Robert Lowie - Biography

Robert Harry Lowie (born ; June 12, 1883 – September 21, 1957) was an Austrian-born American anthropologist. An expert on North American Indians, he was instrumental in the development of modern anthropology.

Biography

Lowie was born in Vienna, but came to the United States in 1893. He graduated from the College of the City of New York (A.B.) in 1901, and from Columbia University (Ph.D.) in 1908, where he studied under Franz Boas. In 1909, he became assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History, New York. Influenced by Clark Wissler, Lowie became a specialist in American Indians. In 1917, he became assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1925 until his retirement in 1950, he was professor of anthropology at Berkeley, where, along with Alfred Louis Kroeber, he was a central figure in anthropological scholarship.

Lowie made numerous field expeditions to the Great Plains and did significant ethnographic fieldwork among the Arikara, Shoshone, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Crow peoples. He also spent shorter field periods among other peoples of the American Southwest and South America.

His theoretical orientation was within the Boasian mainstream of anthropological thought, emphasizing cultural relativism and opposed to the cultural evolutionism of the Victorian era. Like many prominent anthropologists of the day, including Boas, his scholarship originated in the German idealism and romanticism espoused by earlier thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder.

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)

Further reading

External links

• Robert Lowie
• American Ethnography -- Lowie's obituary, written by Paul Radin
• Guide to the Robert Harry Lowie Papers at The Bancroft Library