Abstract
THE MURDOCK LEGACY: THE ETHNOGRAPHIC ATLAS AND THE SEARCH FOR A METHOD Douglas R. White and Lilyan A. Brudner-White There is no doubt that George Peter Murdock contributed to anthropology something novel, vital, and authentic. To explore the Murdock legacy is a valuable experience for anyone who is concerned with the history of the discipline, its core paradigm shifts, and its basic assumptions about the nature of fact. Among other things, Murdock challenged traditional culture theory as it had been handed down by the evolutionists and later sharply revised by Boas and Kroeber, attempting to free it further from its procrustean bed of nineteenth- century evolutionary determinism and accompanying mystifications. His contribution was to be a pioneer in forging some of the new intellectual linkages by which anthropology began to move toward becoming a more self-reflexive discipline, capable of questioning its own theory. Accordingly, the present paper examines several parts of that legacy. Within anthropology, Murdock was for decades the preeminent spokesman of the empirical tradition of direct comparison of societies. His monumental task, along with others, was to create a complex scientific apparatus by which anthropology could eventually become both a comparative and a formal science, capable of testing and falsifying theory against a worldwide data base. He built more directly on the Cross-Cultural Survey that he and others initiated in 1937 as part of an integrated program of research by the Institute of Human Relations at Yale. That research unit compiled data on 150 societies. Murdock’s most immediate antecedents in this context were Sumner and Keller (1927). Like Morgan, Tylor, and Spencer, who went before * Douglas R. White is Professor of Comparative Culture, School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine. Lilyan A. Brudner-White is a former Research Associate, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine.
Highlights
Murdock and to heated debates with him
There is no doubt that George Peter Murdock contributed to anthropology something novel, vital, and authentic
As Sahlins later observed (1976: 92), Murdock essentially operated in the&dquo;Morganian understanding of the relationship between practical circumstance, utilitarian action, and cultural order.&dquo; And LOvi-Strauss (1963: 300) notes: &dquo;Morgan’s genius at one and the same time founded social anthropology and kinship studies and brought to the fore the basic reason for attaching such importance to the latter: permanency, systematic character, continuity of changes.&dquo; Murdock’s article on statistical comparisons of kinship terms (1947) focused on theories advanced by Rivers, Kroeber, Lowie, Sapir, and Radcliffe-Brown
Summary
There is no doubt that George Peter Murdock contributed to anthropology something novel, vital, and authentic. As Sahlins later observed (1976: 92), Murdock essentially operated in the&dquo;Morganian understanding of the relationship between practical circumstance, utilitarian action, and cultural order.&dquo; And LOvi-Strauss (1963: 300) notes: &dquo;Morgan’s genius at one and the same time founded social anthropology and kinship studies and brought to the fore the basic reason for attaching such importance to the latter: permanency, systematic character, continuity of changes.&dquo; Murdock’s article on statistical comparisons of kinship terms (1947) focused on theories advanced by Rivers, Kroeber, Lowie, Sapir, and Radcliffe-Brown He was concerned with attempting to make definitive decisions between alternative scientific theories in anthropology. For example, notes some of the criticism of Murdock’s approach, and states (1968: 612) that &dquo;we must credit Murdock with his historic contribution, the triple linking up of modern ethnography, modern statistics and the statistical comparative cross-cultural survey method.&dquo; Murdock was disappointed at the blank reception of his more formal contributions to a logico-deductive or axiomatic theory of kinship terminology, excruciatingly tested through all of its various consequences. The question of the validity of his codes, relates to questions of theory, and here we must backtrack to the central enigma: the extent to which Murdock’s codes, the reactions of his students to his work, and his reactions to his students’ work, can be understood in terms of the central line of theory that he developed in Social Structure
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