Cooperation and conflict, resource management, categorization and reasoning, language and cognition, ritual and belief, reputation systems, race and ethnicity, ethnobiology, kinship and land.

Latin America (Brazil and Mexico) and Central Asia (Kazakhstan)

Werner Hertzog is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at ISEK-Social and Cultural Anthropology. He specializes in cognitive anthropology and holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Vanderbilt University. His main research site is the Chiapas highlands, southern Mexico, where he has conducted fieldwork among the Tzotzil-Maya people since 2010. Previously, he worked in southern Brazil, while more recently he has bene doing fieldwork in Kazakhstan. Broadly, Dr. Hertzog studies the effect of modernization on various aspects of culture and cognition in agricultural societies. For his Ph.D., he researched the effect of social change on how Tzotzil-Maya communities cooperate and manage resources locally. His research is interdisciplinary, combining qualitative and quantitative methods from anthropology, the cognitive sciences, and economics. Some of his other research projects in Mexico have focused on essentialism and ethnic identity, Tzotzil-Maya animism and religious change, Maya humoral medicine, and ritual and reputation economies in Maya communities. Since 2022, Dr. Hertzog has been doing research on land use and distribution among farmers of the Zhetysu region—southeastern Kazakhstan.