Robert Harry Lowie (Vienna, June 12, 1883 - Berkeley, September 21, 1957) was an American anthropologist and expert in Indian cultures of North America.
Robert Lowie was born in Vienna as Robert Heinrich Löwe. He came to the United States with his parents in 1893, where his name was adapted to English. He initially studied at City College of New York, later at the renowned Franz Boas at Columbia University where he was in 1908 his Ph.D. took over. In 1909 he became Assistant Conservator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He worked under Conservator Clark Wissler and, as well as Lowie, specialized in the cultures and societies of the original inhabitants of America. In 1917 he became assistant professor at the University of California in Berkeley and from 1925 until his retirement in 1950 he was a professor of anthropology.
Lowie stayed many times for long periods somewhere on the Great Plains and performed important ethnographic fieldwork at the Shoshone, Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Crow. He also conducted research into indigenous peoples in the Southwest of the United States and in South America.
The orientation of Lowie was "Boazian": opposed to the cultural evolutionism of the preceding anthropological phase; wars of comprehensive, often speculative theories, and an emphasis on concrete research and verifiable facts. Together with colleague Alfred Kroeber in Berkeley, Lowie became an authoritative scholar and researcher who developed anthropological science and led into new, modern jobs. His Primitive Society (1920) and his ethnographic studies devoted to the Crow are the highlights of his oeuvre. Select bibliography Literature
Robert F. Murphy, Robert H. Lowie. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972
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