HRAF 2024 in Review & 2025 Preview

Year in Review against a blue background with numbered blocks

Francine Barone

It’s time for our annual Year in Review. This article will summarize HRAF’s activities from the previous year as well as describe what you can expect to see from us over the next 12 months.

HRAF at 75

HRAF Celebrating 75 YearsThank you to all of our members and supporters for helping HRAF to mark its 75th anniversary in 2024. The Human Relations Area Files has been a financially autonomous research agency based at Yale University since 1949.

We celebrated by hosting a 75th Anniversary Celebration on May 7, 2024. The HRAF Board of Sponsoring Members, past participants from the HRAF Summer Institutes for Cross-Cultural Anthropological Research, faculty members and researchers featured in our 75th Anniversary videos, and HRAF staff members gathered on Zoom for a virtual celebration. The celebration included opening remarks from President Carol Ember and a video from Board Chairman Glenn Storey. Throughout 2024, video recordings featuring researchers including Irene Glasser, Sheina Lew-Levy, Václav Hrnčíř, Amber Johnson, Zach Garfield, Fiona Jordan, Timothy Earle and Brea McCauley were added to our YouTube playlist. Thank you for your support!

Culture & Tradition Updates

Collection Updates with file cabinets in the background

A popular annual request from our members is for more information about how we are growing our culture and tradition collections in the eHRAF databases. Click here for a summary of what cultures and traditions we added or updated in 2024, as well as what we will be analyzing for eHRAF World Cultures or eHRAF Archaeology throughout 2025.

eHRAF Updates

Database updates with location map screenshot from eHRAF

Every year, HRAF’s Engineering team works tirelessly behind the scenes to keep eHRAF running, respond to user requests, and add and update features. Some of the myriad updates made to eHRAF in 2024 include the ability to Browse Cultures in eHRAF by locating them on a map. Users can now also print document pages from search results.

One of the most notable enhancements is the Advanced Search history. A user’s 10 most recent advanced searches are now stored in the browser’s history for easy replication and modification. Stored searches are displayed in a table below the Advanced Search form. This feature is especially useful for tracking your search history as well as recreating searches containing several cultures, OCM subject identifiers and combinations of keywords, as users can now return more easily to past searches to follow up or compare results.

Also in 2024, HRAF expanded Unicode support for phonetic transcription systems. Code points points used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), Americanist Phonetic Alphabet (APA), and the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA) are now searchable in newly published collections. The tilde (~) operator can also be input into the keywords and/or search box to allow fuzzy searching. Learn more about search syntax in eHRAF here.

New eHRAF World Cultures tutorial videos are available in the eHRAF Tutorials Playlist on the HRAF YouTube Channel. Each video shows a step-by-step guide to using the database features, helping users get the most out of every search. The videos cover a wide range of eHRAF database functions, including how to perform a basic search, how to perform an advanced search, how to filter searches, and how to browse culture collections.

Our first feature preview for 2025 is the addition of a message to the user indicating the source of their eHRAF access. Member librarians will be pleased to learn that this message doubles as institutional branding: it presents the name of the member library or institution granting access to the user.

If you would like to explore eHRAF World Cultures and/or eHRAF Archaeology, but your academic institution is not yet a member, have your librarian contact us to apply for an IP trial.

Staff Updates

A retirement party scene: a man speaks beside a skeleton in a chair, a decorated cake with "Happy Retirement Ian," and attendees gathered near a doorway indoors.

In August, HRAF announced the retirement of Research Anthropologist Ian Skoggard, a longtime member of our staff. Over the course of his 28 years at HRAF, Ian indexed 1,397 ethnographic documents and authored 21 culture summaries appearing in the eHRAF World Cultures database. Ian is not only an excellent analyst, but he also worked on encyclopedias and as a researcher on several grant projects. He co-edited the Encyclopedia of World Cultures Supplement and the Encyclopedia of Diasporas. In addition to his intellectual contributions, Ian’s colleagues admire his commitment to some of the most important human values—treating others with decency and respect, whether in the HRAF workplace or in the broader community. We are pleased to note that he will continue to contribute to our ongoing research projects as well as writing on topics close to his interests in academia and community, science, and religion after his “official” retirement. Please join us in celebrating his contributions to anthropology and to the Human Relations Area Files, and in wishing Ian the very best for his well-earned retirement.

In addition to Ian, we said farewell to Anj Droe, former HRAF Research Assistant and Melvin Ember Intern, who is doing his graduate studies in social work at the University of Connecticut; and Cynthiann Heckelsmiller, whose time working on our 2022 grant project on natural hazards came to an end. Please join us in wishing them both well in their future endeavors.

Also in 2024, HRAF welcomed two new Melvin Ember Interns to our team: Seb Wang Gaouette and Jackie Heitmann.

