An insightful publication by Fulco Scherjon, Corrie Bakels, Katharine MacDonald, and Wil Roebroeks in the June 2015 issue of Current Anthropology sheds new light on present-day and historical fire setting practices among hunter-gatherers and foragers.…
![Fieldnotes: Traditional Basarwa (San) dancing in Botswana [Video]](https://hraf.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/san-dancing-feature.png)
HRAF anthropologist Ian Skoggard visited Botswana last year. In this post, he shares his experiences along with some video footage from his trip. Last September 2016, my wife and I had the privilege to visit…
In our live webinars, you can learn more about the eHRAF databases, including how cultures and traditions are organized by regions, sub-regions, samples, and subsistence types. First developed in the 1930s by George Peter Murdock,…
This year, HRAF welcomes new member institutions from across the world—with universities in Turkey, France, and Canada.
The Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) at Yale University is pleased to announce a one-year internship in Melvin Ember’s name. Melvin Ember was President of HRAF from 1987 until his death in 2009. The intent…
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…
A recent article from NPR, Lost Posture: Why Indigenous Cultures Don’t Have Back Pain, prompted us to see what we could uncover in eHRAF World Cultures that would shed more light on indigenous approaches to…
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…
HRAF is pleased to announce the release of our two latest resources for teaching and research. The first, Explaining Human Culture (just launched in a beta version at hraf.yale.edu/ehc), is a publicly accessible database containing information on…
The Maasai (Masai), nomadic pastoralists who live in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania, are one of the 295 cultures covered in the eHRAF World Cultures ethnographic database. Twenty-one documents totaling 2,571 pages make up the…