George Murdock facts for kids

George Peter ("Pete") Murdock (born May 11, 1897 – died March 29, 1985) was an American anthropologist. He taught at Yale University and the University of Pittsburgh. He is known for his scientific way of studying different cultures. He also studied how families and kinship (family relationships) are structured in various societies around the world.

Murdock created a huge collection of information called the Ethnographic Atlas. This dataset, from 1967, includes details on over 1,200 societies that existed before modern industry. It is still used a lot in social science research today.

Early Life and Education

George Murdock was born in Meriden, Connecticut. His family had been farmers there for many generations. He spent a lot of his childhood working on the farm. This gave him a good understanding of old farming methods.

He finished high school at Phillips Academy, Andover, in 1915. Then, he earned a bachelor's degree in American History from Yale University. After Yale, he started studying law at Harvard Law School. However, he left law school in his second year. He then went on a long trip around the world.

This trip, along with his interest in traditional cultures, led Murdock to study anthropology at Yale. He earned his doctorate (PhD) in 1925. After that, he stayed at Yale as a professor and later became the head of the anthropology department.

Murdock's Approach to Anthropology

Even in his early writings, Murdock's unique way of thinking was clear. He believed that anthropology should be studied scientifically. This meant gathering information from many different cultures. Then, researchers could test their ideas using statistics.

Murdock saw himself as a social scientist, not just an anthropologist. He often worked with experts from other fields. At Yale, he gathered a team to create a large collection of cross-cultural data.

During World War II, Murdock believed that studying different cultures could help the U.S. war effort. He and some friends joined the Navy. They wrote handbooks about the cultures of Micronesia. After this, Murdock served as a government official in occupied Okinawa for almost a year. Before the war, he had studied the Haida people in North America. But after the war, he focused on Micronesia. He continued to do fieldwork there until the 1960s.

Time at Yale University

Murdock became a professor at Yale University in 1928. His PhD was in Sociology because Yale did not have an Anthropology Department yet. He taught courses about human physical features. In 1931, Yale started an anthropology department.

Murdock led the Department of Anthropology from 1938 until 1960. At that time, he reached the mandatory retirement age at Yale. However, he was offered a new position at the University of Pittsburgh. He moved there with his wife.

George Murdock and his wife had one child, Robert Douglas Murdock. Robert was born in 1929 and passed away in 2011.

In 1948, Murdock wanted his cross-cultural data to be available to more researchers. He got funding to create the Human Relations Area Files. This organization made his collections available to many universities.

Major Works and Contributions

Murdock is known for several important books and datasets:

• In 1954, he published the Outline of World Cultures. This book listed every known culture.
• In 1957, he released his first cross-cultural data set, the World Ethnographic Sample. It included 565 cultures with information on 30 different topics.
• In 1959, he published Africa: Its peoples and their culture history. This was a very helpful book about African ethnic groups. It also explored the history of how plants were domesticated (tamed for human use).

Other important works by Murdock include:

• Social Structure. (1949)
• Ethnographic Atlas: A Summary. (1967)
• Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (1969)
• Atlas of World Cultures. (1981)

Murdock's "main sequence theory" suggested how social systems change. He believed that changes often start with how people decide where to live. Then, changes in family descent rules follow. Finally, changes in family terms (like "aunt" or "cousin") happen.

University of Pittsburgh and Later Life

In 1960, Murdock moved to the University of Pittsburgh. He held a special teaching position there. In 1971, he helped start the Society for Cross-Cultural Research. This group includes anthropologists and psychologists.

Between 1962 and 1967, he published parts of his Ethnographic Atlas. This dataset eventually included almost 1,200 cultures. In 1969, with Douglas R. White, he created the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. This is a carefully chosen set of 186 well-documented cultures. Today, it has information on about 2000 different topics.

Murdock retired from the University of Pittsburgh in 1973. He then moved closer to his son and grandchildren. He is buried in a military cemetery in Pennsylvania.

Ethnology Journal

In 1962, Murdock started a journal called Ethnology: An International Journal of Cultural and Social Anthropology. It was published by the University of Pittsburgh. The journal stopped publishing in 2012.

See also

In Spanish: George Peter Murdock para niños

• List of cultures in the standard cross cultural sample