George Peter Murdock

George Peter Murdock (May 11, 1897 - March 29, 1985) was a notable anthropologist. Born in Meriden, Connecticut to a family that had farmed there for five generations, he spent many childhood hours working on the family farm, and acquired a wide knowledge of traditional, non-mechanized, farming methods. He earned an A.B. in American History at Yale University, and then attended Harvard Law School, but quit in his second year and took a long trip around the world. This trip, combined with his interest in traditional material culture, and perhaps a bit of inspiration from the popular Yale teacher A.G. Keller, prompted him to study Anthropology at Yale. Yale's Anthropology program still maintained something of the evolutionary tradition of William Graham Sumner, a quite different emphasis from the historical particularism promulgated by Franz Boas at Columbia. In 1925, he received his doctorate and continued at Yale as a faculty member and chair of the Anthropology department (Whiting 1986: 682-683).

Even in his earliest writings, Murdock's distinctive approach is apparent. He advocates an empirical approach to anthropology, through the compilation of data from independent cultures, and then testing hypotheses by subjecting the data to the appropriate statistical tests. He also sees himself as a social scientist, rather than more narrowly as an anthropologist, and is in constant dialogue with researchers in other disciplines. At Yale he assembled a team of colleagues and employees in an effort to create a cross-cultural data set (Whiting 1986: 683-684).

Believing that a cross-cultural approach would help the U.S. war effort during World War II, Murdock and a few colleagues enlisted in the Navy, and wrote handbooks on the cultures of Micronesia, working out of an office at Columbia University. After completing the handbooks, Murdock and his fellow officers were sent to the Pacific as military government officials, serving for nearly a year in the administration of occupied Okinawa. While his pre-war fieldwork had been among the Haida and other indigenous peoples of the Northwest North American coast, Murdock's interests were now focused on Micronesia, and he conducted fieldwork there episodically until the 1960s (Whiting 1986: 684).

According to David H. Price, in a chapter entitled “Hoover’s Informer”, devoted to Murdock during McCarthyism, he had secretly informed on AAA colleagues to J. Edgar Hoover, even though he later served as chair of the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA’s) Committee on Scientific Freedom, established to defend anthropologists from unfair attacks.

In 1948, Murdock decided that his cross-cultural data set would be more valuable were it available to researchers at schools other than Yale. He approached the Social Science Research Council and obtained the funding to establish an interuniversity organization, the Human Relations Area Files, with collections maintained at Yale University (Whiting 1986: 684).

In 1954, Murdock published a list of every known culture, the Outline of World Cultures. In 1957, he published his first cross-cultural data set, the World Ethnographic Sample, consisting of 565 cultures coded for 30 variables. Between 1962 and 1967 he published installments of his Ethnographic Atlas in the journal Ethnology —a data set eventually containing almost 1,200 cultures coded for over 100 variables. In 1969, together with Douglas R. White, he developed the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, consisting of a carefully selected set of 186 well-documented cultures that today are coded for about 2000 variables (Whiting 1986: 685).

In 1960, Murdock moved to the University of Pittsburgh, where he occupied the Andrew Mellon Chair of Anthropology. In 1971, he was instrumental in founding the Society for cross-cultural research, a scholarly society composed primarily of anthropologists and psychologists (Whiting 1986: 685).

Publications

• Murdock, George Peter (1949). Social Structure. New York: The MacMillan Company. ISBN 0-02-922290-7. 
• Murdock, G. P. 1967. Ethnographic Atlas: A Summary. Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press.
• Murdock, G. P. 1970. Kin Term Patterns and their Distribution. Ethnology 9: 165–207.
• Murdock, G. P. 1981. Atlas of World Cultures. Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press.
• Murdock, G. P. 1985. Kin Term Patterns and their Distribution. World Cultures 1(4): stds25.dat, stds25.cod.
• Murdock, G. P., and D. O. Morrow. 1970. Subsistence Economy and Supportive Practices: Cross-Cultural Codes 1. Ethnology 9: 302–30.
• Murdock, G. P., and C. A. Provost. 1973. Measurement of Cultural Complexity. Ethnology 12: 379–92.
• Murdock, G. P., R. Textor, H. Barry III, D. R. White, J. P. Gray, and W. Divale. 1999–2000. Ethnographic Atlas. World Cultures 10(1): 24–136, at01–09.sav; 11(1): ea10.sav (the third electronic version) [1].
• Murdock, G. P., and D. R. White. 1969. Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. Ethnology 8: 329–69.
• Murdock, G. P., and S. F. Wilson. 1972. Settlement Patterns and Community Organization: Cross-Cultural Codes 3. Ethnology 11: 254–95.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Whiting, John W.M. (1986). "George Peter Murdock, (1897-1985)." American Anthropologist. 88(3): 682-686.
• David H. Price (2004). "Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists" [2]

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