Willem Church

Willem Church is a Researcher affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, specifically within the Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture. He is a member of the Lise-Meitner Group 'BirthRites', an independent research group focused on interdisciplinary anthropology. His work bridges socio-cultural anthropology, cultural evolution, and the philosophy of social science, with a regional specialization in Papua New Guinea and Melanesia.

Church’s research examines the interplay between individual behavior, social organization, and population-level outcomes. He employs both qualitative ethnographic methods and computational modeling to study social group dynamics, cultural identity, and collective action. His current projects include developing generative models to analyze demographic and cultural impacts of social structures, and integrating social ontology into formal cultural evolutionary theory to model intergroup dependencies.

Prior research included doctoral work on political/legal competition among indigenous groups in Papua New Guinea over customary land ownership of a mine site, focusing on how factional rivalry drives socio-political change. He emphasizes collaboration and is open to interdisciplinary dialogue.

His affiliation includes the BirthRites group at the Max Planck Institute, and he can be contacted via willem_church@eva.mpg.de.