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/building 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 2006, there are more than 20 sponsoring members and hundreds of associate members. The HRAF Collection of Ethnography 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 on the web.
Read more about this topic: Human Relations Area Files
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)