fieldwork

I’ve conducted ethnographic fieldwork in southwest Ethiopia for over a decade, including among several distinct ethnolinguistic communities. My initial fieldwork was conducted among the Chabu forager-horticulturalists of the Sheka Forests, where I studied traditional and contemporary leadership among men and women in this relatively egalitarian society.

My fieldwork now centers on The Omo Valley Research Project (OVRP), which I co-founded with Luke Glowacki and now co-direct with him and Maud Mouginot. Since 2019, OVRP has run comparative and longitudinal social, biological, and health research across four ethnolinguistic communities in Ethiopia’s Omo Valley: Hamar, Kara, Kwegu, and Nyangatom. Despite their proximity, these communities differ across multiple dimensions: from the nomadic Nyangatom to the densely settled Kwegu, from villages with functioning clinics to others with no medical access, from sharply stratified communities to relatively flatter ones. These features don’t covary either: differences in one dimension rarely predict differences in another, which is what makes the region a useful comparative setting.

OVRP runs complete household censuses across all four communities, covering over 2,600 households and roughly 2,900 individuals. The dataset combines demographic and reproductive histories, household and individual economic profiles, behavioral observations, social status measures, longitudinal social network data, and health assessments. With Ethiopian epidemiologists and virologists, we’re expanding it to include biomarkers of stress and immune function.

OVRP is an interdisciplinary non-profit organization. It supports research on cultural change and human social organization, and it backs education and philanthropic work across southwest Ethiopia.

A core part of OVRP’s mission is supporting interdisciplinary research that draws on this longitudinal, cross-societal data. Many social scientists and adjacent researchers lack the access, knowledge, or capacity to run their own field projects, even though sample diversity remains a serious limitation across the social sciences. If you’re a researcher with questions that need a field context, get in touch.

AnthroCollect

AnthroCollect is a free, open-access data-collection app my co-PIs and I built for the realities of long-term, multi-community fieldwork. Built on ODK-X and tested over two years across our Omo Valley sites, it supports phonetic search to find participants when names are spelled inconsistently, photo-based verification, and persistent links between individuals and households that survive across surveys and seasons. We’ve also built an algorithmically driven, photo-based pairwise comparison tool to generate quantitative rankings of different types of traits, in order to facilitate, make more efficient, and standardize the photo-ranking methods commonly used by human behavioral ecologists.