HRAF is delighted to celebrate the success of our recentAAA virtual workshop on teaching with the eHRAF Workbooks. The event was well-attended by anthropologists from around the world and feedback has been extraordinarily positive. We are looking forward to hosting a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant-funded Summer Institute for Cross-Cultural Anthropological Researchin Summer 2021. The application deadline is February 15, 2021. Now that we have a complete set of workbook activities for Cultural Anthropology, we are embarking on the development new workbooks for Archaeology. Also featured this month is a cross-cultural study on predictors of land privatization published in American Anthropologist.
HRAF is delighted to report that our virtual workshop, Teaching with the eHRAF Workbooks, was a great success. The workshop covered all aspects of using the eHRAF databases for teaching and learning. Dr. Francine Barone and Matthew Longcore would like to thank all attendees as well as the American Anthropological Association for enabling and hosting this valuable event.
The workshop was attended by anthropology instructors from the US and around the world. The presenters were able to share all the hard work that they have put in throughout 2020 in order to prepare HRAF’s first complete online workbook, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology.
HRAF has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support three years of Summer Institutes for Cross-Cultural Anthropological Research. Cross-cultural findings derived from anthropological data are critical to many social sciences (e.g., psychology, sociology, economics, political science), particularly when testing the generalizability of important theories for policy.
HRAF Summer Institutes will train faculty, researchers, and graduate students in the theory and methods for conducting regional and worldwide comparative research. The first institute will be held late July through early August, 2021. Applications are due February 15, 2021.
In a recent cross-cultural study published in American Anthropologist, authors Carol R. Ember, Teferi Abate Adem, Tahlisa Brougham, and Emily Pitek, reported results that may help us understand why land, a vital resource for most societies in the ethnographic record, would be owned communally or privately.
Conceptualizing and coding land tenure systems as a "bundle of rights," this worldwide cross‐cultural study suggests that Acheson's (2015) economic defendability theory in conjunction with some environmental stressors, such as drought, may help us understand cross‐cultural variation in land tenure systems.
