Songs Across Cultures
Do songs share certain forms across the world? If you hear a song sung in an unfamiliar language, in a rhythm you’ve never heard before, can you still understand what it means? In a cross-cultural…
Category Archives: Feature
Explaining Human Culture: Altered States of Consciousness
Carol R. Ember has authored a summary of cross-cultural knowledge about Altered States of Consciousness for HRAF’s open access resource Explaining Human Culture. Nearly all societies are known to engage in practices that lead to…
Carved in Stone: Prehistoric Representative Art
In eHRAF Archaeology, you will find a collection of descriptive texts for prehistoric archaeological traditions from around the world. All of these texts are indexed with subjects based on the Outline of Cultural Materials (OCM), a vast…
Human Relations Area Files Timeline: 1949 – Present
FRAN BARONE / 17 SEP 2015 For over 60 years, Human Relations Area Files has served the educational community and contributed to an understanding of world cultures by assembling, indexing, and providing access to primary…
Sample syllabi and classroom exercises in Teaching eHRAF
Educators: Did you know that the HRAF website contains an open access collection of over 50 teaching exercises (sample syllabi) for classroom use that include questions and class assignments based on eHRAF World Cultures or…
Are Teens Troublemakers Across the World?
“Youth must go, ah yes. But youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal…But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot…
HRAF collaboration with D-PLACE
We are pleased to share information about the Human Relations Area Files’ collaboration with D-PLACE, the Database of Places, Language, Culture, and Environment. D-PLACE is an expandable and open-access database that brings together a dispersed…
eHRAF Archaeology: Inka of Peru
The Inka tradition extends from 800 to 400 BP. The original Inka homeland was the Cuzco valley of south-central Peru, but the Inka Empire eventually extended along the Andes from Columbia to northern Argentina and…
eHRAF Featured Country: Argentina
Over 400 cultures are represented across our collections in the eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF Archaeology databases. Did you know that you can browse our databases by country? Some countries in the world contain a…
eHRAF World Cultures: The Pashtun
The Pashtun inhabit southern and eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan. Their language is Pushto (Pashto), in the Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. Except for a small minority, they are Sunni Muslims. Until recently,…