By Michael Kimball
Professor, Department of Anthropology
College of Humanities & Social Sciences
University of Northern Colorado
In 2016, as I was writing my interdisciplinary cultural anthropology textbook, Ethnowise, I needed ethnographic snippets to enhance its content and found them aplenty on eHRAF. This was the beginning of my eHRAF journey. About five years later, I received an announcement for HRAF’s 2022 Summer Institute for Cross-Cultural Anthropological Research, applied, and, in the company of an international cohort of extraordinary fellow students, embarked on a three-week eHRAF-based cross-cultural research design and data analysis program brilliantly led by HRAF’s Carol Ember, University of Bristol evolutionary and linguistic anthropologist, Fiona Jordan, and Cardiff University evolutionary psycholinguist, Sean Roberts.
Before we arrived on the Yale campus, we were asked to develop a research question intended to guide our independent projects. Mine was “What kinds of knowledge do Altered States of Consciousness (ASCs) produce?” I was interested in this question because the anthropological accounts I had read discussed ASCs in terms of their causes, ethnobotanical correlates, associated behaviors, possible biocultural evolutionary origins, etc., but I’d seen none that discussed their veridicality, i.e., their capacity to produce new knowledge that in some way informed a person’s experience and their community or society. I was sure there must be evidence somewhere in the ethnographic record to support or at least test this idea.
Unfortunately, my research question did not bear fruit—at least not during the Summer Institute. Nevertheless, there was other fruit in abundance: I learned how to navigate eHRAF, structure complex inquiries, conduct data collection and statistical analyses, and produce new knowledge related to a different, but related research question: “How does asceticism vary cross-culturally?”
A seed was planted. When I returned to the University of Northern Colorado (“the other UNC”), I began to incorporate eHRAF research into the curriculum for an undergraduate Honors class I teach called Culture & Consciousness. Thus, over the last three years I have experimented with research questions and pedagogical innovations to see how my students and I might learn more about consciousness through cross-cultural anthropological research.
This year I experienced a breakthrough. I wanted my students to present their research as a set of posters at UNC’s annual scholars and artists conference in April. The event was only about two months away. Therefore, I needed a project that could be accomplished relatively rapidly, which meant that I needed not only an eHRAF-friendly research question, but also a sort of template that my students—all of them undergraduates with no background in anthropological research—could follow to efficiently produce meaningful results.
In my flailing, I encountered historian of religion, Gregory Shushan’s 2024 paper in the International Review of Psychiatry, entitled “Diversity and similarity of near-death experiences across cultures and history: implications for the survival hypothesis,” which discussed veridicality, the very treasure for which I had been prospecting during my time at the HRAF Summer Institute. I then obtained Shushan’s 2018 book, Near-Death Experience in Indigenous Religions (Oxford University Press), which presents the results of his cross-cultural research into whether and how Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) occur in ethnographic accounts from three regions: North America, Africa, and Oceania. Therein I discovered the following passage:
I have also performed searches in the eHRAF World Cultures database—a collection of ethnographic materials representing over four hundred societies. Its categories include terms such as “notions of the temporary departure of the soul from the body,” “conception of the survival of the soul,” “career of the soul after death,” “mode of departure from the body,” “indefinite sojourn as a disembodied soul or ghost,” and “journey to a realm of the dead” (Shushan, 2018, p. 13).
With that lead in hand, I was able to track down corresponding HRAF Outline of Cultural Materials (OCM) subject codes for these categories (774 Animism, 775 Eschatology, 787 Revelation & Divination) and build a step-by-step research guide for my students that included analytical codes and testable hypotheses generated from Shushan’s work. I formed teams comprising pairs of student researchers and allocated a different region to each team: South America, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Middle America/Caribbean. My intrepid students then plunged into their research and in short order examined a total of 82 cultures across the four regions, identifying and analyzing 21 (26%) that exhibited NDE evidence.
My students proudly presented their posters at UNC’s conference and one of them, Kyle Landwehr, will orally present the results of his and his research partner, Adam Schwartz’s eHRAF investigation of NDEs in Indigenous South American societies at the Association for the Anthropology of Consciousness 42nd Annual Conference in Las Vegas on May 2, 2025. In a different session of the same conference, I will present the pedagogical map I developed for my Culture & Consciousness curriculum, thereby giving both of us a chance to boost eHRAF and its relevance for cross-cultural research.
