George Murdock

George Peter Murdock

May 11, 1897 - March 29, 1985

Biography:

Born in Meriden, Connecticut, George Murdock came to be one of the most influential anthropologists of the mid twentieth century. Growing up in a family where education was highly valued, Murdock attended Phillips Academy, Andover, and received a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University where he graduated with honors in history in 1919. Although Murdock began to study law at Harvard, he soon dropped out in order to travel the world. He eventually returned to Yale to receive his Ph.D. in anthropology and sociology. Although his educational career ended with his Ph.D., he taught his passions of anthropology and sociology to students at the University of Maryland for two years and at Yale for 32 years (Goodenough, 1994).

George Murdock is also considered a functionalist which means he believes that people, objects, and all aspects of society play an important role or each have a specific function in order to help a society survive and thrive (Thompson, 2016) . This is extremely important when looking at George Murdock's career because his functionalist beliefs carried with him into his work as an anthropologist and influenced some of his most notable works.

Scholarly Work

Murdock is an “American anthropologist who specialized in comparative ethnology, the ethnography of African and Oceanic peoples, and social theory”. His most notable work comes from his debut Cross-Cultural Survey in which anthropological data could be retrieved from this collection of known societies' cultures (George P. Murdock). This tool improved the overall science of anthropology because it enabled anthropologists to test theories and look at data from a wide variety of cultures.

Not only did Murdock enhance the cross-cultural studies, but he also was the first to conclude that families are a cultural universal, in which he detailed in his book Social Structure in 1949. This book recounted over 250 sample societies in which the organization of family and kinship was observed (George Peter Murdock) . It is important to note that Murdock's definition of family for a cultural universal included parents and children, whereas some societies heavily depended also on extended family such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, Murdock's conclusion is limited to parents and children.

Publications and Works

After his book in 1949, he published a work in 1957 called the Outline of World Cultures. This contained a list of every known culture that existed in the world and had a total of 565 cultures. In 1962, Murdock started the International Journal of Cultural and Social Anthropology, which was an extensive publication that had many anthropological articles and periodicals. It was finished 50 years later in 2012. He would also go on to publish many more books and articles. Some of these include Ethnographic Atlas: A Summary (1967), Theories of Illness: A World Survey (1980), Atlas of World Cultures (1981), and many more.

Learn More

"Murdock on the Family | A Level Sociology - Families" www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSuUjEyN05U

"George Peter Murdock" anthropology.iresearchnet.com/george-peter-murdock/

What you need to know about: George Murdock (Anthropologist / Sociologist) www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NRTu7cKfUU

Works Cited

George P. Murdock. (n.d.). Retrieved November 06, 2020, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-P-Murdock

George Peter Murdock. (n.d.). Retrieved November 06, 2020, from https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/George_Peter_Murdock

Goodenough, W. H. (1994). George Peter Murdock. In Biographical Memoirs (Vol. 64, pp. 305-309). National Academy of Sciences.

Thompson, K. (2016, August 8). What is the Family? Retrieved December 10, 2020, from https://revisesociology.com/2016/08/08/defining-the-family/