George Peter Murdock

George Peter Murdock (born May 11, 1897 – died March 29, 1985) was an American anthropologist, a pioneer of cross-cultural analytical method in anthropology.

Life

George Murdock was born in Meriden, Connecticut, into a family of George Bronson Murdock and Harriett Elizabeth Graves, farmers, whose family 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 often mentioned, later in life, that this early experiences prepared him for his study in anthropology.

During the World War I Murdock served as an army first lieutenant in field artillery. In 1919 he earned an A.B. in American History at Yale University, and then enrolled into Harvard Law School. There he came under the influence of sociologist A.G. Keller, and decided to quit in his second year, and take a trip around the world. This trip, combined with his interest in traditional material culture, prompted him to change his major to anthropology. Murdock originally wanted to study at Columbia, but when Franz Boas denied him admission because of his “sociological” orientation, Murdock decided to stay at Yale. At the time, 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 Boas at Columbia. In 1925, Murdock received his doctorate and continued at Yale as a faculty member and chair of the Anthropology department. Murdock’s dissertation, a criticism of Julius Lippert’s The Evolution of Culture, was published in 1931.

In 1925 Murdock married Carmen Swanson, a graduate student of biochemistry, with whom he had one son.

Murdock continued teaching at Yale. He helped Edward Sapir establish the anthropology department in 1931, and served as its director from 1937 to 1943 and from 1953 to 1957. He completed several field studies during this period - first was in 1932 studying Haida culture; then in 1934 and 1935 he was among Tenino Indians. Those studies led to his first major comparative ethnographic publication, Our Primitive Contemporaries (1934).

Murdock’s comparative approach perfectly fitted into the interdisciplinary orientation of Yale’s Institute of Human Relations. In 1937 he, together with psychologists Clark L. Hull and Neal Miller, sociologist John Dollard, and other representatives of different disciplines, opened the Cross-Cultural Survey that used E.B. Taylor”s and Murdock’s comparative model to systematize Summer-Keller comparative tradition.

Murdock continued to work on comparative ethnographies throughout 1940s. His work was interrupted by the World War II. 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, working out of an office at Columbia University. 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. In 1943 he arranged the Cross Cultural Survey of Micronesia, publishing a series of handbooks on Marshall, Caroline, Marianas, Izu, Bonin, and Ryukyu islands. Murdock and his fellow officers were then sent to the Pacific as military government officials, serving for nearly a year in the administration of occupied Okinawa. Their study on Micronesia turned into a huge project, with Murdock, from 1947 to 1948, leading a group of 42 anthropologists from twenty different institutions, surveying Micronesia. In 1946, Murdock and his colleagues established the basis for the organization of the Human Relations Area Files, the system that became essential for all cross-cultural studies that followed.

In 1947 Murdock co-founded and served as the president of the Society for Applied Anthropology, and in 1949 he received the Viking Medal. In 1952 he was elected the president of the American Ethnological Society, and in 1955 of the American Anthropological Association.

In 1960, Murdock moved to the University of Pittsburgh, where he occupied the Andrew Mellon Chair of Anthropology. There he established the new anthropology department and founded the journal Ethnology, which dealt with cross-cultural issues in ethnography. In 1964 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences; he received the Herbert E. Gregory Medal in Tokyo in 1966, and the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal in 1967. He published the first issue of his Ethnographic Atlas in 1967, and helped organize the Division of Behavioral Sciences of the National Research Council from 1964 to 1968.

In 1971, he was instrumental in founding the Society for cross-cultural research, a scholarly society composed primarily of anthropologists and psychologists. Murdock and Douglas R. White opened the Pittsburgh's Cross-Cultural Cumulative Coding Center, which compiled systematic sets of comparative data, used for interdisciplinary cross-cultural studies.

Murdock retired in 1973 and moved outside Philadelphia to live near his son. He died in his home in Devon, Pennsylvania in 1985.

Work

Even in his earliest writings, Murdock's distinctive approach was apparent. He advocated 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.

Cross-Cultural Studies

Murdock believed that comparative analytical method is the key for studying culture. He rejected Boasian cultural relativism and historical particularism, which explored individual cultures in their historical context. Murdock was rather interested to make scientific generalizations about culture. Cross-cultural studies made this possible, and he first identified key variables, and then made causal and functional relationships between them. In order to keep his method scientific, Murdock created databases for cross-cultural comparisons, coding them for statistical analysis. With this approach he was able to make global generalizations about cultures. In his most important book, Social Structure (1949), he was able to identify “natural laws” of social organization by means of cross-cultural statistical comparisons.

