About our authors

Carol R. Ember started at Antioch College as a chemistry major. She began taking social science courses because some were required, but she soon found herself intrigued. There were lots of questions without answers, and she became excited about the possibility of a research career in social science. She spent a year in graduate school at Cornell studying sociology before continuing on to Harvard, where she studied anthropology, primarily with John and Beatrice Whiting. For her PhD dissertation, she worked among the Luo of Kenya and studied the possible effects of task assignment on the social behavior of children. For most of her career, she has conducted cross-cultural research on topics such as variation in marriage, family, descent groups, and war and peace, mainly in collaboration with Melvin Ember, whom she married in 1970. All of these cross-cultural studies tested theories on data for worldwide samples of societies. Her recent grant-funded research focuses on how climate-related hazards and other shocks may have affected cultural institutions and practices.

From 1970 to 1996, she taught at Hunter College of the City University of New York, attaining the rank of Full Professor in 1981. She has served as president of the Society of Cross-Cultural Research and the Society for Anthropological Sciences and was one of the directors of NSF-supported Summer Institutes teaching cross-cultural methods from 1991 to 1999 and from 2021 to 2023. Since 1996, she has been at the Human Relations Area Files, Inc., a nonprofit research agency at Yale University, first serving as Executive Director and since 2010 as President of that organization.

Melvin Ember majored in anthropology at Columbia College and went to Yale University for his PhD. His mentor at Yale was George Peter Murdock, an anthropologist who was instrumental in promoting cross-cultural research and building a full-text database on the cultures of the world to facilitate cross-cultural hypothesis testing. This database came to be known as the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) because it was originally sponsored by the Institute of Human Relations at Yale. Originally available in paper and microfiche before being published electronically, today, the digital version of the HRAF files is collectively known as the eHRAF databases. Combined, the annually growing eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF Archaeology databases cover more than 470 cultures, past and present, all over the world.

Melvin Ember did fieldwork for his dissertation in American Samoa, where he conducted a comparison of 3 villages to study the effects of commercialization on political life. In addition, he did research on descent groups and how they changed with the increase of buying and selling. His cross-cultural studies focused originally on variation in marital residence and descent groups. He has also done cross-cultural research on the relationship between economic and political development, the origin and extension of the incest taboo, the causes of polygyny, and how archaeological correlates of social customs can help us draw inferences about the past.

After 4 years of research at the National Institute of Mental Health, he taught at Antioch College and then Hunter College of the City University of New York. He served as president of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research. From 1987 until his death in September 2009, he was president of the Human Relations Area Files, Inc., a nonprofit research agency at Yale University.

Peter N. Peregrine came to anthropology after completing an undergraduate degree in English. He found anthropology’s social scientific approach to understanding humans more appealing than the humanistic approach he had learned as an English major. He undertook an ethnohistorical study of the relationship between Jesuit missionaries and Native American peoples for his master’s degree and realized that he needed to study archaeology to understand the cultural interactions experienced by Native Americans before their contact with the Jesuits.

While working on his PhD at Purdue University, he did research on the prehistoric Mississippian cultures of the eastern United States. He found that interactions between groups were common and had been shaping Native American cultures for centuries. Native Americans approached contact with the Jesuits simply as another in a long string of intercultural exchanges. He also found that relatively little research had been done on Native American interactions and decided that comparative research was a good place to begin examining the topic. In 1990, he participated in the Summer Institute in Comparative Anthropological Research, where he met Carol R. Ember and Melvin Ember.

He is professor emeritus of anthropology at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. He also serves as research associate for the Human Relations Area Files. He continues to perform archaeological research with undergraduate students.