Robert Harry Lowie (born '; June 12, 1883 – September 21, 1957) was an

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

n-born

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

anthropologist An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms an ...

. An expert on

Indigenous peoples of the Americas The Indigenous peoples of the Americas are the inhabitants of the Americas before the arrival of the European settlers in the 15th century, and the ethnic groups who now identify themselves with those peoples. Many Indigenous peoples of the A ...

, he was instrumental in the development of modern anthropology and has been described as "one of the key figures in the history of anthropology".

Early life and education

Lowie was born and spent the first ten years of his life in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

Austria-Hungary Austria-Hungary, often referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire,, the Dual Monarchy, or Austria, was a constitutional monarchy and great power in Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. It was formed with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of ...

, but came to the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

in 1893. He studied at the College of the City of New York, where in 1896 he met and befriended Paul Radin while taking a BA in Classical Philology in 1901. After a short stint as a teacher, he began studying chemistry at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

, but soon switched to anthropology under the tutelage of

Franz Boas Franz Uri Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the movements known as historical ...

Livingston Farrand Livingston Farrand (June 14, 1867 – November 8, 1939) was an American physician, anthropologist, psychologist, public health advocate and academic administrator. Early life and education Born in Newark, New Jersey, to Dr. Samuel Ashbel Far ...

and Clark Wissler. Influenced by Wissler, Lowie began his first fieldwork on the Lemhi Reservation in

Idaho Idaho ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. To the north, it shares a small portion of the Canada–United States border with the province of British Columbia. It borders the states of Monta ...

with the Northern Shoshone in 1906. He graduated (Ph.D.) in 1908. with a dissertation titled "“The Test-Theme in North American Mythology".

Career

In 1909, he became assistant curator to Clark Wissler at the

American Museum of Natural History The American Museum of Natural History (abbreviated as AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. In Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 26 int ...

, New York. During his time there, Lowie became a specialist in American Indians, being active in field research, particularly in several excursions to the

Great Plains The Great Plains (french: Grandes Plaines), sometimes simply "the Plains", is a broad expanse of flatland in North America. It is located west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains, much of it covered in prairie, steppe, a ...

. This work led in particular to his identification with the Crow Indians. In 1917, he became assistant professor at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant un ...

. From 1925 until his retirement in 1950, he was professor of anthropology at Berkeley, where, along with

Alfred Louis Kroeber Alfred Louis Kroeber (June 11, 1876 – October 5, 1960) was an American Cultural anthropology, cultural anthropologist. He received his PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, the first doctorate in anthropology awarded by Columbia. ...

, he was a central figure in anthropological scholarship. Lowie undertook several expeditions to the

, where he conducted

ethnographic Ethnography (from Greek ''ethnos'' "folk, people, nation" and ''grapho'' "I write") is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject ...

fieldwork Field research, field studies, or fieldwork is the collection of raw data outside a laboratory, library, or workplace setting. The approaches and methods used in field research vary across disciplines. For example, biologists who conduct f ...

at the Absarokee (Crow, 1907, 1910–1916, 1931),

Arikaree Arikara (), also known as Sahnish,
''Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation.'' (Retrieved Sep 29, 2011)

Hidatsa The Hidatsa are a Siouan people. They are enrolled in the federally recognized Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. Their language is related to that of the Crow, and they are sometimes considered a paren ...

Mandan The Mandan are a Native American tribe of the Great Plains who have lived for centuries primarily in what is now North Dakota. They are enrolled in the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation. About half of the Mandan still re ...

and

Shoshone The Shoshone or Shoshoni ( or ) are a Native American tribe with four large cultural/linguistic divisions: * Eastern Shoshone: Wyoming * Northern Shoshone: southern Idaho * Western Shoshone: Nevada, northern Utah * Goshute: western Utah, easte ...

(1906, 1912–1916). Shorter research expeditions led him to the southwestern United States, the

Great Basin The Great Basin is the largest area of contiguous endorheic watersheds, those with no outlets, in North America. It spans nearly all of Nevada, much of Utah, and portions of California, Idaho, Oregon, Wyoming, and Baja California. It is noted fo ...

and to

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the sou ...

where he was inspired by

Curt Nimuendajú Curt Unckel Nimuendajú (born Curt Unckel; 18 April 1883 – 10 December 1945) was a German- Brazilian ethnologist, anthropologist, and writer. His works are fundamental for the understanding of the religion and cosmology of some native Brazilian ...

. The focus of some of Lowie's work was

salvage ethnography Salvage ethnography is the recording of the practices and folklore of cultures threatened with extinction, including as a result of modernization. It is generally associated with the American anthropologist Franz Boas; he and his students aimed t ...

, the rapid collection of data from cultures close to extinction.

Ruth Benedict Ruth Fulton Benedict (June 5, 1887 – September 17, 1948) was an American anthropologist and folklorist. She was born in New York City, attended Vassar College, and graduated in 1909. After studying anthropology at the New School of Social Re ...

and Robert Lowie were both commissioned during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

to write a piece about an enemy during wartime by the

United States Office of War Information The United States Office of War Information (OWI) was a United States government agency created during World War II. The OWI operated from June 1942 until September 1945. Through radio broadcasts, newspapers, posters, photographs, films and othe ...

. Unlike Benedict's ''Chrysanthemum and the Sword'' in which she describes the culture of Japan without ever having set foot in Japan, Lowie could at least draw on his recollections from the German-speaking world of his childhood. In his book ''The German People: A Social Portrait to 1914'', Lowie took a cautious approach and stressed his ignorance of what was going on in his country of origin at this time. Once the war ended, Lowie made several short trips to Germany.

