Robert Lowie - Biography

Biography

Lowie was born and spent the first ten years of his life in Vienna, but came to the United States in 1893. He studied at the College of the City of New York, where in 1896 he met and became friends with Paul Radin and from where he acquired his BA in Classical Philology in 1901. After a short stint as a teacher, he began studying chemistry at Columbia University, but soon switched to anthropology under the tutelage of Franz Boas, Livingston Farrand and Clark Wissler. Influenced by Clark Wissler, Lowie began his first fieldwork on the Lemhi Reservation in Idaho in the Northern Shoshone in 1906. He graduated (Ph.D.) in 1908. In 1909, he became assistant curator to Clark Wissler at the American Museum of Natural History, 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. This work led in particular to his identification with the Crow 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 undertook several expeditions to the Great Plains, where he conducted ethnographic fieldwork at the Absarokee (Crow, 1907, 1910-1916, 1931), Arikaree, Hidatsa, Mandan and Shoshone (1906, 1912-1916). Shorter research expeditions led him to the southwestern United States, the Great Basin and to South America where he was inspired by Curt Nimuendaju. The focus of some of Lowie's work was salvage ethnography, the rapid collection of data from cultures close to extinction.

Ruth Benedict and Robert Lowie were both commissioned during World War II to write a piece about an enemy during wartime by the United States Office of War Information. Unlike Benedict's, Chrysanthemum and the Sword in which he 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, 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 had ended, Lowie made several short trips to Germany.

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 and opposed to the cultural evolutionism of the Victorian era. Like many prominent anthropologists at the time, including Boas, his scholarship originated in the school of German idealism and romanticism espoused by earlier thinkers such as Kant, Georg Hegel and Johann Gottfried Herder. Lowie, somewhat stronger than his mentor Boas, emphasized historical components and the element of variability in his works. For him, cultures were not finished constructs, but always changing and he stressed the idea that cultures could interact.

Lowie influenced the discipline of social anthropology through his use of a system to distinguish kinship 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 by dividing one of the Lowie's four systems into a further three types.