Robert H. Lowie

1883 - 1957

Robert Lowie was an anthropologist who was instrumental in the development of the discipline. He helped form the profession and influenced the way in which anthropology is done today. Without the work of Lowie and his contemporaries, the practice of modern anthropology would lack the form and function that it has today.

Robert H. Lowie was born in Vienna, Austria on June 12, 1883 to parents of a traditional Hungarian background. Lowie spent the first ten years of his life in Austria and then immigrated to New York in 1893 with his family. The Lowie family settled in a traditional German pocket in New York City, one where the old ways and traditions of his childhood were kept alive. Lowie once noted that the "American Melting Pot was not doing much melting in his neighborhood" (Murphy p. 8). Lowie’s community was made up of people much like him, people of German heritage who had some lines of Jewish descent somewhere in the mix and had a sense of being rational freethinkers.

After time spent at public schools Lowie entered the City College of New York where he was a superior student and went on to earn his Bachelors Degree in 1901. After his time at City College, Lowie entered Columbia University where he studied under Franz Boas with future colleagues such as Alfred Kroeber and Albert Lewis. It was at Columbia that Lowie first found his niche in anthropology and decided to make it his career. Lowie commented that "No ethnologist, not even Boas-was ever my hero or my source of inspiration" (Murphy p. 12).

Even so, Clark Wissler could be called Lowie’s greatest influence in his education. Wissler was a professor at Columbia and also a Chairman of the American Museum of Natural History. It was Wissler who sent Lowie on his first field trip to study the Shoeshoni and guided his work on the American Plains Indians, which started his lifelong preoccupation with the non-speculative, non-metaphysical, and highly descriptive orientation of his field work. It is also under Wissler that Lowie did his most intense fieldwork on the culture of the Crow Indians. He closely studied them every season from 1910 to 1916.

It was with these assignments that Lowie began to employ a type of ethnography called "salvage ethnography," the purpose of which was to salvage a record of what was left of a culture before it disappeared. This was entirely practical at this time since the American Indian Tribes were fast becoming separated from their traditional culture.

In his ethnographies Lowie has a passion for facts and accuracy in his work and used as many informants as possible. It was this type of ethnography that Lowie mostly practiced. He did not see his task as having to be a totally immersed participant in the culture being studied. Lowie relied almost completely upon interviews for his ethnography research.

Lowie received his Ph.D. in 1908 and from there started a valuable relationship with his former professor Wissler. In 1921 Lowie was accepted into the faculty at University of California at Berkeley and with this came a constraint on his fieldwork for now he was a full time teacher and for the next twenty years Lowie and Kroeber formed the core of the Berkeley Department of Anthropology. It is said that Lowie was a brilliant and charismatic lecturer, but also one whose lectures where so filled with facts and analysis that one could get bogged down with all the information.

Lowie remained first and foremost a student of cultural anthropology although he was interested in archeological problems as long as they cast light on his ethnography. Lowie wrote down his thoughts on issues as these in his books An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Culture and Ethnology-where he was committed to ethnology as a science itself-, and some of his best known works Primitive Religion and Primitive Society-which established Lowie as one of the leaders of the attack against cultural evolutionism.

Lowie argued for the theory of cultural diffusionism, that is, that different cultures borrowed and lent cultural traits and this was how different cultures could be traced and studied (Murphy p. 36) Through this, Lowie brought a sense of specialization to his students in the field of Cultural Anthropology.

In 1933, Lowie married Ms. Luella Cole. This bond also brought a restraint to Lowie in respect to his work and he became even more formal in his profession. After his retirement in 1950, Lowie stepped into a new style of ethnography when he and his wife went to Germany to observe and study the post war German people. In this approach, Lowie and his wife worked in close contact with the native people taking every opportunity available to learn more about the diversified population of the very different Germany from the one he once knew.

After retirement, Lowie received many honors. During this time he accepted honorary memberships in scientific societies and also lectured on and off. On September 21, 1957, shortly after finishing his last seminar at Berkeley, Robert Lowie died in his sleep of cancer after reading his wife a verse from Faust.

I

References:

Murphy, Robert F. Robert H. Lowie, Columbia University Press. 1972.

Lowie Robert H. Robert H. Lowie, Ethnologist, A Personal Record. University of California Press. 1959.

Written by Students in an Introduction to Anthropology Class, Minnesota State University, Mankato, Minnesota 2000

Edited by: David Gardner 2007.