Fieldwork

I co-founded the OVRP with Luke Glowacki and co-direct it with him and Maud Mouginot. Since 2019, OVRP has run comparative and longitudinal research across four ethnolinguistic communities in Ethiopia's Omo Valley.

Despite their proximity, these communities differ across multiple dimensions: from the semi-nomadic Nyangatom to the densely settled Kwegu, from villages with functioning clinics to others with no medical access, from sharply stratified communities to flatter ones. These features don't covary, which is what makes the region a useful comparative setting. At the same time, they share overlapping subsistence strategies and kinship-based social organization. They also share many of the same institutions for managing conflict, cooperation, and authority, which makes meaningful comparison possible in the first place.

OVRP runs complete household censuses across all four communities, covering over 2,600+ households and roughly 4,000 individuals. The dataset combines demographic and reproductive histories, household economic profiles, social status measures, longitudinal network data, and health assessments.