The Outline of Cultural Materials, first developed by G.P. Murdock in the 1940s, is an ethnographic classification system on human behavior, social life and customs, material culture, and human-ecological environments. In the past, this indexing system was used in the paper and microfiche versions of the Collection of Ethnography. Today, the OCM subject thesaurus serves the eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF Archaeology databases.

OCM Print Copy

A print copy of the OCM is 300+ pages, can be ordered from HRAF,  and contains the following:

• A list of the 90+ major OCM categories (e.g. 750 Sickness)
• A list of the 700+ OCM subcategories (e.g. 751 Preventive Medicine, 753 Theory of Disease)
• Detailed descriptions of the OCM subjects
• An alphabetic index of the OCM terms
• Information about the types of subject categories, developmental perspectives, and the use of the OCM in field research

OCM in eHRAF

In eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF Archaeology, the OCM can be found in Browse Subjects, or used in the Add Subjects function of an Advanced Search. In a Basic Search it is used to automatically “map” keywords to the extensive OCM subject thesaurus.

PDF Download

A PDF file containing the list of OCM subjects can be found here.