description George Peter Murdock Overview
George Peter Murdock was an American anthropologist known for comparative studies of kinship, social organization, and family systems. At Yale University he founded the Human Relations Area Files, an indexed archive that organizes ethnographic information by culture and topic for cross-cultural research, and he also produced the Ethnographic Atlas; his methods sought to compare social institutions across a large, systematically coded sample of societies.
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What is George Peter Murdock known for?
Murdock is known for comparative research on kinship, social organization, family systems, and cultural patterns. He also founded the Human Relations Area Files at Yale.
What are the Human Relations Area Files?
The Human Relations Area Files are an indexed archive that organizes ethnographic information by culture and topic. The project began at Yale in 1935 under George Peter Murdock and colleagues.
What is Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas?
The Ethnographic Atlas is a comparative dataset that codes information about societies, including subsistence and social organization. Yale's HRAF describes its sample as covering over 1,264 societies.
How did Murdock make cross-cultural comparison possible?
He promoted standardized categories and indexing so researchers could compare the same topics across many cultures. His Outline of Cultural Materials, published in 1961, helped organize ethnographic sources for that purpose.
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