The Human Relations Area Files at Yale University has enjoyed a wonderful year in celebration of HRAF’s 75th Anniversary. On February 26, 1949, delegates from Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Washington, and Yale University met in New Haven, Connecticut to pledge their membership in a nonprofit research organization to be based at Yale. On May 7, 1949, the Human Relations Area Files was formally established as an independent non-profit membership organization.
HRAF began with a small group of universities and has expanded to over 500 members around the world. While much has changed, including the transition to digital format and the production of an archaeological collection, our core mission remains the same: to promote understanding of cultural diversity and commonality in the past and present.
Yale’s Institute of Human Relations
In the 1930s, behavioral scientists at Yale’s Institute of Human Relations (IHR) started to develop a collection of cultural materials classified by subject at the paragraph-level, enabling quick access to the contents. The original idea for the finely subject-indexed collection of ethnography came from a pilot project called the Cross-Cultural Survey that began at IHR.
Here are some of the highlights of our anniversary year:
Anniversary Celebration
On May 7, 2024, the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University hosted a celebration in honor of our 75th anniversary. The HRAF Board of Sponsoring Members, past participants from the HRAF Summer Institutes for Cross-Cultural Anthropological Research, researchers and faculty members 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, a video from Board Chairman Glenn Storey, and a fun game of HRAF Jeoparody. After the virtual celebration, staff members at the HRAF office in New Haven, Connecticut enjoyed a birthday cake featuring the HRAF 75th Anniversary logo.
Friends of HRAF
In celebration of HRAF’s 75th anniversary, our $75 for 75 Campaign invited supporters to make a $75 contribution. For a limited time, donors who made gifts of $75 or more received a HRAF tote bag. Donors were asked to contribute to HRAF in the following ways:
$49 to celebrate our Founding Year of 1949
$75 to celebrate our 75th Anniversary
$200 to join the Founders Circle
$500 or more to join the Benefactors Society
Video Recordings
In honor of our anniversary, HRAF created a series of 12 videos with individuals sharing their appreciation for HRAF and discussing how they have used our resources for research and teaching. Over the past year, these videos have been featured in our monthly newsletters.
These videos included: Brea McCauley (May 2024), Timothy Earle (June 2024), Fiona Jordan (July 2024), Zach Garfield (August 2024), Amber Johnson (September 2024), Václav Hrnčíř (October 2024), Sheina Lew-Levy (December 2024), Irene Glasser (January 2025), Manvir Singh (February 2025), Michele Gelfand (March 2025), John Millhauser (April 2025), and H. Russell Bernard (May 2025). All the videos can be found here.
Both Timothy Earle and Russ Bernard were long-time HRAF Board Members who also served on the Executive Committee (and Russ Bernard was Chairman of the Board for two terms). Amber Johnson related the story about how Lewis Binford became the only individual member of the paper files when he got all the hunter-gatherer materials. Irene Glasser and John Millhauser primarily described how they use eHRAF in teaching. Three of the videos were with HRAF Summer Institute participants: Fiona Jordan was a co-PI of the Summer Institute grant and co-instructor; and Brea McCauley and Václav Hrnčíř, Summer Institute participants, talked about their research using eHRAF. Zach Garfield, Sheina Lew-Levy, and Manvir Singh (as well as Fiona Jordan) not only talked about how eHRAF shaped their thinking and research projects, but also how they encourage students to use our resources. Finally, Michele Gelfand, a cross-cultural psychologist, talked about how she teamed up with us on two major grants to test ideas about cultural tightness in non-industrial societies.
Thank you to all who joined us this past year to celebrate HRAF’s 75th Anniversary!
Please celebrate our 75th Anniversary by making a donation to the Friends of HRAF.