Jump to content

Draft:David Zeitlyn

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

David Zeitlyn
Born1958 (age 65–66)
Cambridge, County: Cambridgeshire, England
Alma mater
Occupations
  • Anthropologist
  • Sociolinguist
  • Photo Historian
Notable work
Websitewww.mambila.info

David Zeitlyn,FRAI (born 1958) is a British anthropologist. He is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford, and a supernumerary-Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. His research has concentrated on the Mambila People of Cameroon, endangered languages and Cameroonian photographers such as Samuel Finlak, Joseph Chila and the late Jacques Toussele. Working on anthropological archives has led him to write on the ethics of archiving fieldwork data, and he has helped revise the ASA ethical guidelines for anthropology.


Early life and education

[edit]

David Zeitlyn was born in 1958 in Cambridge, England. He was educated at the The Perse School, Cambridge. He studied physics and philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford, before converting to anthropology by taking an anthropology Masters degree at The London School of Economics and Political Science. He received his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 1990 supervised by Esther Goody. His thesis was "Mambila Traditional Religion: Sua in Somié" [1].

Professional career

[edit]

After a stipendiary postdoc 1988-1991 at Wolfson College, Oxford Zeitlyn had a British Academy fellowship also at Wolfson 1992-1995. Following that, after a brief spell as the inaugural IT officer at the Pitt Rivers Museum at which time he developed a networked catalog using a relational database system [2]


in 1995 Zeitlyn moved to the University of Kent at Canterbury as Lecturer in Social Anthropology, in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology.

By 2007 he was Professor of Anthropology there [3]


In 2010 he moved to the University of Oxford as a part-time Professor of Social Anthropology. [4]


As well as his ongoing research in Cameroon mainly with Mambila People Zeitlyn has been involved in ways of using the Internet to make material available since before the web was invented.

His first internet publication used Gopher to make (probably) the first sound recordings of a non- Indo-European language available online.[5]

At the University of Kent Zeitlyn worked with Mike Fischer to develop the Centre of Social Anthropology and Computing (CSAC) on a variety of projects. These include the website (one of the first 400) originally at "lucy.ukc.ac.uk" and now archived at the internet archive [6] (covering 1999-2019 - the earliest versions seems not to have survived).

The CSAC vision as developed over the years was to make a wide range of research materials available for others to be able to use in various ways. This started with teaching: they wanted students to be able to see more of what the teaching staff-as- researchers had dealt with and synthesised into the articles and books which were the staple stuff of reading lists. This turned into a large project <Experience Rich Anthropology> the results of which are still online ([7]. One thing that did not loom large was copyright and issues of licences although it became an issue for ERA which was established before CC licenses were available.

In 1995 he was appointed as Hon. Editor of the RAI's [8] and was concerned behind the scenes with some of the quiet, unseen and unacknowledged work to index and make work discoverable.

He also served for many years on the ESRC Resources Board [9] which was funding

a) the Social Science Data archive (now renamed as the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex which included the qualidata archive and

b) some of the development of eSocial Science.

This led to his attending a technology conference in Harvard when Linux was in its heyday and Richard Stallman was preaching his millenarian message about open source software. Provoked by Eric Redmond’s use of Marcel Mauss in his 'Cathedral and the Bazaar' piece (1997) (See The Cathedral and the Bazaar) he wrote a highly cited paper that was in an early, formally-open, special issue: "Gift economies in the development of open source software." [10]

His work on archives and ethics has led to some open access articles: Archiving ethnography? [11]

For Augustinian archival openness [12]


Following a workshop in Yaoundé, Cameroon in 2013 he founded an online journal with two Cameroonian colleagues Vestiges: Traces of Record[13] This is peer reviewed and is published open access with no publishing fees. The journal is listed in DOAJ. ISSN: 2058-1963.

Honours and other notable activities

[edit]

2003-4 he was elected to be the Evans-Pritchard Lecturer, All Souls College Oxford.

In 2017 he was invited to participate in the Science Foo Camp where he talked about divination.

In 2021 (July-December) Zeitlyn was co-curator of an Exhibition at the Fowler Museum at UCLA "Photo Cameroon: Studio Portraiture 1970-1990s" Co-curated with Erica Jones. See [14] See Guardian feature on this show [15]

Before that he had been the organiser/curator of 'Cameroon- faces and places: a photographic exhibition by two Cameroonian photographers'

1. Curated by Dr David Zeitlyn and David Reason, British Council, Yaoundé, January 2004

2. National Portrait Gallery, London in Summer 2005 curated by NPG staff as [16] This was part of "Africa’05".

Evidence for academic notablity

[edit]

WP guidelines on Academic Notability say Academics meeting any one of the following conditions, as substantiated through reliable sources, are notable.

