The Human Relations Area Files (eHRAF) World Cultures is a cross-cultural database of information on all aspects of cultural and social life, organized into cultures and ethnic groups. This multi-cultural database provides you with in-depth information on all aspects of cultural and social life which makes it different from the other databases we subscribe to. Because of its structure and the coding that has been done by de HRAF antropologists, it is well suited for exploratory data-analysis and cross-cultural comparisons.

Impression of the possibilities

The following three articles give a good impression of the kind of research that has already been done with eHRAF:

• Garfield, Z. H., Schacht, R., Post, E. R., Ingram, D., Uehling, A., & Macfarlan, S. J. (2021). The content and structure of reputation domains across human societies: a view from the evolutionary social sciences. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 376(1838), 20200296. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0296

From the abstract: “We conducted exploratory analyses on the content, distribution and structure of reputation domain diversity across cultures, using the Human Relations Area Files ethnographic database. After coding ethnographic texts on reputations from 153 cultures, we used hierarchical modelling, cluster analysis and text analysis to provide an empirical view of reputation domains across societies.”

• Mehr, S. A., Singh, M., Knox, D., Ketter, D. M., Pickens-Jones, D., Atwood, S., … & Glowacki, L. (2019). Universality and diversity in human song. Science, 366(6468), eaax0868. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aax0868

From the abstract: “Mehr et al. examined ethnographic data and observed music in every society sampled (see the Perspective by Fitch and Popescu). For songs specifically, three dimensions characterize more than 25% of the performances studied: formality of the performance, arousal level, and religiosity.”

• Murray, D. R., Fessler, D. M., Kerry, N., White, C., & Marin, M. (2017). The kiss of death: Three tests of the relationship between disease threat and ritualized physical contact within traditional cultures. Evolution and Human Behavior, 38(1), 63-70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2016.06.008

From the abstract: “We tested this prediction across three domains of such behavior – greetings, romantic kissing, and mortuary rituals – by compiling ethnographic information on normative behavior in traditional cultures and comparing it with epidemiological estimates of pathogen prevalence.”

The database can be accessed via the UvA database search.