thousands of deaths in recent years. Many conflicts are triggered by localized events that rapidly spiral out of control. What leads specific interpersonal conflicts to scale up into intergroup violence? We propose that such conflicts are rooted in identity and ritual dynamics. We present evidence that participants in Mambila traditions of masquerade initiation in Cameroon report especially stron…
Haunting, Dutching, and Interference
I consider three ways of thinking about time, especially the future, that are new to anthropology. The concepts of interference and haunting illuminate how pasts and futures interact so that consideration of "historicity" needs to be complemented by "futuricity." Discussion of promissory notes and Dutch betting (hedging bets) prompts reassessment of forward planning, including prophecy and prediction. Scenario planning is viewed as a way of "dutc…
Sex-Specific Genetic Data Support One of Two Alternative Versions of the Foundation of the Ruling Dynasty of the Nso′ in Cameroon
Sex-specific genetic data favor a specific variant of the oral history of the kingdom of Nso' (a Grassfields city-state in Cameroon) in which the royal family traces its descent from a founding ancestress who married into an autochthonous hunter-gatherer group. The distributions of Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA variation in the Nso' in general and in the ruling dynasty in particular are consistent with specific Nso' marriage practices, sugge…
The Documentary Impulse
A wide variety of documents exist in Cameroonian rural villages, few of which are likely to be preserved since many are not perceived as being worthy of long-term conservation as well as being vulnerable to damp, termites, and to recycling in the form of cigarette or wrapping paper. In this paper I consider the information contained in the different types of written record and how they interrelate. In a companion piece (Zeitlyn mss) I continue to…
Kingdom on Mount Cameroon
Archaeological Evidence for Population Rise and Collapse between ~2500 and ~500 cal. yr BP in Western Central Africa
Des études paléoenvironnementales antérieures ont montré que des changements majeurs de la végétation et de l’environnement se sont produits en Afrique centrale à partir de l’Holocène moyen (ex. Maley & Brenac 1998). Plusieurs d’entre elles mettent en évidence une origine humaine et supposent que les grandes migrations de population, les innovations techniques (par exemple, la technologie de la fonte du fer) et/ou de nouveaux choix dans les prati…
Photo History by Numbers
In this paper I provide baseline estimates for the scale of black-and-white photography as a locally run, commercial undertaking in Cameroon both before and after independence. In categorizing, starting with short 19th and 20th centuries, I end by suggesting a better division is between an era of Colonial Photography (roughly 1865-1955) and a shorter period of larger-scale Administrative Photography (1955-1985), the so-called "Golden Age of the S…
Ethno-Ornithology of the Mushere of Nigeria
Mushere children’s ethno-ornithology was surveyed from October to November 2015 to find out their level of bird knowledge—as well as whether and how children valued and learned about birds—in order to determine the potential role such knowledge might play in Mushere biodiversity conservation. Methods included picture elicitation exercises, free-listing, and semi-structured interviews. Our results revealed a limited knowledge of birds in Mushere c…
Diary Evidence for Political Competition
An examination of personal diaries kept by Mambila people in Somié village, Cameroon, shows that everyday occurrences and small events, whose importance may have been overlooked at the time and which were forgotten soon after they took place, can be understood, in retrospect, as part of a larger struggle for power in a small Cameroonian chieftancy. This article examines the written accounts of some of these events in the context of diary narrativ…
Representation/Self-representation
The problem of representation is profound for anthropology: how do representation and represented relate? What motivates or warrants bridges over the inevitable disconnection between the two? I suggest that photographs and portraits provide a rich basis for thinking about the particular sorts of warrant for anthropological representation. My most general suggestion is that anthropological representation may be conceived of as a form of portraitur…
Photographic Props / The Photographer as Prop
The paper explores the way in which a Cameroonian studio photographer, Jacques Touselle, used props and how he chose to present himself in the course of a forty year career as the first indigenous photographer from Mbouda, a town in Cameroon’s West Region (former West Province). As well as providing photographs for routine administrative purposes such as ID cards, the studio photographers took many different ‘photos de plaisir’: images for fun. L…
God, Shrines and Problem-Solving among the Anufo of Northern Ghana
