Biographical Memoirs Volume 64 (1994) / Chapter Skim
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George Peter Murdock
George Peter Murdock
Pages 304-319
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From page 305... ...
But his critics tract to reckon with his work, and many of them found, in the end, that their own contributions grew significantly out of it, thereby underscoring the importance of his role in the growth of his discipline. He contributed not only intellectually but also as an organizer, providing leaclership in the creation of the Human Relations Area Files, Inc., and in the promotion ant!
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From page 306... ...
education and the cultivation of knowledge as the proper pathway to personal and social fulf~Iment anti fosterect Murdock's education accordingly, sending him to Phillips Academy, Anclover, en cl then to Yale University, where he graduated with honors in history in 1919. He took leave from Yale to serve as a member of the National Guard in the Mexican border incident of 1916 anti, again, as a seconcl lieutenant of artillery in WorI`1 War I
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From page 307... ...
Much of his career was devoted to creating organized data archives intended to establish a solid foundation for such study. In this, as in everything else he did, Murdock sought to bring better order to the enormous mass of ethnographic information and to the many conflicting and competing v generalizations, hypotheses, and typologies that anthropologists were continually generating but failing to test emoirically in a rigorous way.
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From page 308... ...
knowledge of culture and society and that improved the quality of the data base on which comparative stucly relied. Murclock held his students to the highest stanciarcis in the conduct of their own ethnographic research ant!
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as a topical guide in ethnographic research. This later work was cleveloped in connection with the ambitious project called the Cross-Cultural Survey, which Murdock set up at YaTe's Institute for Human Relations in the mid-1930s.
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Resulting concern to improve the quality of the ethnographic data base led to major advances in ethnographic method, and to considerable rethinking and refining of the categories in terms of which data are reported and generalized. This concern also contributed to the development of protocols for enhancing comparability of ethnographic data.4 The comparative studies the HRAF files facilitated also contributed significantly to rethinking and refining concepts.
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From page 311... ...
The bibliography of North America, subsequently co-authored and greatly expanded by Timothy O'Leary into a f~ve-volume fourth edition (1975) , remains the most important reference for students and researchers, as do Murclock's cowlings of a large number of cultural variables for 218 North American societies.7 Finding his cross-cultural research demands running ahead of the resources being macle available through the Human
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From page 312... ...
above, he published the results of a number of other comparative studies, ranging over such topics as the social regulation of sexual behavior, family stability, parental attitudes, parental kin terms, the distribution of kin term patterns, cross-sex kin behavior, and the division of labor by sex. His final comparative study was a global survey of theories of illness and their regional distributions (19801.
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With HaroIcI Coolicige, he organized the Pacific Science Board within the National Research Council of the National Acactemy of Sciences anct obtained for the Board funding from the Office of Naval Research for the Coordinatect Investigation of Micronesian Anthropology (CIMA) , a project that took forty-two anthropologists and linguists from more than twenty institutions to clo field research in 1947-48.
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NOTES 1. This memoir draws heavily on two other biographical pieces by the author: "George Peter Murdock," in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol.
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Jorgensen, "George Peter Murdock's Contributions to the Ethnology of Native North America," in Behavior Science Research, 22 (1988)
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Of the twenty-four former students who contributed to this volume, nine have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
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1941 Ethnographic Bibliography of North America. New Haven: Anthropological Studies, I
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1955 North American social organization. Davidson f.
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Ethnographic Bibliography of North America, 4th ea., 5 vols. New Haven: HRAF Press.
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