UGA Libraries News & Events

Spotlight On: eHRAF World Cultures

HRAF, Inc., or Human Relations Area Files, is a research organization based at Yale University that has been gathering cultural information about societies and ethnic groups since 1949.  UGA subscribes to their two online resources, Human Relations Area Files (eHRAF): World Cultures and Human Relations Area Files (eHRAF): Archaeology.

Human Relations Area Files (eHRAF): World Cultures is a Web-based, full-text database of ethnographic studies for cultures throughout the world. The cultural, religious, and political customs of each group or community are documented by field anthropologists. The database contains ethnographic and other documents (books, journal articles, and dissertations) that are compiled into culture files.

There are multiple pathways into the information available in Human Relations Area Files (eHRAF): World Cultures.  If you are interested in all material about a certain ethnic group, you should use the Browse tab and find the group by name in an A-Z list, or look by geographical region or country.

Choose the name of a culture and you get the options of a summary of the materials available about that culture (“Collection Description”), a Culture Summary giving an overview of everything from language to child-rearing practices, and a Collection of Documents with full-text versions of scholarly publications about the culture.

Click on the highlighted titles to read the documents; a table of contents will appear in the left-hand sidebar.  Note that many of the documents are historical and reflect the state of ethnographical inquiry at the time they were composed.

The database also allows browsing by subject, which allows you to compare different cultures (for example, finding information about many cultures’ agricultural practices), and sophisticated searching.  Consider also exploring the Encyclopedia of World Cultures, which also includes profiles of cultural groups (though it is less comprehensive).

Tutorials and user guides are provided by Yale, there is a Help link within the database, or you can Ask a Librarian if you need help using this resource.