• Anthropologist George Peter Murdock, 1897
  

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 A.B. 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.

Even in his earliest writings, Murdock's distinctive approach is apparent. He advocates an empirical approach to anthropology, through the compilation of data from independent cultures, and then testing hypotheses by subjecting the data to the appropriate statistical tests. He also sees himself as a social scientist rather than more narrowly as an anthropologist, and is in constant dialogue with researchers in other disciplines. At Yale, he assembled a team of colleagues and employees in an effort to create a cross cultural data set.

Believing that a cross cultural approach would help the U.S. war effort during World War II, Murdock and a few colleagues enlisted in the Navy and wrote handbooks on the cultures of Micronesia, working out of an office at Columbia University. After completing the handbooks, Murdock and his fellow officers were sent to the Pacific as military government officials, serving for nearly a year in the administration of occupied Okinawa. While his prewar fieldwork had been among the Haida and other indigenous peoples of the Northwest North American coast, Murdock's interests were now focused on Micronesia, and he conducted fieldwork there episodically until the 1960s.

Murdock joined the faculty of Yale University in 1928 (his Ph.D. from Yale was in the field of Sociology, as Yale at that time did not yet have a Department of Anthropology). He served as chairman of the Department of Anthropology from 1938 to 1960. At that time, he hit 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 Pitt until his retirement in 1973, at which point he moved to the Philadelphia area to be close to his son.

Carmen and Pete 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, even though he later served as chair of the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA’s) Committee on Scientific Freedom, established to defend anthropologists from unfair attacks. In fairness to Murdock, it must be added that he 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.

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.

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, which both constitutes a very useful reference book on African ethnic groups and also broke new ground in the analysis of prehistory, especially the domestication of plants.

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. 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.

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 preeminent anthropology journals in the world.