Best of 2024

Top Content with social media "heart" icons

The Top 5 most popular teaching activities in 2024 were Relative and Absolute Dating Methods in Archaeology; An Introduction to Fieldwork and Ethnography; Reciprocity & Exchange: The Kula Ring; and Language, Culture & Society by Dr. Francine Barone (HRAF) and Ethnography and Ethnology in Anthropology by Dr. Diana Shandy (Macalester College).

The top five articles on our homepage throughout 2024 were:

As we begin 2025, HRAF has decided to no longer publish on the X Platform (formerly Twitter). You can now find us on Bluesky @hraf755.bsky.social. You can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

HRAF Research & Publications

Research Updates with magnifying glasses

HRAF features a selection of the latest research in the HRAF Academic Quarterly. It is hoped that this new series will assist in showcasing eHRAF-based cross-cultural research as well as promoting and disseminating findings from researchers at our member institutions. Each Quarterly also includes updates on publications and conference papers from HRAF researchers throughout the year.

In 2024, 52 publications and papers were featured. You can read them here:

Sign up here to be notified of new issues when they are published. If you would like your research based on eHRAF or HRAF data to be featured in the next edition, contact Francine Barone.

Explaining Human Culture

A new summary module, Status and Role of the Elderly, was published in Explaining Human Culture (EHC), our open access database of cross-cultural studies. Teaching exercises intended to be used in conjunction with the summary module have also been published in Teaching eHRAF.

EHC aims to help scholars search for previous cross-cultural studies on topics of interest as well as to provide overviews of topics for which we have a considerable body of research. The EHC database, now containing over 1,200 reports, summarizes the purpose of each study, the hypotheses tested, whether the hypotheses are supported or not, the important variables in the study and the subject-categories in eHRAF that may apply to these variables. The Status and Role of the Elderly topical summary joins others covering the life cycle — Childhood and Adolescence. Every topical summary also includes a section on what is not yet known in order to stimulate further research.

Conferences & Events

In January 2024, HRAF Anthropologist Ian Skoggard attended the International Institute of Love Studies’ first conference in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. The theme of the conference was “Towards Research-Based Knowledge of Love.” Ian’s full presentation, “Representations of the Love Act across Cultures” is now available on YouTube. The paper discusses ritual and utilitarian objects from several cultures which combine sexual imagery to evoke, he argues, memories of lovemaking. You can also read Ian’s reflections on attending the conference here.

HRAF staff members Ian Skoggard and Samantha King presented their research at the 84th Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology in Santa Fe, Arizona.

Leon Doyon and Matthew Longcore exhibited at the Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana in April. In June, HRAF attended the Royal Anthropological Institute conference at the University of London. HRAF staff members Matthew Longcore and Amanda Wescott exhibited at the booth for HRAF. Additionally, Matthew Longcore and Michael Fischer presented Teaching Anthropology Globally with HRAF Resources. The authors of the presentation are Francine Barone, Ben Kluga, Matthew Longcore, Michael Fischer, and Carol R. Ember. HRAF again returned to the exhibition hall at the American Sociological Association meeting in Montreal, Canada in August.

Two women holding a tablet displaying the book title Eggonomics

Diane M. Tober receiving the Carol Ember Book Prize from Caitlyn Placek (Society for Anthropological Sciences)

Finally, we closed out an eventful year with the American Anthropological Association Annual meeting in Tampa, Florida. Vistors to the exhibitor’s booth received free trials, tote bags and exclusive discounts for attending. Several HRAF researchers presented in the panel “Cross-Cultural Studies of Societal Effects of Exogenous Forces” chaired by Ian Skoggard. Four papers discuss possible cultural transformations in response to natural hazards in a global sample. One methods paper describes recent measures of hazards, looking at hazard dimensions such as frequency, severity, predictability, or slow or fast-onset. Another methods paper describes how new digital methods used to analyze ethnographic text in eHRAF World Cultures may help identify cultural processes. Learn more about the panel and its papers here.

At the 2024 AAA Annual Meeting in Tampa, Florida the Society for Anthropological Sciences (SAS) presented the Carol R. Ember Book Prize to Diane M. Tober for her book Eggonomics: The Global Market in Human Eggs and the Donors Who Supply Them. Eggonomics explores the ethical and social implications of the global egg donation industry, examining how donors are often commodified and exploited in the pursuit of profit. Drawing on international anthropological fieldwork, it reveals the physical and emotional toll on donors, the role of eugenic selection in donor choice, and the impact of corporate capitalism on fertility medicine.

HRAF Membership Updates

Member updates with blocks and lines connecting networks

We warmly welcomed these new members to the HRAF family in 2024.

HRAF Global Scholars

We are pleased to announce the seven recipients of the HRAF Global Scholars Program for 2025. Please join us in congratulating the successful applicants whose eHRAF research we will feature throughout the year.

Stay in touch

As always, our Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and LinkedIn will keep you in the loop, but should you want to get first dibs on our latest announcements, remember to sign up for the HRAF newsletter and, for research updates, the HRAF Academic Quarterly.

Photo credits: Images via Canva Pro license.