George Peter Murdock

Ethnographic Atlas: A Summary

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Factors in the division of labor by sex: a cross-cultural analysis

A division of labor betweeIl the sexes has long been recognized by economists, sociologists, and other behavioral scientists as (I) the original and most basic form of economic specialization and exchange, and as (2) the most fundamental basis of marriage and the family and hence the ultimate source of all forms of kinship organization. On the whole, however, scholars have focused their major attention on the consequences rather than the causes of the division of labor by sex, seeking, for example, to ascertain 1tS bearing on such matters as the status of women and the forms of soczal organization. In the present paper the emphasis shifts to an inquiry into the factors governing the assignment of particular tasks to men or to women in the cultures of the world.

Sociology and Anthropology.

The Department of Sociology and Anthropology offers three avenues for specialized study: a major in sociology, a major in anthropology, and a minor in anthropology. The department has one principal mission — to challenge students to examine the social and cultural dimensions of the contemporary world. As social sciences, both disciplines play a distinctive role in the liberal arts curriculum. Each combines a humanistic concern for the quality and diversity of human life with a commitment to the empirical analysis of culture and society. The department welcomes non-majors to courses when space is available. Our curricula also have many ties to Holy Cross’ interdisciplinary programs and concentrations.

Natchez Class and Rank Reconsidered

During the brief period from 1700 to 1731 French missionaries, explorers, and colonial administrators recorded the features of Natchez social life. In 1731 a war with the French led to the surrender and sale into slavery of one sector of the tribe and the dispersal of the remainder, who later were assimilated into the Creek confederacy. In writing the first modern ethnographic reconstruction of Natchez society and culture, Swanton (1911) had to rely upon somewhat fragmentary accounts of the French, principally those of Penicaut, Du Pratz, Dumont, and Charlevoix (notes on early contacts are supplied in Appendix 2). The Natchez are the best described ethnographic example of the Temple Mound cultures of the Lower Mississippi valley, whose archeological record dates back to about 700 A.D. 1 As such, they provide the most striking instance of a stratified social system in aboriginal North America. The historical Natchez villages were scattered along St. Catherine’s Creek, which empties westward into the Mississippi River below the present city of Natchez, Mississippi. They comprised a population, in 1700, of about 3,500 persons in nine villages (Swanton 1911: 39-44). Over this population ruled a divine king, the Great Sun, 2 who administered the capital village directly and appointed a number of high officials, including a Head War Chief, a Master of Temple Ceremonies, two peace or treaty chiefs, a maize chief, an official responsible for public works, and four administrators for public festivities. Four of the other villages were each headed by a War Chief appointed from among the Sun nobility, the matrilineal relatives of the Great Sun. Of four lesser villages, one or two were inhabited by remnants of the formerly independent Tioux tribe and had their own village chiefs but were nonetheless under the authority of the Great Sun. In the central or Great Village, the residence of the Great Sun occupied a raised mound situated across the central plaza from a mound and temple devoted to Sun ancestors and the Sun deity. Former Sun rulers and the sacrificial victims who accompanied their death were interred in the temple. Among those sacrificed were a large retinue of lifelong personal servants, assigned as suckling infants to the Great Sun at his birth as an heir to the throne. Royal succession, as in many of the chiefdoms of the Southeast, was matrilineal.

