Ian Skoggard

Yale University | YU · Human Relations Area Files

With climate change intensifying, building resilience against climate-related shocks is now a global imperative. Historically, many societies have faced natural hazards, with some adapting through specific social and cultural practices. Understanding these responses is key to developing modern sustainability strategies. Here, we address this issue...

There is a growing interest and urgency in understanding and incorporating local knowledge and strategies into sustainable climate change adaptation. This is particularly important because as populations age and new technologies come on the scene, much local knowledge is lost to newer generations. For this reason, we have systematically examined 90...

All societies have religious beliefs, but societies vary widely in the number and type of gods in which they believe as well as their ideas about what the gods do. In many societies, a god is thought to be responsible for weather events. In some of those societies, a god is thought to cause harm with weather and/or can choose to help, such as by br...

Review of a book that examines the relationship between anthropology and theology.

Using a worldwide, largely nonindustrial, sample of 46 societies with high gods, the research reported here explores whether certain climate patterns predict the belief that high gods are involved with weather. Our major expectation was that such beliefs would most likely be found in drier climates, an expectation that was largely supported. Cold e...

Purpose: In this paper we examine and test alternative models for explaining the relationships between resource stress, beliefs that gods and spirits influence weather (to help or harm food supply or punish for norm violations), and customary beyond-household sharing behavior. Our model, the resource stress model, suggests that resource stress affe...

Using a cross-cultural, largely nonindustrial, sample of 47 societies with high gods, the research reported here explores whether certain climate patterns predict the belief that gods are involved with weather. Our major expectation was that drier climates would be the most likely to have such beliefs, an expectation that was largely supported. We...

Food sharing and (to a lesser extent) labor sharing play central roles in the evolution of cooperation literature. One popular explanation for sharing beyond the family is that it reduces the likelihood of shortages by pooling risk across households. However, the frequency and scope of sharing have never been systematically documented across nonind...

Purpose Ember et al. (1992) addressed whether the “democracies rarely fight each other” hypothesis held true in the anthropological record of societies of various sizes and scales around the world. They indeed found that more participatory polities had less internal warfare – or warfare between one society’s territorial units (e.g. bands, villages,...

Ember et al. (1992) addressed whether the “democracies rarely fight each other” hypothesis held true in the anthropological record of societies of various sizes and scales around the world. They indeed found that more participatory polities had less internal warfare—or warfare between one society’s territorial units (e.g., bands, villages, district...

With the growing interdisciplinary interest in affect, scholars acknowledge the importance of feelings, emotions, intimacies and sentiments in theory, practice and action. Through their feelings humans are able to sense complex bodily states, social situations and environmental conditions; and act on it. In this paper I explore cross-culturally how...

Provides some preliminary results of our interdisciplinary NSF-supported project ”Natural Hazards and Cultural Transformations” Grant Number (#SMA-1416651). For a project description see http://hrafarc.org/bin/hrafARC+Research+-+Chacult/ Topics covered in the presentation are property systems, food and labor sharing and cultural ”tightness” or ”loo...

A growing interest in affect holds much promise for anthropology by providing a new frame to examine and articulate subjective and intersubjective states, which are key parts of human consciousness and behavior. Affect has its roots in the social, an observation that did not go unnoticed by Durkheim and since then has been kept in view by those soc...

Focusing on livestock raiding, a major form of violence in arid and semiarid regions, we evaluate the relationship between rainfall and intensity of violence, disaggregating ethnic groups that have somewhat different subsistence patterns. We do so to try to resolve previously published results and conclusions that appear contradictory – some resear...

Over the past four years, a team of computational social scientists at the Center for Social Complexity at George Mason University (GMU) in collaboration with anthropologists from the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) at Yale University have been developing a multi-scale spatial agent-based model to better understand the environmental, social, and...

There is no stopping technology. The incorporation of computers as a research tool into anthropology is inevitable. The Luddite in us wants to lash out against this intrusion. The alternative is to meet the challenge head on and tame the beast in our own way. The papers in this special issue on modeling reveal how this latter process is possible an...

In 2009, Witsenburg and Adano summarized their research on rainfall variability and livestock raiding in Marsabit District, Kenya. They found that livestock-related violence was higher in wetter months and wetter years, contrary to the common assumption that scarcity of water and pasture is the primary driver of livestock violence. Our research, fo...

Previous research on warfare in a worldwide sample of societies by Ember and Ember (Journal of Conflict Resolution, 36, 242–262, 1992a) found a strong relationship between resource unpredictability (particularly food scarcity caused by natural disasters) in nonstate, nonpacified societies and overall warfare frequency. Focusing on eastern Africa, a...

In a previous study, Ember and associates (2012) found that livestock-related violence involving the Turkana was higher in dry months, drier years, and when months were drier than expected between the years of 1998–2009. This article has data on livestock-related violence from media reports, together with localized and georeferenced spatial and rai...

Livestock raiding among East African nomadic herders has lately become increasingly violent in some areas, while significantly declining in others. Scholars attribute this change to a combination of causes including colonial encounter, environmental change, political disenfranchisement, penetration of capital markets, and introduction of firearms....

This is a study of different definitions and types of diasporas, their morphologies and cinematic expressions. The author discusses how the identities within a diaspora are in the the process of formation and the need to recover basic human sentiments in order reconstitute new social relationships.

l R. Ember (now Executive Director of HRAF), has three major components. First, cultural summaries (as in the Encyclopedia of World Cultures) will be included for nearly all of the world's ethnographically described cultures. This will dispose of an old objection to HRAF---that it is not complete in its coverage. Even if researchers do not find a l...

In the last forty years, Taiwan has experienced a remarkable transformation from a poor agrarian society to an affluent industrial nation. This “economic miracle” has defied Western theories about the negative effects of both dependency and tradition on modernization and development. The economy grew in spite of a strong dependency on foreign capit...