Evolutionary Anthropologist &
Behavioral Scientist
Zachary H. Garfield
Zachary H. Garfield
Our species cooperates at scales that no other animal approaches, enabled by our evolved psychology and expressed through norms, institutions, and hierarchies that coordinate group members and punish free riders. I study how these mechanisms emerge and vary across societies, drawing on two complementary methods: long-term ethnographic fieldwork in southwest Ethiopia and cross-cultural datasets built from the global ethnographic record, both integrated through computational modeling.
Incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Grinnell College.
Co-Director, Omo Valley Research Project.
Research
Full program →Leadership & Coordination
How communities decide who leads, and what leaders actually do. The Multi-Capital Leadership Theory draws on fieldwork across subsistence societies.
02Norms & Cultural Transmission
How cooperative norms are enforced, taught, and stabilized across generations. Leaders as central agents in cultural transmission.
03Social Networks & Risk
How individual relationships scale into network structures shaping coordination and conflict. Ties form across ethnic and gender lines even under pressure.
04Health & Inequality
How social position translates into differential health outcomes as communities navigate rapid socio-economic transition. A biosocial dataset links livelihoods to physiological well-being across the Omo Valley.
Recent Work
All publications →2025
Teaching is associated with the transmission of opaque culture and leadership across 23 egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies
Garfield, Z. H., & Lew-Levy, S.
Nature Communications
Fieldwork
Since 2015, I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in southwest Ethiopia, first among the Chabu forager-horticulturalists of the Sheka Forest, and since 2019 across four Omo Valley communities (Hamar, Kara, Kwegu, Nyangatom) through the Omo Valley Research Project. The project combines censuses of 2,600+ households with social network data, health measures, and longitudinal psychological, social, and demographic records.
