The Virtual Institute of Mambila Studies
The Virtual Institute of Mambila Studies seeks to collate and
connect the different research and researchers with an interest
in the Mambila people of the Nigeria - Cameroon borderland and
their neighbours; their languages and the area in which they
live. We take a broad view of Mambila, including other groups
speaking related languages such as Kwanja, Vute, Wawa, Nizaa,
Njerep (3 speakers at last count!) Twendi (35 speakers), Tep, and
others. Our research is primarily of an anthropological and
linguistic nature; abstracts or full texts of papers are
available at the site. The currently available work includes
reports on Zeitlyn's research on kinship and language and his
annotated version of Meek's early ethnological work in the
region, and Connell's comparative linguistic research and work on
tone realization in Mambila, as well as a full bibliography of
anthropological, linguistic, and related research on Mambila.
VIMS was established by David Zeitlyn (anthropology) and Bruce
Connell (linguistics). We would welcome your comments addresses
below.
The following inline image acts as a link to photographs of
the "Physical Institute of Mambila Studies" in Somié,
Cameroon which has been the base for much of this research.
The work of a cooperative group
doing reforestation work in the area around Somié
Online fulltext now available. With the permission of the publisher we now include
the pdf of the following publication:
David Zeitlyn N. Mial & C. Mbe, Trois Etudes sur les Mambila de Somié, Cameroun,
Groupe de Recherches sur l'Afrique Francophone, Boston, Mass., 2000. (download size 4.7 MB)
A Somié produced video of "Women's sua in Somié 2012" is now
available online.
Pages of historical
documents captured as jpeg image files
Notes and images from
essays written by Mambila geography students in Mubi in the
1970s
2006-2009 Documentation of
endangered languages and cultures in the Nigeria-Cameroon
borderland
A Kent Anthropology MSc in
Ethnobotany, 2009 "Sharing Knowledge Intra-cultural variation
of ethnobotanical knowledge and the factors that pattern it in a
Mambila community in the Cameroon-Nigeria borderland"
A diary written during fieldwork in
late 2003-early 2004
Cameroonian Studio Photography
I have been undertaking research with several Cameroonian
Studio Photograhers (some covering Mambila villages but others in the
Bamiléké area)
Archiving a
photographic studio in Mbouda, West Province (now Region)
The work of Samuel
Finlak and Joseph Chila
Exhibition of of
Samuel Finlak and Joseph Chila
Long List for
the Samuel Finlak and Joseph Chila show
2003/4 Evans Pritchard Lectures
In autumn 2003 David
Zeitlyn gave the 2003/4
Evans Pritchard Lectures, All Souls College, Oxford: Sample of One: The
life of Diko Madeleine and the History of Somié in the
Twentieth Century Sound Recordings and background material is available online
from the Diko Web pages
Words and Processes in Mambila Kinship
Monograph
published in 2005.
Words and Processes in Mambila Kinship: the Theoretical
Importance of the Complexity of Everyday Life.
Contents
| Preface |
ix |
| Part One |
| Chapter One: Introduction |
3 |
| Chapter Two: Reconstructing Kinship: The Pragmatics of
Kin Talk |
13 |
| Chapter Three: The Implicatures of Everyday Life: Mambila
Social Deixis |
39 |
| Chapter Four: Asking about People, Not about Kin
Terms |
57 |
| Chapter Five: Translation, Anthropology, Kinship |
85 |
| Chapter Six: The Ethnography of a Mambila
Conversation |
103 |
| Chapter Seven: A Conversation in Somie |
115 |
| Part Two |
| Chapter Eight: Person Referring Expressions in Natural
Conversation |
155 |
| Chapter Nine: Summing up Kin Talk |
183 |
| Chapter Ten: Conclusions |
207 |
| Appendix |
211 |
| Bibliography |
217 |
| Index |
237 |
With permission of the publisher the introductory chapter
is available to download
Other researchers known to be working on Mambila and related
groups
- Roger Blench, Linguist, Cambridge Institute for the Study
of Pacific and African Languages
- Mona Perrin Linguist, SIL.
