Happy Halloween! It’s the time of year for ghastly ghouls, wicked witches and terrifying things that go bump in the night. From haunted houses to headless horsemen, there are many spooky legends in Western culture.…
Based on interviews of 10,500 women – including 5,165 girls aged 10 to 17 – in 13 countries worldwide The Dove Global Beauty and Confidence Report (2017) investigates the current state of female body confidence (Dove…
HRAF President, Carol Ember, has contributed this post reporting on her ongoing research into natural hazards and cultural “tightness”. Some societies appear to have strong and clearly defined expectations for how to behave in many…
![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…
Carol R. Ember has authored a summary of cross-cultural knowledge about Altered States of Consciousness for HRAF’s open access resource Explaining Human Culture. Nearly all societies are known to engage in practices that lead to…
We are pleased to share information about the Human Relations Area Files’ collaboration with D-PLACE, the Database of Places, Language, Culture, and Environment. D-PLACE is an expandable and open-access database that brings together a dispersed…
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…