George Peter Murdock

George Peter Murdock was an American anthropologist, born in 1897, who chaired the anthropology department at Yale University from 1938 to 1960 before moving to the University of Pittsburgh as its Andrew Mellon Professor. He was a leading advocate of an empirical, statistically grounded approach to cross-cultural comparison, in contrast to the qualitative Boasian tradition then dominant in American anthropology. In 1949 he founded the Human Relations Area Files, an inter-university archive of coded ethnographic data intended to make systematic cross-cultural research available to scholars beyond Yale, and his 1967 Ethnographic Atlas compiled comparative data, including kinship terminology, descent and marriage patterns, on more than one thousand two hundred societies; he later developed the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample with Douglas R. White in 1969. His 1949 book Social Structure remains a foundational text in the comparative study of kinship. He died in 1985.