George Peter Murdock (1897–1985)

George P. Murdock, an American anthropologist, studied both sociology and anthropology at Yale University under Albert G. Keller, who had been William Graham Sumner's most important student. The card file that Sumner used in preparing his famous Folkways, published in 1906, became Keller's, and show more under Murdock's guidance it ultimately became the basis for the Human Relations Area Files, a major database in the field of anthropology. Murdock's interest in cross-cultural analysis led to a number of books and to the journal Ethnology, which he founded in 1962. He taught at Yale University until 1960, when he went to the University of Pittsburgh, from which he retired in 1973. (Bowker Author Biography) show less