Robert Lowie
Encyclopedia
Robert Harry Lowie was an Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

n-born American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 anthropologist. An expert on North American Indians
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...

, he was instrumental in the development of modern anthropology.

Biography

Lowie was born in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

, but came to the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 in 1893. He graduated from the College of the City of New York
City College of New York
The City College of the City University of New York is a senior college of the City University of New York , in New York City. It is also the oldest of the City University's twenty-three institutions of higher learning...

 (A.B.) in 1901, and from Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 (Ph.D.) in 1908, where he studied under Franz Boas
Franz Boas
Franz Boas was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology" and "the Father of Modern Anthropology." Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did...

. In 1909, he became assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History
American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History , located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world...

, New York. Influenced by Clark Wissler
Clark Wissler
Clark Wissler was an American anthropologist.Born near Hagerstown, Indiana, Wissler graduated from Indiana University in 1897. He received his doctorate in psychology from Columbia University in 1901. After Columbia, Wissler left the field of psychology to focus on Anthropology...

, Lowie became a specialist in American Indians. In 1917, he became assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

. 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
Great Plains
The Great Plains are a broad expanse of flat land, much of it covered in prairie, steppe and grassland, which lies west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains in the United States and Canada. This area covers parts of the U.S...

 and did significant ethnographic fieldwork among the Arikara
Arikara
Arikara are a group of Native Americans in North Dakota...

, Shoshone
Shoshone
The Shoshone or Shoshoni are a Native American tribe in the United States with three large divisions: the Northern, the Western and the Eastern....

, Mandan, Hidatsa
Hidatsa
The Hidatsa are a Siouan people, a part of the Three Affiliated Tribes. The Hidatsa's autonym is Hiraacá. According to the tribal tradition, the word hiraacá derives from the word "willow"; however, the etymology is not transparent and the similarity to mirahací ‘willows’ inconclusive...

, and Crow
Crow Nation
The Crow, also called the Absaroka or Apsáalooke, are a Siouan people of Native Americans who historically lived in the Yellowstone River valley, which extends from present-day Wyoming, through Montana and into North Dakota. They now live on a reservation south of Billings, Montana and in several...

 peoples. He also spent shorter field periods among other peoples of the American Southwest and South America
South America
South America is a continent situated in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. The continent is also considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east...

.

His theoretical orientation was within the Boasian mainstream of anthropological thought, emphasizing cultural relativism
Cultural relativism
Cultural relativism is the principle that an individual human's beliefs and activities should be understood by others in terms of that individual's own culture. This principle was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and...

 and opposed to the cultural evolutionism
Cultural evolutionism
Cultural evolutionism attempts to describe and explain long-term change in human ways of life, insofar as those ways are socially rather than biologically acquired...

 of the Victorian era
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...

. Like many prominent anthropologists of the day, including Boas, his scholarship originated in the German idealism
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 revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment...

 and romanticism
German Romanticism
For the general context, see Romanticism.In the philosophy, art, and culture of German-speaking countries, German Romanticism was the dominant movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. German Romanticism developed relatively late compared to its English counterpart, coinciding in its...

 espoused by earlier thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder
Johann Gottfried Herder
Johann Gottfried von Herder was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the periods of Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, and Weimar Classicism.-Biography:...

.

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)

External links

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