Instructors: Carol Ember & Francine Barone
Worldwide cross-cultural researchers use the vast quantity of already collected data from the anthropological record to try to understand cultural universals and differences in the past and the present. More specifically, they use scientific methods to test theories and explore models that may help explain observed differences.
This 3 day, 2 hours per day, workshop will cover the logic of cross-cultural research, relationships between theory and hypotheses, types of research questions that can be answered with cross-cultural research, the derivation of testable hypotheses, creating quantitative measures from qualitative descriptions, dealing with bias by coders and ethnographers, coding variables, choosing a sample of societies to study, and common criticisms. Also included are demonstrations and hands-on coding and search exercises using eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF Archaeology, databases containing descriptive ethnographic and archaeological materials from over 350 cultures and over 100 archaeological traditions, respectively for conducting cross-cultural research.
Instructor: Carol Ember
Carol Ember is President of the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University. She is a cultural anthropologist (Ph.D. Harvard University) specializing in cross-cultural research. She has published on a broad range of cross-cultural topics including predictors of variation in social organization (marital residence, unilineal descent, extended families), violence (warfare, interpersonal aggression, corporal punishment, atrocities), participatory political systems, women and children’s work, fear of sex, linguistic variation (in CV syllables and sonority), how cross-cultural research can be used for archaeological inference, and more recently the possible effects on culture of living in hazard-prone environments (with respect to food sharing, subsistence diversification, strength of norms, property rights, beliefs that gods affect weather, and contingency plans for dealing with disasters). She has written numerous methodological works and reviews about cross-cultural methods, including a primer, Cross-Cultural Research Methods, 2nd ed. She is currently one of the main instructors for the NSF-supported Summer Institutes for Cross-Cultural Anthropological Research. She has served as the President of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research and the Society for Anthropological Sciences and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. You can find her CV at https://hraf.yale.edu/about/staff/carol-r-ember/.
Instructor: Francine Barone
Francine Barone is a digital anthropologist and media ethnographer with a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Kent. Her research interests include urban anthropology, technology as material culture, place-making, sensory anthropology, and the socio-cultural impacts of the digital age. Her doctoral research, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Catalonia, Spain, investigated how technology and urban change are intertwined with place and identity. She has also worked on Google-funded projects on web archives and digital forgetting. She co-founded the Open Anthropology Cooperative, a web-based anthropological organization formed to realize a more open, public anthropology. She continues to contribute to open access initiatives in anthropology and the social sciences. Francine coordinates HRAF’s social media engagement, researches and writes anthropological content, curates academic resources for Teaching eHRAF, produces original teaching materials, and contributes to the technical development of the eHRAF Databases. She also publishes on media ethnography and open educational resources in anthropology.
Dates: October 25, 26, 27, 2022
Time: 9:00am - 11:00am each day (T, W, Th) Arizona Time Zone
This workshop will take place entirely over Zoom and will incorporate hands on exercises
Workshop Fee: $50