eHRAF World Cultures is a fulltext collection of ethnographic books and articles that describe cultural and social life among almost 300 cultural groups around the world. Paragraph-level indexing for cultural materials - human behavior, social life and customs, material culture, and human-ecological environments - makes eHRAF particularly powerful for cross-cultural research.
Look at these reference tools before attempting to search eHRAF!
· Outline of World Cultures - the list of eHRAF cultures. HINT! Focusing on cultures in the PSF (Probability Sample FIle) and SRS (Simple Random Sample) subsets will provide very large collections of ethnographic works.
· Outline of Cultural Materials - features of cultures, technologies, social arrangements, and so on, that is, the "subjects" in eHRAF ADVANCED searching.
CAVEAT! As a collection of ethnographic texts, eHRAF needs careful attention. eHRAF focuses on a time period known as "the ethnographic present", that is usually a time in the past, typically around the point of contact with Western culture but more reasonably the date when fieldwork was conducted. Individual ethnographies may describe other "ethnographic presents" and they may represent the ethnographer's interests or biases. Also, searching paragraph-level OCM indexing may lead you to forget that the whole ethnography might be on a broader or more specific cultural feature. HINT! When looking at a paragraph, look at its Publication Information.
