eHRAF World Cultures

background depicting a Peruvian landscape

Search ethnographic collections covering all aspects of cultural and social life.

Peruvian landscape. Photograph by Stacey Martin from Pixabay.

Explore eHRAF

Socialization

of the Saami

Gestures and Signs

Across all cultures

Gender Roles and Subsistence

Across Asian cultures

Potlatches

of the Pacific Northwest

About eHRAF

Our award-winning, membership-based eHRAF World Cultures database contains information on present and past aspects of cultural and social life for a worldwide sample of societies.

Designed with cultural researchers in mind, eHRAF differs from other academic online databases that you may be used to.

The contents are organized by cultures and indexed at the paragraph level by HRAF anthropologists with unique subject identifier codes from the Outline of Cultural Materials (OCM), making it ideal for both exploratory, in-depth cultural research, and cross-cultural comparisons.

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Quick Start Guide

New to eHRAF? This guide will walk you through the basics.

Cultures

Browse over 360 culture collections to discover rich ethnographic data covering a sample of the world's societies.

Subjects

Each paragraph of text in eHRAF has been indexed by HRAF anthropologists using the Outline of Cultural Materials (OCM), a vast ethnographic classification system and subject thesaurus.

Documents

Find ethnographic sources contained in eHRAF by browsing and filtering documents.