Robert Lowie

Robert Henry Lowie (born June 12, 1883 in Vienna; died September 21, 1957) was an Austrian-born American anthropologist, who influenced the development of modern anthropological theories and practices.

Life

Robert Lowie was born in Vienna, Austria, from an Austrian mother and a Hungarian father. His family emigrated to the United States when Lowie was ten years old, and settled in the traditional German part of New York City. Although living in a foreign land, Lowies kept strong cultural identity as German people, which had an important impact on Robert's entire life. They spoke German in their home, and read mostly German literature. Robert's grandfather, who was a physician, gave into inheritance to his grandson his entire library, consisting of all German philosophers and writers. Robert grew up in such environment, developing deep attachment for his ethnic background, which is evident in the two books he published late in his career - The German People (1945) and Towards Understanding Germany (1954). The German influence is also visible in his scientific work, through the influence of Haeckel, Ostwald, and Wundt, at the beginning of his career, and Boas and Mach at the end of it.

The American culture, however, left its mark on Lowie as well. Lowie graduated from the City Collegte of New York in 1901, being a top student in his class. He entered Columbia University with the intent to study chemistry, but after the meeting with Franz Boas he changed his major to anthropology. The influence that Franz Boas had on Lowie can be seen throughout Lowie's entire work. However, although it was maybe Boas who left the greatest impact on Lowie, Clark Wissler was the one who determined which way Lowie's career will go. Wissler was the Chairman of the American Museum of Natural History and a lecturer at Columbia. Under his guidance Lowie started research on Shoeshoni Indians, and conducted his first field trip into the Great Plains. Wissler influenced Lowie's method of research, which relied predominantly on a descriptive study, free of speculative and metaphysical elements.

Lowie received his Ph.D. in 1908, and spent additional six years, from 1910 until 1916, in the intense fieldwork on the culture of Crow Indians. He soon became one of the greatest experts on the culture of Crows. In 1921 he received a full time professorship at the University of California at Barkeley, where he spent next twenty years. Together with Alfred Kroeber he became the core of the Barkeley Department of Anthropology. It is said that Lowie was an excellent lecturer, whose classes were always full and whose lectures were simply loaded with facts.

Lowie served as president of the American Folklore Society from 1916 to 1917, then the American Ethnological Society from 1920 to 1921, and of the American Anthropological Association from 1935 to 1936. He was the editor of the AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST from 1924 to 1933.

In 1933 Lowie married Luella Cole, after which he dedicated more time to his family and less to his work. After the Second World War he and his wife visited Germany several times, and Lowie spent the rest of his life in studying the post-war Germany. He retired from Barkeley in 1950, and received numerous honors for his work, including the election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1931, and an honorary degree of Doctor of Science from the University of Chicago in 1941. In 1948 he delivered the Huxley lecture at the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, and received the Viking medal in the same year. Lowie died in 1957 from cancer.

Work

Lowie's theoretical orientation can be generally characterized as laying within the Boasian mainstream anthropological thought. In his work, Lowie emphasized cultural relativism as opposed to the cultural evolutionism of the Victorian era. In it, Lowie argued, individual cultural beliefs and practices can be understood only within that particular culture. Thus no culture can be called "primitive", as evolutionists suggested. His works Primitive Religion and Primitive Society made him as one of the main propagators against cultural evolutionism. Lowie advocated the theory of cultural diffusionism, the idea that different cultures borrowed and lent cultural traits from each other, which was due to migration of people. Through those traits cultures could ultimatelly be traced and studied, claimed Lowie.

Through his fieldwork Lowie came in touch with different Indian tribes, including Shoshoni, the Ute, Chippewayan, Crow, Hidatsa, Mandan, Arikara, Hopi, and Washo. He also studied South American and Mexian Indian etnology. When taken all together, Lowie was the only anthropologist who had so diversified experience with so many different Indian cultures. However, it was Crow Indians that he will remain the most famous after. Lowie spent years in studying Crow culture, collecting and filing even the smallest data. The completeness of this study and the analysis of the data involved compelled many anthropologists today to hold that Lowie's work on Crows is the model that can be used in all seminars on social structures.

From his work with Native Indian cultures Lowie developed the term "salvage ethnography", to describe the method of rapid data collection of nearly distinct cultures. Since numerous Native Indian tribes had becoming quickly assimilated into the American culture, their culture of origin was in danger to become completely lost. Lowie thus held that anthropologists need to collect as much data as possible to make a solid record of those nearly distinct cultures. Lowie himself was known for his precision and in-depth analysis of every detail in his ethnographic research. He relied primarily on interview techniques, here distancing himself from anthropologists who preferred to immerse themselves into the cultures studied and use observational method. Lowie published his ideas on issues like these in his two books - An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, and Culture and Ethnology.

Bibliography

• 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 Indian, (1922)
• The Material Culture of the Crow Indians, (1922)
• Crow Indian Art, (1922)
• Psychology and Anthropology of Races, (1923)
• History of Ethnological Theory, (1937)
• The German People, (1945)
• Towards Understanding Germany, (1954)

External links

• Robert Lowie biography
• Robert Lowie biography 2

Credits

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