George Murdock was a great help in writing and distributing ethnographic material collected from all around the world. These were originally called cross-cultural files; later identified as human relation files and circulated among various colleges.
Murdock graduated from Yale University with a Bachelors Degree in American History. He then moved onto the Harvard Law School, but decided it wasn't for him and dropped out to take a trip around the world. Inspired by the trip, Murdock decided to pursue anthropology and applied to Yale. He graduated from the joint Anthropology-Sociology program completing his Ph.D. in three years. In the summer of 1932, he conducted a field study of the Haida of the Northwest Coast. Between 1934 and 1935 he studied the Tenino of Oregon.
Murdock began teaching at the University of Maryland. During World War II he enlisted in the Army and arranged to be sent to Columbia University to produce informational handbooks on Micronesia. He also asked for the reports of the 1910 German expedition and the available Japanese reports to be translated and processed for the files at Yale. With the additional information, he was able to create a set of Civil Affairs Handbooks covering not only Micronesia, but also the areas from Bikini to Yap, Okinawa and Taiwan.
George Murdock produced many successful literary works in his time including The Outline of World Cultures, the Ethnographic Atlas, Africa: Its Peoples and Their Culture History and numerous papers between 1934 and 1949.
This picture reprinted by permission from the American Anthropological Association.
References
George Peter Murdock (1897-1985). Obituaries. <http://www.jstor.org/view/00027294/ap020465/02a00120/0>
Written by Students in an Introduction to Anthropology Class, Minnesota State University, Mankato, Minnesota
Edited by Marcy L. Voelker, 2007