The HRAF Community College Initiative recognizes the important role of community colleges in providing students with access to affordable opportunities for higher education. There are nearly 1,300 community colleges in the United States, serving more than 12 million students. According to the U.S. Department of Education, community colleges represent over 40 percent of undergraduate students enrolled in the United States and award over 800,000 associate degrees each year. The HRAF Community College Initiative is focused on expanding our engagement with community colleges. 

HRAF is collaborating with the Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges (SACC), a section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), with instructors who teach anthropology at two-year and four-year colleges. HRAF is offering discounted annual dues for academic institutions that have faculty members affiliated with SACC. If you are affiliated with SACC and interested in having institutional access to the eHRAF databases, we encourage you to speak with your college librarian and/or social sciences department chairperson.

Click here to read about the Community College Initiative

While English makes limited use of diacritical marks, many of the world's languages employ an augmented Latin alphabet to represent specific phonetic distinctions. As eHRAF contains documents describing cultures from across the globe, the database contains a broad range of orthographic systems. Following careful evaluation, Noto Sans has been adopted as the new default typeface for eHRAF. Designed to offer the broadest Unicode support, Noto provides consistent spacing and reliable rendering across the many alphabets and orthographies represented in the database. It is also well-suited to accessibility requirements, offering compatibility with screen readers and improved readability for users with dyslexia. For cases where Noto Sans may not render certain diacritic combinations optimally, Gentium Plus has been introduced as a new alternative typeface. Developed by and for linguists, Gentium excels in the precise display of unusual and complex diacritic combinations, ensuring accurate representation of diverse language forms. Gentium is particularly recommended for linguistic texts and for materials documenting languages that lack an indigenous written tradition.

Click here to read about Font Selection & Linguistic Display

HRAF Global Scholar Erhao Ge is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Central South University in Changsha, China. Previously he was an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London. His work focuses on computational social science, evolutionary anthropology, and human behavioral ecology, with sustained attention to cooperation, religion, social networks, and the emergence of complex societies.

Erhao is currently collaborating with economists who build large-scale regional economic datasets. Their shared goal is to combine quantitative data with systematically coded ethnographic information. The subject-indexed ethnographies in eHRAF World Cultures allow Erhao to extract comparable variables on marriage systems, inheritance rules, ritual frequency, religious institutions, household composition, and subsistence strategies across many societies. With these coded variables he is able to run event-history and multilevel hierarchical models to test how cultural institutions mediate fertility, marriage timing, migration, and resource allocation under varying ecological and economic conditions. This provides the unique value of enabling robust cross-cultural inference.

In the future, Erhao plans to incorporate eHRAF World Cultures into concrete training for undergraduate and graduate students.

Click here to learn about HRAF Global Scholar Erhao Ge

We are pleased to announce new publications in eHRAF World Cultures. The database now contains a new culture collection for the Jicarilla Apache and an updated culture collection for the Han Chinese. The new publications contain approximately 30,000 new paragraphs of material across 65 documents.

Jicarilla Apache (NT26)

The Jicarilla Apache are a federally recognized Native American Nation. Their reservation is located in north-central New Mexico, spanning nearly 880,000 acres of high desert and mountainous terrain. The term jicarilla comes from Mexican Spanish meaning "little basket" in reference to the baskets they used as drinking vessels. To neighboring Apache bands, such as the Mescalero and the Lipan, they were known as Kinya-Inde which translates as "people who live in fixed houses."

Han Chinese (AE15)

The Han Chinese are the world’s largest ethnic group. Comprising over 1.4 billion people—roughly 17% of the global population—they make up the vast majority people in China and Taiwan, alongside significant diasporas worldwide. The Han Chinese identity is deeply rooted in a shared history, language, and culture that traces back over 3,000 years.

Learn about new publications in eHRAF World Cultures