Influences

Together with Alfred Kroeber, Lowie was one of the first generation of students of Franz Boas. His theoretical orientation was within the Boasian mainstream of anthropological thought, emphasizing

cultural relativism Cultural relativism is the idea that a person's beliefs and practices should be understood based on that person's own culture. Proponents of cultural relativism also tend to argue that the norms and values of one culture should not be evaluated ...

and opposed to the

cultural evolutionism Sociocultural evolution, sociocultural evolutionism or social evolution are theories of sociobiology and cultural evolution that describe how societies and culture change over time. Whereas sociocultural development traces processes that tend ...

of the

Victorian era In the history of the United Kingdom and the British Empire, the Victorian era was the period of Queen Victoria's reign, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. The era followed the Georgian period and preceded the Edwa ...

. Like many prominent anthropologists at the time, including Boas, his scholarship originated in the school of

German idealism German idealism was a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with Romanticism and the revolutiona ...

and

romanticism Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate ...

espoused by earlier thinkers such as

Kant Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aest ...

Georg Hegel Georg may refer to: * ''Georg'' (film), 1997 *Georg (musical), Estonian musical * Georg (given name) * Georg (surname) George is a surname of Irish, English, Welsh, South Indian Christian, Middle Eastern Christian (usually Lebanese), French, or ...

and

Johann Gottfried Herder Johann Gottfried von Herder ( , ; 25 August 174418 December 1803) was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the Enlightenment, '' Sturm und Drang'', and Weimar Classicism. Biography Born in Mohr ...

. Lowie, somewhat stronger than his mentor Boas, emphasized historical components and the element of variability in his works. For him,

culture Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups ...

s were not finished constructs, but always changing and he stressed the idea that cultures could interact. In 1919, Lowie published ''Primitive Society'', which ''"''criticized the hypothetical reconstruction of the stages of the evolution of civilization as postulated by

Lewis H. Morgan Lewis Henry Morgan (November 21, 1818 – December 17, 1881) was a pioneering American anthropologist and social theorist who worked as a railroad lawyer. He is best known for his work on kinship and social structure, his theories of social ev ...

". The book has been seen as a key text in the promotion of theories of social organization in anthropology, being praised by Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski. It was also the work that inspired

Claude Levi-Strauss Claude may refer to: __NOTOC__ People and fictional characters * Claude (given name), a list of people and fictional characters * Claude (surname), a list of people * Claude Lorrain (c. 1600–1682), French landscape painter, draughtsman and etcher ...

to move his intellectual interest from philosophy to anthropology.

Kinship

Lowie influenced the discipline of

social anthropology Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In ...

through his use of a system to distinguish

kinship In anthropology, kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of all humans in all societies, although its exact meanings even within this discipline are often debated. Anthropologist Robin Fox says that ...

relationships: he identified four main systems, which differed based on the names of the relatives of the first ascending generation, i.e. the parent generation. His Classification Scheme was slightly modified by

George P. Murdock George Peter ("Pete") Murdock (May 11, 1897 – March 29, 1985), also known as G. P. Murdock, was an American anthropologist who was professor at Yale University and University of Pittsburgh. He is remembered for his empirical approach to ethn ...

by dividing one of Lowie's four systems into a further three types.

Honours

Lowie was give honorary membership of a number of societies such as the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, the Instituto do Cerara in Brazil, the American Philosophical Society and the New York Academy of Science. Lowie twice served as editor of the ''

American Anthropologist ''American Anthropologist'' is the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), published quarterly by Wiley. The "New Series" began in 1899 under an editorial board that included Franz Boas, Daniel G. Brinton, and John ...

.'' He also served as chairman of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology of the National Research Council. Lowie was President of the

American Folklore Society The American Folklore Society (AFS) is the US-based professional association for folklorists, with members from the US, Canada, and around the world, which aims to encourage research, aid in disseminating that research, promote the responsible ...

from 1916-17. He was elected to the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nat ...

in 1931.

Writings

His principal works include: * ''Societies of the Arikara Indians'' (1914) * ''Dances and Societies of the Plains Shoshones'' (1915) * ''Notes on the social Organization and Customs of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Crow Indians'' (1917) * ''Culture and Ethnology'' (1917) * ''Plains Indian Age Societies'' (1917) * ''Myths and Traditions of the Crow Indians'' (1918) * ''The Matrilineal Complex'' (1919) * ''Primitive Society'' (1919) * ''The religion of the Crow Indians'' (1922) * ''The Material Culture of the Crow Indians'' (1922) * ''Crow Indian Art'' (1922) * ''Psychology and Anthropology of Races'' (1923) * ''Primitive Religion'' (1924) * ''The Origin of the State'' (1927) * ''The Crow Indians'' (1935) * ''History of Ethnological Theory'' (1937) * ''The German People'' (1945) * ''Social Organization'' (1948) * ''Towards Understanding Germany'' (1954) * ''Robert H. Lowie, Ethnologist; A Personal Record'' (1959)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lowie, Robert Harry American curators American folklorists 20th-century American educators Anthropologists of religion Columbia University alumni Austro-Hungarian emigrants to the United States Austrian Jews 1883 births 1957 deaths People associated with the American Museum of Natural History 20th-century American non-fiction writers Linguists of Siouan languages Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Jewish anthropologists 20th-century American anthropologists American Anthropologist editors Presidents of the American Folklore Society