A new topical summary on Sexuality is now available in Explaining Human Culture, our open access database that summarizes the results of over 1,000 cross-cultural studies. The sexuality module is authored by HRAF President Carol…
Today, popular television shows featuring ethnographic culinary adventures bring food and film together for the enjoyment, entertainment, and enlightenment of foodies and anthropologists alike. While most of us do not have the opportunity to travel…
In keeping with our mission of promoting cultural diversity, the HRAF Global Scholarship has attracted candidates from around the world. As one of our top funding priorities, the scholarship provides institutions and individuals in low-income…
Ian Skoggard, research anthropologist with the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) at Yale University, has been elected to the executive board for the Society for Anthropological Sciences (SAS). As a member of the SAS executive board,…
Settlements are central to human development, making shelter, dwellings, and residence patterns necessary foci of investigation in both anthropology and archaeology. This post seeks to address a related and easily overlooked aspect of this anthropological…
Our anthropologists and programmers have been hard at work to bring you five new culture collections: Babylonians (MH07) Hadza (FN11) Kanak (OP04) Kimam (OJ82) Mao (MP19) These collections include 46 new documents in total, with…
A few years ago, HRAF anthropologists were involved in a project to help develop an agent-based model of violent conflict in Eastern Africa. As part of the project they mapped the different ethnic groups…
Where Have All the Comparisons Gone?, a recently published series from the Society for Cultural Anthropology, revisits a longstanding topic in the social sciences: the debate over the value of comparative cultural studies. In this…
Jeffrey Vadala “The shaman is not merely a sick man or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.” -Terence McKenna, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens & the I Ching During the…
How does the relationship between gender and power vary cross-culturally? According to Forbes, Angela Merkel tops the list of “world’s most powerful women“, with Hillary Clinton and Melinda Gates labelled the second and third most…