George Murdock is remembered for his empirical approach to ethnological studies and his study of family and kinship structures across differing cultures.
17 Facts About George Murdock
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George Murdock created the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample with Douglas R White.
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George Murdock is known for his work as an FBI informant on his fellow anthropologists during McCarthyism.
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George Murdock graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover, in 1915 and earned a BA in American History at Yale University.
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George Murdock then attended Harvard Law School, but quit in his second year and took a long trip around the world.
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George Murdock sees himself as a social scientist rather than more narrowly as an anthropologist, and is in constant dialogue with researchers in other disciplines.
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George Murdock 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.
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Andrew Mellon 8.
George Murdock was particularly antagonistic of Boasian cultural anthropology, which he considered to be aligned with communist thought.
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George Murdock was not the only person in his field or at his university to cooperate with intelligence agencies.
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George Murdock later served as chair of the American Anthropological Association's Committee on Scientific Freedom, established to defend anthropologists from unfair attacks.
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In 1948, George Murdock decided that his cross-cultural data set would be more valuable were it available to researchers at schools other than Yale.
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George Murdock 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.
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In 1954, George Murdock published a list of every known culture, the Outline of World Cultures.
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In 1959, despite having no professional experience in Africa, George Murdock published Africa: Its peoples and their culture history, a reference book on African ethnic groups heavily reliant on colonial sources that attributed African innovations to diffusion from cultures outside Africa.
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In 1960, George Murdock moved to the University of Pittsburgh, where he occupied the Andrew Mellon Chair of Anthropology.
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George Murdock is buried in a military cemetery, Valley Forge Memorial Gardens, 352 South Gulph Road, King of Prussia, PA.
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In 1962, George Murdock founded Ethnology An International Journal of Cultural and Social Anthropology, published by the University of Pittsburgh.