HRAF News Vol. 2023-12
Season's Greetings from HRAF
Season's Greetings from HRAF! As 2023 comes to a close, we would like to thank all of our members for their continued support. It was great to see many of our friends at the 2023 AAA/CASCA Annual Meeting in Toronto, Canada. HRAF is pleased to see that media coverage of anthropological and cross-cultural research is increasing. This month we are featuring an NPR article about research on alloparenting. We encourage anthropology instructors to check out the new eHRAF teaching activity for environmental archaeology from Professor John Millhauser. Still searching for the right gift for the special researcher in your life? Give the gift of cultural knowledge with an Independent Researcher Membership to the eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF Archaeology databases. HRAF looks forward to the year ahead and to celebrating the upcoming 75th Anniversary of the founding of our organization. HRAF was founded on May 7, 1949.
Professor John Millhauser, Director of Graduate Programs for Anthropology at North Carolina State University, has shared a new eHRAF teaching activity from his course on Environmental Archaeology.

In this Teaching eHRAF activity, students work in groups and alone to study some aspect of how humans relate to their environments using ethnographic resources of the eHRAF databases. Ethnographic data is central to many archaeological interpretations of past behaviors, events, and processes. It helps link the material remains found at archaeological sites with human practices that generated them.
 
eHRAF World Cultures has information on on present-day people and their connections to their environments. This project allows students to:
 
●    Navigate the eHRAF databases and conduct detailed searches
●    Investigate human-environmental interaction
●    Assess the value and relevance of ethnographic data for archaeological research
●    Make controlled comparisons within and among cultures

HRAF staff members attended the 2023 AAA/CASCA Annual Meeting in Toronto, Canada. It was great to reconnect with friends we have known for years, and also a pleasure to meet many new people.

At our exhibit booth, Carol Ember and Matthew Longcore provided demonstrations of the eHRAF databases and showcased the eHRAF Workbooks for teaching and learning.

Ian Skoggard organized a panel on Scientific Perspectives in Human Transitions sponsored by the Society for Anthropological Sciences (SAS). Ian Skoggard, Carol Ember, Michael Fischer, and Samantha King presented papers along with two past HRAF Summer Institute participants.

Michael Fischer gave a demonstration illustrating how developments produced via iKLEWS can facilitate and enhance research using eHRAF World Cultures. The demonstration showcased a web app featuring prototype tools and analysis for HRAF data including visualizations such as concept maps and 3D Principal Component Analysis (PCA) graphs.

Give the gift of cultural knowledge with an Independent Researcher Membership to our award-winning eHRAF World Cultures and/or eHRAF Archaeology databases.

Comprising the largest anthropological database in the world, our ethnographic and archaeological databases include nearly 1 million pages of expertly indexed information on 474 cultures and traditions.

eHRAF is ideal for anthropologists, archaeologists, cross-cultural researchers, psychologists, data scientists, linguists, social scientists and other researchers interested in a global perspective on cultural and social life, past and present.

Available for a 6-month or 12-month term per database, this category of membership is for independent researchers unaffiliated with an existing HRAF member institution who wish to use the eHRAF databases for research purposes. Other requirements apply.
In an article for National Public Radio (NPR), Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD looks at the practice of alloparenting. Doucleff’s work focuses on parenting around the world.

The article draws primarily on research from scholars at University College London and Cambridge University. Both of these academic institutions are members of eHRAF World Cultures.

According to the article, "Altogether the research across cultures suggests that human parents are psychologically adapted to raise children cooperatively, not in isolation. Yet in Western culture, many times the mother alone is expected – or even required – to provide this incredibly intensive parenting.”"(Doucleff, 2023)

If you are interested in learning more about alloparenting across cultures, the eHRAF World Cultures database is a great place to start. Search tips are provided on the HRAF homepage.

HRAF at Yale University|hraf.yale.edu