Zachary H. Garfield

Now is an extraordinary time to be a social scientist. As a species, we’re crossing a major transition. We’re witnessing the final stages of the agricultural and industrial revolutions unfolding in some of the most remote corners of the world. The subsistence lifestyle, where groups of families live together and cooperate to produce their own food, shaped who we are today. And it’s rapidly disappearing.

We have a narrow window to collect high-resolution empirical data among rural, subsistence-based communities. Data that can speak to some of our oldest questions about who we are. Alongside this work, we have an opportunity, and I’d argue an obligation, to serve as advocates for these communities as they navigate their changing worlds.

I’m an evolutionary anthropologist and interdisciplinary behavioral scientist. I’m an Assistant Professor at University Mohammed VI Polytechnic in Rabat, Morocco, jointly appointed to the Faculty of Governance, Economics, and Social Sciences and the Africa Institute for Research in Economics and Social Sciences. I was previously a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. I co-direct The Omo Valley Research Project, a non-profit doing scientific research and community development in southwest Ethiopia, and I write Ecology of Minds, a blog on how culture, context, and evolution shape behavior.

Research

I study the mechanisms of sociality underpinning human uniqueness, and how cooperation is organized and sustained in human societies. The work runs along four connected threads: leadership and coordination, norms and cultural transmission, social networks and risk buffering, and social position and health. I work at three scales: long-term ethnographic fieldwork in southwest Ethiopia, comparative analysis using global ethnographic databases, and computational modeling.

For the long story, check out the research, fieldwork, and scientific philosophy pages.

Get in touch

Email me if you want to talk about science, data, cultural diversity, or big questions about who we are as a species. Especially if you’re a student thinking about graduate work, a scientist with overlapping interests, or a journalist following any of these topics.