- Dr Quentin Gausset, former research student in
anthropology, Université Libre de Bruxelles, currently
teaching in Copenhagen. Email =
quentin.gausset@mail1.anthro.ku.dk
- Professor Charles Frantz, U. Penn, Philadelphia
- Rolf Theil Edresen, University of Oslo, Norway
- Gladys Guarisma, LACITO, Paris
- Raymond Boyd CNRS, Paris
- Jim and Marta Wade, University of Maiduguri, Nigeria
Research projects currently underway or completed
- Mambila Nggwun - the
construction and deployment of multiple meanings in
ritual
- The Mambila riddle machine - an
interactive introduction to Mambila riddles
-
Work on Mambila Divination, NB Including a Java-based
simulation of Spider Divination
-
A Day in the Life... Somié Village, Province de
l'Adamaoua, Cameroon A series of video clips that were
taken at approximately one hour intervals throughout the period
6am-7pm of Wednesday 21 April 1999.
- A preliminary report of linguistic fieldwork undertaken in
Jan 1999 by Connell and Blench: including news of two previously undocumented
languages
-
Bruce Connell ESRC funded Comparative survey of
Mambila dialects
Results of this project:
- Voices from the
Grave: Dying languages and the complexity of the Mambiloid
group - abstract
- Four tones and
downtrend: a preliminary report on pitch realization in
Mambila, a language with four level tones A revised
version of a paper presented to the 27th ACAL, University
of Florida, Gainesville, 29-31 Mar 1996 and the LAGB,
University of Sussex, Brighton, 11-13 Apr 1996.
- The Roots of
Mambila: Convergence and divergence in the development
of Mambila Text of a paper presented at the
26th Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics,
Leiden, The Netherlands, Sept. 5-7 1996.
- Mambila
Fricative Vowels a paper presented at ACAL 28, Cornell
University, July 11-13 1997 to appear in Carstens, Vicki
(ed.) Proceedings of ACAL 28
- THE INTEGRITY OF
MAMBILOID a paper presented at the Second World
Congress of African Linguistics, Leipzig, July 27 - August
3 1997.
- MORIBUND
LANGUAGES OF THE NIGERIA-CAMEROON BORDERLAND a paper
presented at the Symposium on Language Endangerment in
Africa Leipzig, July 29 - 31, 1997
- David Zeitlyn: Pilot Project: exploratory research on
archival sources for Mambila demography. Period supported: 1
Sept 1997-30 Nov 1998 Funded by the Wellcome Trust (ref no.
051191).
- David Zeitlyn Kinship and language: a computer-aided study
of social deixis
in conversation. A project funded by the ESRC (UK) R000 23
3311
Results of this project:
Data on Mambila can be found at the
following locations:
Other related material
The works of Professor Farnham Rehfisch
The late
Professor Farnham Rehfisch was the first anthropologist to
conduct protracted field work among the Mambila (in 1953/4), and
with the kind permission of his widow, Mrs A. Rehfisch, his
material on Mambila (published and un-published) is being made
available. This starts with a short
bibliography of his work from where you can find the full
text of some of his articles.
The articles and fieldnotes are now available online
Links to other related sites:
Send Email to Bruce
Connell.
EMail David Zeitlyn
More information about David Zeitlyn,
Bibliography of David Zeitlyn NB this
is no longer updated. For recent publications see the Oxford
webpage above
Professor of Social Anthropology (research)
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology,
School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography,
51 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PE, UK
Created July 1995, last modified 7 May 2013
Link to David Zeitlyn
Personal webpages
these contain material from Jonathan Zeitlyn, a scanned photo
album from Rugeley and did have Alice Zeitlyn's 1988 thesis "MATURE
STUDENTS in HIGHER EDUCATION: the Career of a Cohort of Mature
Students in a Public Sector Institution." (now archived at
ARRO