Robert H. Lowie

Robert H. Lowie (born June 12, 1883, Vienna, Austria—died Sept. 21, 1957, Berkeley, Calif., U.S.) was an Austrian-born American anthropologist whose extensive studies of North American Plains Indians include exemplary research on the Crow. He also influenced anthropological theory through such works as Culture and Ethnology (1917), Primitive Society (1920), and Social Organization (1948).

Lowie studied under Franz Boas at Columbia University, New York City, receiving his Ph.D. in 1908. From then until 1921 he was affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, and, under the direction of Clark Wissler, undertook many of his major field trips to the Plains Indians, including the northern Shoshone, Blackfoot, and Crow. His most original ethnographic contributions appear in 18 monographs on the tribes he studied. Besides writing a study, The Crow Indians (1935), he also collected three volumes of Crow language texts. His book Primitive Society had a major impact on anthropology, dominating theories of social organization for nearly 30 years. Broad in scope, the work considered kinship, justice, property, government, and other topics and made much of the concept of cultural diffusion.

Lowie was professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1921 to 1950, and he maintained a lifelong interest in psychology and dealt with it at some length in The History of Ethnological Theory (1937). Included among the ideas he advanced was the suggestion that religion and mythology may originate in dreams that have some kind of biological basis. He also conjectured that cultural selection is an aspect of natural selection.

Later in life he wrote about German culture in The German People (1945) and Toward Understanding Germany (1954), the latter dealing with the effect of war on personality. Other works include Robert H. Lowie, Ethnologist: A Personal Record (1959) and 33 papers (1911–57) in Selected Papers in Anthropology (1960), edited by Cora Dubois.