1. The person's research has had a significant impact in their scholarly discipline

See a review of his 2020 Mambila divination monograph: "The book, with its exceptional ambition and thorough ethnography, is essential for all social scientists studying divination."[17]

2. Prestigious academic awards

2003-4 he was elected to be the Evans-Pritchard Lecturer, All Souls College Oxford. See recording of lecture 1 [18]

He was winner of the 2023 Curl Essay Prize awarded by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland [19]


7 Substantial impact outside academia in their academic capacity. His collaboration with the artist Tomás_Saraceno was reflected in the summer 2023 exhibition in the Serpentine Gallery London See refs on the Saraceno page and the nggam du website [20]

Books

[edit]

Monographs

  • Aroney, Michelle; Zeitlyn, David (2024). Divination Oracles Omens. Bodleian Library Press. ISBN 9781851246335.
  • Zeitlyn, David (2022). An Anthropological Toolkit: Sixty Useful Concepts. Berghahn. ISBN 9781800735354.
  • Zeitlyn, David (2020). Mambila Divination: Framing Questions, Constructing Answers. Routledge. ISBN 9781032174082.
  • Banks, Marcus; Zeitlyn, David (2015). Visual Methods in Social Research. Second Edition London: Sage. ISBN 9781446269756.
  • Zeitlyn, David; Just, Roger (2014). Excursions in Realist Anthropology. A Merological Approach Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. ISBN 978-1-4438-6403-9.
  • Zeitlyn, David (2005). Words and Processes In Mambila Kinship: the Theoretical Importance of the Complexity of Everyday Life, Lexington Books (Rowman & Littlefield), Lanham, Maryland.
  • Zeitlyn, David (2001). Reading in the Modern World: Anthropological Perspectives on Writing and the Virtual World (CSAC Monographs Online 17). Archived from the original on 22 April 2004.
  • Zeitlyn, David; Mial, Nicodeme; Mbe, Charles (2000). Trois Études sur les Mambila de Somié, Cameroun (PDF). Groupe de Recherches sur l’Afrique Francophone, Boston, Mass.
  • Zeitlyn, David; Fischer, Mike (1999). Experience Rich Anthropology. Resource Guide and Sampler CD for teachers and Students. CSAC.
  • Zeitlyn, David; Bex, Jane; David, Matthew (1999). Knowledge Lost in Information, British Library Research and Information Group Research Report RIC/G/313. Office for Humanities Communication.
  • Zeitlyn, David; Fowler, Ian (1996). African Crossroads: Intersections between history and anthropology in Cameroon". Berghahn Books.
  • Zeitlyn, David (1994). Sua in Somié: Mambila Traditional Religion, Collectanea Instituti Anthropos v. 41. Academia Verlag. ISBN 978-3883453750.


References

[edit]
  1. ^ Mambila Traditional Religion: Sua in Somié, 1990
  2. ^ "David Zeitlynurl=https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/people/prof-david-zeitlyn".
  3. ^ "Professor David Zeitlyn".
  4. ^ "Annals: Departmental reports and staff listings. University of Oxford".
  5. ^ "Mambila Sound recording".
  6. ^ "CSAC".
  7. ^ "Experience Rich Anthropology".
  8. ^ "Anthropological Index Online".
  9. ^ "Economic & Social Research Council Annual Report 2005-06" (PDF).
  10. ^ Zeitlyn, David (2003). "Gift economies in the development of open source software: anthropological reflections". Research Policy. 32 (7): 1287–1291. doi:10.1016/S0048-7333(03)00053-2.
  11. ^ Zeitlyn, David (2022). "Archiving ethnography? The impossibility and the necessity. Damned if we do, damned if we don't". Ateliers d'Anthropologie. 51.
  12. ^ Zeitlyn, David (2021). "For Augustinian archival openness and laggardly sharing: trustworthy archiving and sharing of social science data from identifiable human subjects". Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics. 6 (63): 736568. doi:10.3389/frma.2021.736568. PMC 8552885. PMID 34723067.
  13. ^ "Vestiges: Traces of Recod".
  14. ^ {{cite web|url=https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/photo-cameroon/[[https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/photo-cameroon/}}
  15. ^ "Cameroon with a View".
  16. ^ ""Cameroon – London"".
  17. ^ Dianteill, E (2023). "Review of "Mambila Divination: Framing Questions, Constructing Answers", written by David Zeitlyn". International Journal of Divination and Prognostication. 4 (2): 167–170. doi:10.1163/25899201-bja10001.
  18. ^ "Evans-Pritchard Lecture".
  19. ^ "Curl Essay Prize Past Awards". Retrieved 30 September 2024.
  20. ^ [htpps://nggamdu.org/ "nggamdu.org"].
[edit]

University of Oxford departmental web page]


Identifiers

[edit]

Google Scholar profile: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=lYK4auAAAAAJæ ORCID Researcher id 0000-0001-5853-7351 Scopus Author ID 6602478625 ISNI: 0000 0001 2433 0782 VIAF ID: 22235364 Wikidata entry: Q28812542



Category:1958 births Category:Living people Category:People from Cambridge, England Category:People educated at the Perse School, Cambridge Category:Alumni of Wadham College, Oxford Category:Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge Category:British anthropologists Category:Fellows of Wolfson College, Oxford

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:David_Zeitlyn&oldid=1248997824"