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 of age, 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. It was maybe Boas who left the greatest impact on young Lowie, but 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.
Work
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 Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel and Johann Herder.
Legacy
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
Credits
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