Robert H. Lowie

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Robert Harry Lowie , born with the name Robert Heinrich Löwe , (born June 12, 1883 in Vienna , † September 21, 1957 in Berkeley , California ) was an American anthropologist .

Life

Robert Lowie - a son of Jewish parents of Hungarian origin - spent the first ten years of his life under a different name in Vienna. In 1893 his family moved to New York; they took English-speaking names. Robert Lowie studied at City College of New York , where his friendship with Paul Radin began in 1896 . Lowie received his BA in Classics in 1901 . After a short time as a teacher, he began studying chemistry at Columbia University , but soon switched to anthropology with Franz Boas , Livingston Farrand and Clark Wissler . Lowie followed Wissler's advice and in 1906 carried out his first field research on the Lemhi Reservation in Idaho near the Northern Shoshone . He received his doctorate in 1908. Clark Wissler brought Lowie as his second husband to the American Museum of Natural History . During this time he carried out a number of field research, especially on the Great Plains . He is said to have a special identification with the Crow Indian tribe . In 1917 he was appointed to the University of California in Berkeley , initially as an associate professor . From 1925 to 1950 he was professor of anthropology there. In 1931 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences . Since 1942 he was a member of the American Philosophical Society .

Together with Alfred Kroeber , Lowie was one of the first generation of Franz Boas's students.

field research

Lowie undertook several expeditions to the Great Plains , where he carried out ethnographic field research with the Absarokee (Crow; 1907, 1910-1916, 1931), Arikaree , Hidatsa , Mandan and Schoschonen (1906, 1912-1916) . Shorter researches took him to the southwest of the USA, the Great Basin and, inspired by Curt Nimuendaju, in South America. The focus of some of Lowie's works has been on salvage ethnography , the rapid gathering of data from near-extinct cultures.

propaganda

Similar to Ruth Benedict , Robert Lowie was commissioned by the United States Office of War Information during the Second World War to write a work about an enemy of the war. In contrast to Benedict, who describes Japanese culture in Chrysanthemum and Sword without ever having been to Japan, Lowie knew German-speaking countries from his childhood. In his work The German People , Lowie was more cautious and stressed that he himself did not know what was going on in his former home during this time. After the end of the war, Lowie kept returning to Germany for short periods of time.

position

As an expert on North American indigenous societies, Robert Lowie has contributed to the development of modern anthropological theories:

His basic theoretical assumptions are by and large those of his teacher Franz Boas, which means that Lowie can also be assigned to cultural relativism , which is opposed to Victorian cultural evolutionism . Like Boas, Lowie is also influenced by German philosophers such as Immanuel Kant , Georg Hegel and Johann Gottfried Herder . Far more than his mentor Boas, Lowie emphasized historical components and the element of variability in his works. For him, cultures were not ready-made constructs, but always changeable, and he affirmed the concept that cultures would influence one another.

Lowie also influenced ethnosociology through a system for differentiating between kinship terminologies : It knows four main systems, which differ on the basis of the names of the relatives of the first rising generation, namely the parent generation. His classification scheme was slightly refined by George P. Murdock by dividing one of the four Lowie systems into three further types.

Publications

  • The Test-Theme in North American Mythology (Ph.D.), 1908
  • Societies of the Arikara Indians (1914)
  • Dances and Societies of the Plains Shoshones. New York 1915.
  • Notes on the Social Organization and Customs of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Crow Indians. New York 1917.
  • Culture and Ethnology (1917)
  • Plains Indian Age Societies. In: Historical and Comparative Summary, pp. 877-1031. New York 1916.
  • Myths and Traditions of the Crow Indians (1918)
  • The Matrilineal Complex (1919)
  • Primitive Society. Routledge, London 1920. ( digitized version )
  • 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)
  • Primitive Religion (1924) ( digitized version )
  • The Origin of the State (1927)
  • Ancient Society (1930)
  • Erland Nordenskiöld . American Anthropologist Vol 35, No. 1, 1933.
  • The History of Ethnological Theory. Farrar & Rinehart, New York 1937. ( digitized version )
  • The German People. A Social Portrait to 1914. Farrar & Rinehart, New York 1945.
  • Towards Understanding Germany (1954)
  • Contributions to the ethnology of North America . Messages from the Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg , 23rd Hamburg 1951.

literature

  • Regna Darnell: Robert H. Lowie. In: Regna Darnell u. a .: Celebrating a Century of the American Anthropological Association. Presidential portraits. University of Nebraska Press, 2002, pp. 69-72.
  • Joseph Maier : Lowie, Robert Harry. In: Wilhelm Bernsdorf , Horst Knospe (Ed.): Internationales Soziologenlexikon. Volume 1: Articles on sociologists who died by the end of 1969. 2nd Edition. Enke, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-432-82652-4 , p. 258.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Member History: Robert H. Lowie. American Philosophical Society, accessed January 6, 2019 .

See also

personal data
SURNAME Lowie, Robert H.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lowie, Robert Harry (full name); Leo, Robert Heinrich (birth name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American anthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH June 12, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH September 21, 1957
Place of death Berkeley , California