June 26, 2006 :: No. 287

Susan Parman, professor of anthropology at Cal State Fullerton, has been elected chair of the board and vice president of the Human Relations Area Files Inc. (HRAF) at Yale University.

She is the first woman to hold the post.

“I am honored by this appointment and think it reflects the organization’s awareness of CSUF’s commitment to both teaching and research,” said Parman, who also serves as an elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquarians in Scotland.

HRAF is a nonprofit membership consortium of universities, colleges and research institutions in the fields of cultural anthropology and archaeology. It encourages and facilitates worldwide comparative studies of human behavior, society and culture. Founded in 1949 at Yale University, HRAF produces two major collections — the HRAF Collection of Ethnography and the HRAF Collection of Archaeology — plus encyclopedias and other resources for teaching and research.

“HRAF is an important vehicle of cross-cultural teaching and research, and CSUF’s association with HRAF as a member of the board has been a prestigious feather in its cap,” said Parman, a Yorba Linda resident.

“HRAF’s ethnographic collections presently are composed of 1.2 million pages from more than 8,600 primary ethnographic documents covering 398 cultures. The files have been analyzed and referenced so that researchers may go directly to topics that interest them, such as child-rearing practices, clothing or diet.”

It is possible, for example, to test hypotheses about aggression, polygamy and preferences for fatness or thinness by doing a search for the appropriate codes or words, Parman said.

“The relevant information can be immediately extracted from the whole document because someone has read through the pages and linked the descriptive material with the HRAF classification codes,” she said.

Originally typed on sheets of paper and distributed among participating research universities, the files were copied in the 1940s, transferred to microfiche in 1958, rendered into electronic form in 1993 and posted on the web in 1997.

Parman became a member of the board about a decade ago, shortly after she secured a $1 million National Science Foundation grant to construct Cal State Fullerton’s Anthropology Research and Teaching Facility on campus. It was completed in 1998 and occupies a 10,000-square-foot space on the fourth floor of McCarthy Hall that is home to a museum, computer lab, and the Anthropology Department offices and classrooms.

Parman joined the CSUF faculty in 1988 and earned her doctorate at Rice University.

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