" Mardi Gras in New Orleans today, with its colorful floats, street parades, masked performers and drunken revelers, has all the markings of a traditional Carnival celebration as found throughout Europe...During Mardi Gras, one finds a suspension of most everyday rules for street decorum, and all revelers are welcomed to partake in special foods – such as King cake – and cultural rituals. The well-known motto for the holiday is laissez les bon temps rouler! or 'let the good times roll!'.

Yet even ritualized chaos 'has its own system of rules' that act as a framework for the 'play' (Ancelet 1991: 108)." 

Click here to read the full article.

HRAF has found its newest IT team member! Furkan comes to us from Turk Telekom in Istanbul, where he was a DevOps Engineer (a systems engineer that balances the goals of both development and operations). Just before joining our team, he spent four weeks at 42, the coding school in Silicon Valley.

As his first project at HRAF, he is working on adding new collections to eHRAF World Cultures. We're excited to see the new roles he takes on as he becomes more familiar with our databases.

Outside of work, he practices taekwondo and currently holds a black stripe belt.

The history of HRAF is intertwined with the history of photocopying. In the early days, verbatim copies of ethnographic passages were created by using a typewriter and carbon copy paper. As an intermediate stage between typewriters and Xerox machines, the Photostat machine was used. Above, a HRAF staff member uses a Photostat Machine to copy a book, circa 1960.

A couple of fascinating articles came out in the past month that used eHRAF in their research designs. Evolutionary Models of Leadership by Garfield, Hubbard, and Hagen, published in Human Nature , tests theoret ical models of leadership against the ethnographic record. And Curry, Mullins, and Whitehouse found seven potentially universal rules of human morality. See Is It Good to Cooperate? in Current Anthropology .