HRAF News Vol. 2019-11
Visit HRAF at the 2019 AAA/CASCA Annual Meeting
HRAF team members Carol R. Ember, Ian Skoggard, Teferi Abate Adem, and Matthew Longcore will be attending the 2019 AAA/CASCA Annual Meeting  in Vancouver, Canada from Wednesday, November 20 to Sunday, November 24. President Ember and HRAF anthropologists Teferi Abate Adem and Ian Skoggard will be presenting papers. Matthew Longcore   will be available at Booth 224 in the Exhibition Hall. Stop by for a demo of our databases and open access resources.
As a global organization, HRAF strives to makes a difference in the world. This critical work is made possible by our membership base, and also by the contributions of individuals and institutions who believe in our mission. Your gift will help us develop open access resources and additionally provide support for our global scholarships.

For over 70 years, HRAF has been fulfilling our mission 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. HRAF is a non-profit 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. Donations to support our efforts are tax-deductible.

A new topical summary on   Gender  is now available in  Explaining Human Culture , our open access database that summarizes the results of over 1,000 cross-cultural studies.
 
The purpose of the topical summaries is to overview what we think we have learned about a particular topic, such as gender, and to point out some of the things we do not yet know from cross-cultural research.

It is our hope that these summaries will not only be useful for classroom use, but will also stimulate further research to fill in the gaps in our knowledge.
 
The summary provides more in-depth information to supplement the teaching exercise   available on   Teaching eHRAF .
 
As HRAF celebrates our 70th anniversary, we take a look back at history in our latest post Remembering Lévi-Strauss and pre-digital HRAF collections: A conversation with Bernadette Bucher .

HRAF asked Bucher what the physical presence of the files meant to her personally and the role it played at different steps of her becoming an anthropologist. We were also curious to know more about the context of the connection between Lévi-Strauss and the files.

We hoped to gain some insight into the human and intellectual impact this pre-digital connection and Lévi-Strauss himself may have had on her work as an anthropologist, on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the US, the Thanksgiving holiday reminds us to be grateful for the things that we have, and even to go out of our way to be gracious and thankful to those around us. Kindness and charity in general are prized as virtues throughout the end-of-year holiday season, with special emphasis put on expression of gratitude , giving and sharing.

This festive time is likewise marked by gift-giving. We are introduced to the complicated cultural facets surrounding giving and receiving as well as measures of expressing gratitude in the formation and strengthening of social and familial bonds.

Do the same actions and activities show thanks around the world or are there significant cultural differences?

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