The Human Relations Area Files, Inc. (HRAF), located in New Haven, Connecticut, US, is an international nonprofit membership organization with over 500 member institutions in more than 20 countries. A financially autonomous research agency based at Yale University since 1949, its mission is to promote understanding of cultural diversity and commonality in the past and present. To accomplish this mission, the Human Relations Area Files produces scholarly resources and infrastructure for research, teaching and learning, and supports and conducts original research on cross-cultural variation.
HRAF produces two flagship databases accessible by its members: eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF Archaeology. HRAF also sponsors and edits the quarterly journal, Cross-Cultural Research: The Journal of Comparative Social Science. Expanded and updated annually, eHRAF World Cultures includes ethnographic materials on cultures, past and present, all over the world. Also expanding annually, eHRAF Archaeology covers major archaeological traditions and many more sub-traditions and sites around the world. Documents in both eHRAF databases are subject-indexed at the paragraph level by HRAF anthropologists.
In addition, HRAF offers several open-access resources. Explaining Human Culture is a database with standardized summaries that provides a searchable way for researchers to find out what has been learned from previous cross-cultural research about cultural universals and differences. Explaining Human Culture also features topical articles on cross-cultural insights (e.g., cross-cultural perspectives on childhood, dwellings, and sports). Introducing Cross-Cultural Research is a series of PDFs constituting a "crash course" in cross-cultural methods. Finally, Teaching eHRAF is a library of teaching exercises and syllabi (many designed by professors at member institutions) that use eHRAF to explore cultural diversity.
History
On February 26, 1949, delegates from Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Washington, and Yale University met in New Haven, Connecticut to pledge their membership in a new nonprofit research consortium to be based at Yale. The plan was to "develop and distribute files of organized information related to human societies and cultures." The name of the new inter-university corporation was the Human Relations Area Files, Inc. (HRAF). It is an ever-growing catalogue of cross-indexed ethnographic data, sorted and filed by geographic location and cultural characteristics.
The name came from the Institute of Human Relations, an interdisciplinary program at Yale at the time. The Institute of Human Relations had sponsored HRAF's precursor, the Cross-Cultural Survey (see George Peter Murdock), as part of an effort to develop an integrated science of human behavior and culture. On May 7, 1949, the HRAF consortium was formally established with three additional universities—the University of Chicago, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Southern California. As of 2018, there are 21 sponsoring members and hundreds of associate members. The HRAF Collection of Ethnography (the pre-electronic precursor to eHRAF World Cultures) was originally distributed as paper files. From the early 1960s until 1994, most members received their annual installments on microfiche. Since 1994, the annual installments have been in electronic form, first on CD-ROM and later online.
Distinctiveness of the databases
The HRAF databases were developed to foster comparative research on humans in all their variety, from small-scale hunting and gathering societies to complex states. This provides a contrast to databases that focus solely on countries. In addition, the databases, in contrast to bibliographic ones that provide pointers to materials, actually contain those materials. Searching across cultures for particular kinds of information is facilitated by the unique ethnographic subject classification system that HRAF has developed and refined over more than 60 years, the Outline of Cultural Materials or OCM. In contrast to most subject-indexing which is done at the document level, HRAF has its indexers subject index at the paragraph level.