The Murdock Legacy

The Ethnographic Atlas and the Search for a Method

Bibliographic Data

ID5772939
AuthorsDouglas R White (0000-0001-5872-3963), Lilyan A Brudner‐white (University of California, Irvine), Lilyan A Brudner-White
Year1988
Volume22
Issue1-4
Pages59-81
Publication date1988-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBehavior Science Research (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0094-3673
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/106939718802200107
OpenAlexW2031178715
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited35

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

Reflexivity · Spatial and Panel Data Analysis

Tools

Open DOISci-HubOpen Access