Can you give some background to yourself, and how you became an anthropologist in the first place?

Well, I was born in 1958 in Cambridge and brought up there. I went to the Perse School (which incidentally is the origin of the name Free School Lane, where the Cambridge Anthropology Department is based). As an undergraduate I studied physics and philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford, where I first encountered anthropology indirectly from Rom Harré who taught the philosophy of science. I came to feel that I knew more about the structures of the atom than the structures of society (sorry: I know this comes across as portentous, and now, a long time afterwards, I am little better off – but a little nonetheless!). This led me to a conversion Masters degree in anthropology at the LSE.
After that I returned to Cambridge to study for a PhD supervised by Esther Goody. This was on “Mambila Traditional Religion”. I first went to Cameroon in 1985 and I have managed to continue going every year until COVID stopped travel.
I know you’ve asked about the deep background but to continue, as it were, talking you through my CV, I then had two successive postdocs at Oxford (a Wolfson College postdoc followed by a British Academy fellowship) before eventually being appointed as lecturer at the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1995. Continue reading “An interview with David Zeitlyn, author of An Anthropological Toolkit” →