Professor Garfinkel Visits the Soothsayers
Creativity of Power
Un fragment de l'histoire des Mambila
Zeitlyn David. Un fragment de l'histoire des Mambila : un texte de Duabang. In: Journal des africanistes, 1992, tome 62, fascicule 1. pp. 135-150
Pronouns and People
Ways of Speaking, Ways of Knowing
Ethno-Logic
Reconstructing Kinship, or, the Pragmatics of Kin Talk
This article argues that kinship terminologies are best studied in their full linguistic context; the data should be collected from naturally occurring conversation rather than elicited with frames, and recognition must be given to the fact that people choose which expressions to use. Other means are available for talking to or about kin: in any language there are many ways of referring to people. These include the use of kin terms, names, nickna…
Spiders in and out of Court, or, 'the long legs of the law
Both Banen and Mambila in Cameroon use spiders in divination. The intellectual practice of the divinatory technique is related to the different sociological contexts of divination. Relative freedom of interpretation and the posing of questions overnight among the Banen correlate with its political unimportance. Conversely among the Mambila the interpretation of the diviner is rule-bound, and many simple questions may be asked in quick succession.…
Mambila Figurines and Masquerades
Film reviews
Frozen tombs of Siberia The Mystery of the Frozen Tombs of Siberia. Directed by Françoise Lévie; camera, Sacha Wiernik; sound, Sarah Moon Howe; editing, Michèle Maquet; produced by Sofidoc Production. 1994,26 minutes, color and black & white, English narration. Imbalu, a ritual of manhood Imbalu: Ritual of Manhood of the Bagisu of Uganda. A film by Richard Hawkins and Suzette Heald; director: Richard Hawkins; camera: David and Judith MacDougall; …
The Distribution of Person-Referring Expressions in Natural Conversation
(1995). The Distribution of Person-Referring Expressions in Natural Conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction: Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 61-92
The CHILDES Project
African Crossroads
What Are They Doing? Dilemmas in Analyzing Bibliographic Searching
This paper presents provisional results from research into the uses and usefulness of electronic bibliographic databases in academic contexts. The research has been carried out as part of a British Library funded research project using ethnographic, focus group and conversation analytic techniques. Here we address the question: What can different varieties of ethnography and discourse analysis contribute to our understanding of organizational and…
Sua in Somie
Objects
Information Technology and Anthropology
La technologie de l'information entraine des changements en anthropologie que ce soit dans la collecte, la transmission et la publication des donnees, dans la methodologie et l'analyse, dans la relation interdisciplinaire mais aussi dans le sujet anthropologique en modifiant les concepts de recherche sur le terrain
Sua in Somie. Aspects of Mambila Traditional Religion
Sua in Somie
Kingdom on Mount Cameroon
African Crossroads
Chapter 1. The Catalyst: Chilver at the Crossroads S. Ardener Chapter 2. The Grassfields and the Tikar I. Fowler and D. Zeitlyn Chapter 3. The Person, Ethnicity and the Problem of Identity in West Africa R. Fardon Chapter 4. Political Relations and the Eastern Marches of Adamawa in the late 19th Century P. Burnham Chapter 5. Mythic Transformation and Historical Continuity: the Duala of Cameroon and German Colonialism, 1884-1914 R. A. Austen Chapt…
Mambila Demography from Archival Sources
This paper provides a first report of a study of the population of Somié, a Mambila village in Cameroun, which seeks to explore ways of linking microdemographic analysis and the results of anthropological research. We have sought ways in which we can analyze in a common frame genealogical data, residence patterns, and other data from anthropological fieldwork, together with census returns and archival materials. By combining the details of kinshi…
Democratization and Modernization in a Multilingual Cameroon (review)
Asuagbor, Greg O. 1998. Democratization and Modernization in a Multilingual Cameroon. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen. ix+206 pp. No price given
Njerep a postcard from the edge
Kunama has been reported by different scholars as having two or three tones, downstep (or not), contrastive length of both consonants and vowels, and lexical stress. Despite this range of reported phenomena, little in-depth research into the prosodic system of Kunama has been undertaken. The aim of the present study is to report such a detailed investigation and to establish on a solid footing basic aspects of the tonal system of Kunama. The work…
Sociology (49 obras) · Philosophy (34 obras) · Computer Science (33 obras) · History (31 obras) · Art (26 obras) · Anthropology (21 obras) · Epistemology (21 obras) · History (21 obras) · Philosophy (21 obras) · Political science (19 obras)