HRAF is pleased to announce the HRAF Global Scholars for 2026. This program provides scholars around the world with one year of complimentary access to our research databases, eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF Archaeology.

For 2026, we have four scholars participating in the HRAF Global Scholars Program.

Nora Viviana Franco

Universidad de Buenos Aires

Argentina

Maria Belen Carpio

Universidad Nacional del Nordeste

Argentina

Erhao Ge

Central South University

China

Ma Teresa Guanzon De Guzman

University of the Philippines

Phillipines

Congratulations to our new cohort of HRAF Global Scholars!

Click here to read about the HRAF Global Scholars 2026

Founded in 1949, HRAF is a nonprofit membership organization affiliated with Yale University. The mission of HRAF is to promote understanding of cultural diversity and commonality in the past and present. To accomplish this mission, HRAF produces scholarly resources and infrastructure for research, teaching and learning, and supports and conducts original research on cross-cultural variation.

Your support makes a difference. When you join the Friends of HRAF, your generous contribution will enable us to advance our mission of understanding cultural diversity through scholarly research and education. It will support funding priorities such as the HRAF Global Scholars Program in addition to the ongoing development of our open access resources. HRAF is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization and eligible to receive tax-deductible contributions.

Click here to donate now and join the Friends of HRAF

Michael Fischer and Ben Kluga presented a poster at the AAA meeting in New Orleans. Ethnography as Language Model: Speaking Beyond the Text explored using generative AI, or Large Language Models (LLMs), as tools for evaluating ethnographic writing. The poster utilized the previous generation of language models, both as a tool for semantic inquiry as well as an entry into understanding how LLMs work. The presentation demonstrated how meaning can be explored through vector space operations. LLMs were presented as potentially powerful tools for the analysis of ethnographic data, with capabilities for summarizing and extracting structured information from ethnographic entries. A comparison between public and private models was conducted using ethnographic text on Cayapa marriage to identify deontic themes. Small, private LLMs are suggested as a secure and viable option for anthropological scholarship. The presentation suggests that LLMs may reveal something deeper about language itself.

Learn about Ethnography as Language Model

The Society for Anthropological Sciences Carol R. Ember Book Prize 2025 was awarded to Manvir Singh for Shamanism: The Timeless Religion.

Manvir Singh combines ethnography with cross-cultural analysis and insights from the cognitive sciences to explain why shamanic practices reliably emerge across human societies. He shows that shamanism endures as a powerful, recurrent cultural form because it taps into universal psychological mechanisms while adapting to diverse historical and social contexts.

The award committee noted that this work surveys shamanism using ethnographic research, cognitive methods, and cross-cultural datasets. It is written for any audience, yet without exoticizing cultural differences or downplaying anthropological theory.

Join us in congratulating Dr. Singh for this outstanding work of anthropological science.

Click here to read about the Carol R. Ember Book Prize