Robert Harry Lowie (born Robert Heinrich Löwe; June 12, 1883 – September 21, 1957) was an Austrian-American anthropologist. An expert on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, he was instrumental in the development of modern anthropology and has been described as "one of the key figures in the history of anthropology".
Early life and education
Lowie was born and spent the first ten years of his life in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, 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 befriended Paul Radin while taking a 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. He graduated (Ph.D.) in 1908 with a dissertation titled The Test-Theme in North American Mythology. Shorter research expeditions led him to the southwestern United States, the Great Basin and to South America where he was inspired by Curt Nimuendajú. 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 each commissioned by the United States Office of War Information, during World War II, to write a piece about an enemy. Unlike Benedict's Chrysanthemum and the Sword in which she 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: A Social Portrait to 1914, Lowie took a cautious approach and stressed his ignorance of what was going on in his country of origin at this <!-- Which time? Pre-WWI or during WWII? --> time. Once the war ended, Lowie made several short trips to Germany.
Influences
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.
Kinship
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.
Honours
Lowie was given honorary membership of a number of societies such as the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, the Instituto do Cerara in Brazil, the American Philosophical Society and the New York Academy of Science. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1931.