Mark Moritz

Assistant Professor
Anthropology
4058 Smith Laboratory
614.247.7426
moritz.42@osu.edu  

Education
M.A., Cultural Anthropology, Leiden University, The Netherlands (1995)
Ph.D., Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles (2003)

Teaching/Research
Dr. Moritz's research focuses on the transformation of African pastoral systems. His research focuses on how FulBe pastoralists in the Far North Province of Cameroon have adapted to changing ecological, political and institutional conditions that affect their lives and livelihoods. His studies include herder-farmer conflicts, intensification of pastoral systems, and pastoral development. Recently, Mortiz has begun a new interdisciplinary study of complex social-ecological systems that is funded by the National Geographic Society and a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation.

Selected Publications
"Crop-Livestock Interactions in Agricultural and Pastoral Systems in West Africa," Agriculture and Human Values, forthcoming)

"Too Many People and Too Few Livestock in West Africa? An Evaluation of Sandford’s Thesis," with Britney Kyle, Kevin C. Nolan, Steve Patrick, Marnie F. Shaffer, and Gayatri Thampy (Journal of Development Studies, 2009)

"A Critical Examination of Honor Cultures and Herding Societies in Africa" (African Studies Review, 2008)

"Competing Paradigms in Pastoral Development? A Perspective from the Far North of Cameroon" (World Development, 2008)

"The Politics of Permanent Conflict: Farmer-Herder Conflicts in the Far North of Cameroon" (Canadian Journal of African Studies, 2006)

"Pastoralists' Responses to Floodplain Rehabilitation in Northern Cameroon," with Paul Scholte, Saïdou Kari and Herbert Prins (Human Ecology, 2006)

"FulBe Pastoralists and the Neo-Patrimonial State in the Chad Basin" (Geography Research Forum, 2005)

"Conflicts and Conflict Management in the Waza Logone Floodplain," in The Return of the Water, ed. by P. Loth (IUCN, 2004)

"Watching social interactions produces dorsomedial prefrontal and medial parietal BOLD fMRI signal increases compared to a resting baseline," with Marco Iacoboni, Matthew D. Lieberman, Barbara J. Knowlton, Istvan Molnar-Szakacs, C. Jason Throop, and Alan Page Fiske (NeuroImage, 2004)

"The Demise of the Nomadic Contract: Arrangements and Rangelands Under Pressure in the Far North of Cameroon," with Paul Scholte and Saïdou Kari (Nomadic Peoples, 2002)

Honors, Awards, and Service
National Science Foundation CAREER grant, "Pastoral Management of Open Access: The Emergence of a Complex Adaptive System" (2008)

National Science Foundation CAREER grant, "Pastoral Management of Open Access: The Emergence of a Complex Adaptive System" (2008)

National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration grant, "Managing Open Access: The Political Ecology of Pastoral Mobility" (2007)

Board Member, Society for Economic Anthropology (2006-09)

Member of the Scientific Committee of the Centre d'Appui à la Recherche et au Pastoralism (CARPA), Maroua, Cameroon (2006-)

NSF Summer Institute for Research Design in Cultural Anthropology (1998)

Mershon Projects
A Comparative Study of Herder-Farmer Conflicts in Africa (2009-10)