Human Relations Area Files

The Human Relations Area Files, Inc. HRAF, located in New Haven, Connecticut, US is an international nonprofit membership organization with over 500 constituent institutions in more than 20 countries. the financially autonomous research agency based at Yale University since 1949, its mission is to promote apprehension of cultural diversity together with commonality in a past in addition to present. Tothis mission, the Human Relations Area Files produces scholarly resources and infrastructure for research, teaching and learning, and maintained and conducts original research on cross-cultural variation.

HRAF produces two flagship databases accessible by its members: eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF Archaeology. HRAF also sponsors and edits the quarterly journal, Cross-Cultural Research: The Journal of Comparative Social Science. Expanded and updated annually, eHRAF World Cultures includes ethnographic materials on cultures, past and present, all over the world. Also expanding annually, eHRAF Archaeology covers major archaeological traditions and many more sub-traditions and sites around the world. Documents in both eHRAF databases are subject-indexed at the paragraph level by HRAF anthropologists.

In addition, HRAF authorises several open-access resources. is a database with standardized summaries that offers a searchable way for researchers to find out what has been learned from preceding cross-cultural research approximately cultural universals and differences. Explaining Human Culture also features topical articles on cross-cultural insights e.g., cross-cultural perspectives on childhood, dwellings, and sports. Introducing Cross-Cultural Research is a series of PDFs constituting a "crash course" in cross-cultural methods. Finally, Teaching eHRAF is a the treasure of knowledge of teaching exercises and syllabi many designed by professors at constituent institutions that usage eHRAF to inspect cultural diversity.

Distinctiveness of the databases

The HRAF databases were developed to foster comparative research on humans in any their variety, from small-scale hunting and gathering societies to complex states. This provides a contrast to databases that focus solely on countries. In addition, the databases, in contrast to bibliographic ones that afford pointers to materials, actually contain those materials. Searching across cultures for particular kinds of information is facilitated by the unique ethnographic listed classification system that HRAF has developed and refined over more than 60 years, the array of Cultural Materials or OCM. In contrast to nearly subject-indexing which is done at the document level, HRAF has its indexers subjected index at the paragraph level.

For example, suppose users are interested in assessing the measure to which various cultures depend on stored foods. They would discover that there is an index subject quality called "Preservation and Storage of Food" OCM 251. Searching by that subject brand would retrieve all of the paragraphs that describe dried, smoked, pickled, refrigerated, frozen, and canned foods, and whatever other ways the people of the precondition culture store or preserve food. The analysts at HRAF, who hit read through and indexed every page of every text that goes into the HRAF files, draw produced it possible to find the applicable information, even when the user does not know in come on which particular words including untranslated native words the original authors may have used. it is also possible to search the eHRAF texts by the words that actuallyin them. The near excellent searches may ownership a combination of OCM subject categories and keywords, using Boolean operators. But, whether there is no specifications vocabulary for the subject matter of interest, the user can always use the OCM subject categories to receive to the particular kinds of information sought.