HRAF -- 2.
Description
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.
How the series evolves
Books in this Series
New lives for old
Anthropological study of the Manus tribe of New Guinea, which was catapulted by the Second World War from a Stone Age culture into the path of modern civilization.
The Baganda
Missionary and amateur anthropologist John Roscoe (1861–1932) published this account of the Baganda tribe of Buganda in 1911, to preserve a record of a sophisticated people before their cultural traditions were undermined as their territory became part of the British Protectorate of Uganda. He had spent twenty-five years in Africa, during which he interviewed the people in their own languages about their customs and religious beliefs. The Baganda is a straightforward survey of a traditionally organised way of life. Birth, upbringing, marriage, death and burial, clans, kings, government, warfare, and other topics are treated in careful detail. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the longest chapter is on religion, but Roscoe makes non-judgmental observations on customs which did not fit with western morality. More recent anthropological research has amplified Roscoe's findings, but has found little to correct, and this remains a standard work on a culture about to undergo a massive transformation.
Zniewolony umysł
A work of nonfiction by Polish writer, poet, academic and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz. It was written after the author's defection from Stalinist Poland in 1951. The book catalogs the experiences of Milosz and his colleagues, in pre-war Poland, under the Nazi Occupation, and in the Soviet-dominated People's Republic of Poland. Milosz ponders on the mental gymnastics required for intellectuals to turn against their countrymen and the truth, by turns sympathetical and critical.