Harold K. Schneider - Human Relations Area Files

Human Relations Area Files

Schneider was also interested in using information technology to store and analyze ethnographic information. He served on the executive committee of the Human Relations Area Files between 1981 and 1984, at a time when the organization began moving its data into electronic format. As Edgar Wimans notes, the influence of George Peter Murdock can be seen in Schneider's work, not only in his interest in ethnographic databases (a movement which Murdock pioneered), but in the way in which he developed general causal hypotheses explaining features of social structure. This facet of Schneider's thought is best exemplified in his 1979 Livestock and Equality in East Africa: The Economic Basis for Social Structure, where he maintains that a pastoral society's kinship system and its degree of egalitarianism are conditioned by the number of livestock per person.