George Murdock

Born in Meriden, Connecticut to a family that had farmed there for five generations, Murdock spent many childhood hours working on the family farm and acquired a wide knowledge of traditional, non-mechanized, farming methods. He graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover, in 1915 and earned an BA in American History at Yale University. He 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 Murdock 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.

For Murdock's war Service in World War II, the best source is his own account as published in A Twenty-Five Year Record: Yale College Class of 1919, a class yearbook published in New Haven, Connecticut in 1946. These are Murdock's own recollections, as shared with his classmates in the class of 1919 at Yale:

Murdock joined the faculty of Yale University in 1928. His PhD from the institution was in the field of Sociology, as Yale at that time did not yet have a Department of Anthropology. Murdock taught courses in physical anthropology. In 1931, Yale established an anthropology department and hired Edward Sapir as the chairman. Murdock's sociological and positivist approach to anthropology was at odds with Sapir's Boasian approach to cultural anthropology. Following Sapir's death, Murdock served as chairman of the Department of Anthropology from 1938 until 1960, when he reached the then mandatory retirement age at Yale. However, he was offered the chair of Andrew Mellon Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. Leaving his long-time residence at 960 Ridge Road in Hamden, Connecticut, Murdock moved with his wife to 4150 Bigelow Boulevard in Pittsburgh. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh until his retirement in 1973, at which point he moved to the Philadelphia area to be close to his son.

Murdock and his wife had one child, Robert Douglas Murdock. He was born in 1929 and died in 2011.

According to David H. Price, in a chapter entitled "Hoover's Informer", devoted to Murdock during McCarthyism, Murdock had secretly informed on AAA colleagues to J. Edgar Hoover. Murdock was particularly antagonistic of Boasian cultural anthropology, which he considered to be aligned with communist thought. Murdock was not the only person in his field or at his university to cooperate with intelligence agencies. For much of the 20th century, agencies such as the CIA and the FBI enjoyed a close relationship with American universities. Yale University was especially known (later) as a breeding ground for employees of the agencies. Researchers in anthropology and foreign relations were often debriefed after foreign field trips (see: Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961. New York: william Morrow, 1987). Murdock 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 inter-university organization, the Human Relations Area Files, with collections maintained at Yale University (Whiting 1986: 684).

Murdock is known most of all for his main sequence theory whose gist was spelled out by him initially as follows: "When any social system which has attained equilibrium begins to change, such change regularly begins with modification of the rule of residence. Alteration in residence rules is followed by development or change in form of descent consistent with residence rules. Finally adaptive changes in kinship terminology follow (Murdock 1949:221-222)."

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. In 1959, despite having no professional experience in Africa, Murdock published Africa: Its peoples and their culture history, a very useful reference book on African ethnic groups which also broke new ground in the analysis of prehistory, especially the domestication of plants. There is also a list of his other major works:

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). 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 1962, Murdock founded Ethnology An International Journal of Cultural and Social Anthropology, published by the University of Pittsburgh. This publication continues in its 45th volume as one of the pre-eminent anthropology journals in the world.