John Victor Murra

John Victor Murra (24 August 1916 – 16 October 2006), born Isak Lipschitz in Odessa, Ukraine, was a professor of anthropology and a researcher of the Inca Empire.

Biography

He emigrated to the United States in 1934, and two years later fought in the Spanish Civil War as a Republican. He completed an undergraduate degree in sociology at the University of Chicago, and at the same university finished a master's in 1942 and a Ph.D. in 1956, both in anthropology. He taught at the University of Puerto Rico (1947-50), Vassar College (1950-61), Yale (1962-63), Universidad de San Marcos (1964-66), and Cornell University (1968-82).

His work included the development of a new perspective of the Inca Empire, where trade and gift-giving among kin were common. Through extensive perusal of Spanish colonial archives and court documents, he found that the Inca dwelling in the rainforest hiked into the Andes to trade crops for products like wool from their mountain-dwelling kin. Murra called this "the vertical archipelago", and the model has been verified by later research. While some contest components of the theory, it has become the accepted economic model of the Central Andes in that time.cite news | title=John V. Murra, 90, Professor Who Recast Image of Incas | author = Dennis Hevesi | publisher = New York Times | quote=John V. Murra, a professor of anthropology who culled voluminous Spanish colonial archives for research that reshaped the image of the Incas and their vast South American empire, died on Oct. 16 at his home in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 90. |url=http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/obituaries/24murra.html?_r=1&oref=slogin | date=October 24, 2006]

Among Murra's writings are "The Economic Organization of the Inca State" (1956), "Cloth and its Functions in the Inca State" (1962), and "El mundo andino: población, medio ambiente y economía" (2002). Following his retirement, he worked at the National Museum of Ethnography in La Paz, Bolivia. [cite web|url=http://www.nmnh.si.edu/naa/whatsnew2005_08.htm|title=What's New at the National Anthropological Archives (August 2005)|accessdate=2006-10-24] He died in his home in Ithaca, New York, in 2006.

References