Murdock saw himself as a social scientist, rather than more narrowly as an anthropologist, and was in constant dialogue with researchers in other disciplines. He also believed that his cross-cultural data set needed to be available to researchers from different disciplines and not only from Yale University. That was the reason he initiated the idea and established, first the Social Science Research Council, and then an interuniversity organization, the Human Relations Area Files, with collections maintained at Yale University. His idea was to share his cross-cultural results with scientists from different fields.

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. His Ethnographic Atlas consisted of data set eventually containing almost 1,200 cultures coded for over 100 variables. He also 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.

Family Studies

Murdock was interested in social organization and the regulation of sexual behavior. He published several of his works on this topic, including Family Universals in 1947, Cultural Correlates of the Regulation of Premarital Sexual Behavior in 1964, and his masterwork Social Structure in 1949. In Social Structure he described the family and kinship organization in the sample of 250 societies that he coded on features of kinship organization.

Criticism

Murdock’s cross-cultural approach was sometimes criticizes as being too mechanical, with a classification system that is, according to modern standards, outdated. He was also objected that his methodology was biased, because he used Western standards in comparative analysis.

Legacy

Murdock was a true pioneer of comparative, cross-cultural method of cultural studies. He worked in the time of proliferation of American anthropology as scientific discipline, when the exact nature of anthropology’s subject matter was just defined. Murdock compiled several databases that consisted of data from different cultures. His The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample has been used in hundreds of published cross-cultural studies to date. He made significant contributions to the study of kinship and social organization.

Bibliography

• Murdock, George P. 1934. Our Primitive Contemporaries. Macmillan Company

• Murdock, George P. 1947. Social organization of Truk. University of New Mexico Press

• Murdock, George P. 1959. Africa: Its Peoples and Their Culture History. McGraw Hill. ISBN 0070440522

• Murdock, George P. 1965 (original work from 1949). Social Structure. Free Press. ISBN 0029222907

• Murdock, George P. 1967. Double Descent. Bobbs-Merrill

• Murdock, George P. 1967. Ethnographic Atlas. Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press.

• Murdock, George P. 1970. Kin Term Patterns and their Distribution. Ethnology, 9, 165–207.

• Murdock, George P. 1973. Culture and Society Twenty-Four Essays. Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 0822952068

• Murdock, George P. 1976. Ethnographic Bibliography of North America. Human Relations Area Files (4th edition). ISBN 0875362052

• Murdock, George P. 1981. Atlas of World Cultures. Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 0822934329

• Murdock, George P. 1981. Theories of Illness: A World Survey. Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 0822934280

• Murdock, George P. & Morrow, D. O. 1970. Subsistence Economy and Supportive Practices: Cross-Cultural Codes 1. Ethnology, 9, 302–30.

• Murdock, George P. & Provost, C. A. 1973. Measurement of Cultural Complexity. Ethnology, 12, 379–92.

• Murdock, George P., Textor, R., Barry, H., White, D. R., Gray, J. P & Divale W.. 1999–2000. Ethnographic Atlas. World Cultures 10(1): 24–136, at01–09.sav; 11(1): ea10.sav (the third electronic version) [1].

• Murdock, George P., & White, D. R. 1969. Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. Ethnology, 8, 329–69.

• Murdock, George P., & Wilson, S. F. 1972. Settlement Patterns and Community Organization: Cross-Cultural Codes 3. Ethnology, 11, 254–95.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Goodenough, Ward H. 1964. Explorations in cultural anthropology: Essays in honor of George Peter Murdock. McGraw-Hill Book Co

• Price, David H. (2004). "Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists" [2]

• Whiting, John W.M. 1986. George Peter Murdock, (1897-1985). American Anthropologist., 88(3), 682-686.

External links

• George Peter Murdock – Biography

• Anthropological Theories: Cross-Cultural Analysis – About cross-cultural analysis, which Murdock pioneered

• Sex Before Marriage – Article in Time magazine discussing the concept of premarital sex from cross-cultural perspective (Murdock’s viewpoint included)

• Ethnographic Atlas – Description of the Atlas, with the link to CrossTabulations

• Yale Anthropology Department – Link to Department of Anthropology at Yale University

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