Changing Emphases in Social Structure

W HEN SCIENTISTS approach a new subject, their first task, after that of raw description and preliminary ordering, is to discover which descriptive features of the phenomena under observation are particularly useful for grouping or differentiation, and to initiate classification on the basis of such criteria. Their next task is to determine which features isolated according to one set of criteria coexist with features isolated according to other useful criteria. In this way they arrive at larger typological classifications which bring a measure of systematic order into what had first seemed sheer descriptive chaos. Noteworthy examples in other sciences include the Linnaean classification of living organisms and the periodic system of classifying chemical elements devised by Mendelyeev. In anthropology, the initial classificatory task has by now been substantially accomplished in the field of social structure. Through the contributions of men like Morgan, Tylor, Rivers, Kroeber, Lowie, Linton, Spier, Kirchhoff, Radcliffe-Brown, Steward, and Eggan we now possess satisfactory criteria for differentiating types of family organization, kin and local groups, and kinship terminology and behavior patterns. Moreover, the work of Rivers, Lowie, Radcliffe-Brown, and many others, including the present writer, has shown how these features are combined with one another in particular ways to produce a finite number of types of social organization, which in their totality represent a systematic classification comparable to those of Linnaeus and Mindelyeev. However useful, and indeed indispensable, is this task of classification, it is by no means the ultimate goal of science. Any typological system is, by its very nature, static in character. It takes on full meaning only when scientists are able to demonstrate the dynamic processes which give rise to the phenomena thus classified. The Linnaean system, for example, came alive only after Darwin had discerned the processes of variation and natural selection, and especially after the geneticists had laid bare the dynamic mechanisms of heredity. It is the contention of this paper that the anthropological study of social structure has gradually been emerging from its classificatory or typological phase, and that the changing emphases which we can currently observe are characterized for the most part by a common concern with dynamics or process. Before examples are

Family Stability in Non-European Cultures

THIS paper presents the conclusions of a special study of the stability of marriage in forty selected non-European societies undertaken in an attempt to place the family situation in the contemporary United States in cross-cultural perspective. Eight societies were chosen from each of the worlds major ethnographic regions-Asia, Africa, Oceania, and native North and South America. Within each region the samples were carefully selected from widely scattered geographical locations, from different culture areas, and from levels of civilization ranging from the simplest to the most complex. The data were obtained from the collections in the Hu-

Feasibility and Implementation of Comparative Community Research: With Special Reference to the Human Relations Area Files

JNTEREST in the community is diverse. For some it is primarily theoretical, being directed, for example, toward the analysis of the structured relationships of individuals within the community, as into social classes or castes, or into institutions like those of the church, the school, cooperatives, or municipal government. For others the interest takes a practical form; the community is the recognized locus for the implementation of programs of education, public health, nutrition, social work, relief and rehabilitation, agricultural extension work, and the like. Some few may even be responsible for planning the establishment of new communities, as in reclamation and resettlement projects. Whatever these varied interests, however, they all come to a common focus in the structure and functioning of the community. The broader and deeper the scientific knowledge of the community, the better equipped each specialist will be to carry out his own specific task. In this paper, consequently the problem of the community will be approached from the broadest possible comparative or cross-cultural point of view. The first point to be noted is that the local community is a universal social group. It shares with the nuclear or biological family -and with it alone-the distinction of being present and functionally significant in every one of the thousands of societies known to ethnography and history, from the simplest primitive cultures to the most complex modern civilizations. Specialists interested in public schools or cooperativeseven those concerned with the courts or the church-are dealing with historically limited or culture-bound phenomena which can be

Social Organization of Truk

1879. Though Spanish sovereignty was recognized in 1886, actual administration did not begin until the arrival of the Germans in 1899. Truk passed into the possession of Japan in 1914 and of the United States in 1945. In the face of these acculturative influences the aboriginal culture has shown remarkable vitality, and most of what has disappeared in fact survives in memory.1 The people of Truk are divided into about forty matrilineal and strictly exogamous sibs (einang),2 which also extend to the surrounding atolls from Lukunor to Puluwat. None is confined to a single island, and many are widespread, but no island has representatives of all. Besides the regulation of marriage, sibs possess only a single important function, namely, the channeling of

MEAD, MARGARET (Ed.). Coöperation and Competition Among Primitive Peoples. Pp. xii, 531. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1937.

its use. By numerous specific instances in text and footnote the memory of various informants in placing events is discredited. Reliance is placed most heavily on documents and manuscripts both private and public; in these, frequent tests for bias or fraud are made. The book is much more than a biography of Red Cloud or a narrative of Red Cloud’s folk. There is scarcely a person of importance-Indian or white, trader, trapper, missionary, soldier, chief, general, agent, or squawman-whose participation in the political breakdown of the Oglalas is not considered. Red Cloud actually occupies a relatively minor place in the volume, probably the correct historical judgment. The movements, campaigns, battles, victories, and defeats of many tribes other than the Oglalas are treated in adequate relationship to the general Siouan picture. The shifting political and economic scenes in Washington and the East and the