LOWIE, ROBERT H.

LOWIE, ROBERT H. (1883–1957), American anthropologist. Lowie was born in Vienna and emigrated to New York in 1893. After graduation from City College with honors in classics and an interlude of public-school teaching and additional training in science, he enrolled at Columbia for graduate study in anthropology under Franz Boas. His student cohort included Edward Sapir, Alexander Goldenweiser, Frank Speck, and Paul Radin, all of whom were to exert continuing influence on Lowie's ideas and approach to anthropology. Clark Wissler served as Lowie's principal fieldwork mentor and directed his formative research among the Shoshoni and various Plains tribes. He obtained his doctorate in 1908 with a comparative dissertation, "The Test-Theme in North America Mythology."

While employed by the American Museum of Natural History (1907–1917), Lowie conducted extensive fieldwork among the tribes of the Great Basin, the Southwest, and the Plains, eventually focusing on the Crow Indians of Montana. From this rich and varied data base he produced an impressive corpus of detailed ethnographic writings.

After holding a visiting professorship in 1917–1918, Lowie received a permanent appointment at the University of California, where he remained for the rest of his academic career. At Berkeley he proved a beloved teacher and an able administrator, and he broadened his theoretical horizons and range of ethnological expertise. In the 1930s he developed an interest from afar in the Ge-speaking Indians of eastern Brazil, an interest that was expressed through his promotion and translation of the valuable researches of Curt Nimuendajú. Near the end of his career Lowie studied complex societies and published two books on postfascist Germany.

Lowie's reputation rests primarily on his substantive contributions to ethnography and to theoretical issues in kinship and social organization, but he maintained an abiding interest in problems of religion. Although a freethinker, he came to view religion sympathetically as a vital and perduring force in human culture and society. His approach to religion was essentially psychological. Influenced by the work of the German critical empiricist Ernst Mach (1838–1916), Lowie felt it possible to reach objective analyses of such subjective phenomena as magical thinking, symbolic associations of meaning, and individual religious experience.

Lowie's Primitive Religion (1924; rev. ed., 1948) is a loosely integrated composite treatment of the subject. In his autobiography (1959), he comments that the book "met with a cold reception and I doubt whether it has exerted any influence." Nevertheless, Primitive Religion repays careful study as an exemplary document of the Boasian approach to religion. After a cautious consideration of the problem of defining religion, Lowie plunges directly into particularistic ethnographic data by offering synthetic sketches of four tribal religions from different regions of the world. Next he offers philosophically informed critiques of major anthropological theories of religion, taking direct aim at E. B. Tylor, James G. Frazer, and Émile Durkheim. The final section of the book comprises an uneven yet suggestive treatment of such diverse topics as individual variability in religious matters, religious movements, the role of women in religion, and relations of religion to art and economics.

Lowie's main legacy to the study of religion consists in his own rich corpus of field materials and his critical assessments of the theories of others. His significance lies in the questions he posed rather than in any synthesis he achieved.

Bibliography

Details of Lowie's life and work are readily available in his entertaining autobiography, Robert H. Lowie, Ethnologist: A Personal Record (Berkeley, 1959). This volume contains his vita, outlining his professional career and listing the many honors he received, as well as a nearly complete bibliography of his many publications. A representative collection of Lowie's articles, including some of his more technical essays on myth, ceremonialism, and comparative religious ethnology, can be found in Lowie's Selected Papers in Anthropology, edited by Cora DuBois (Berkeley, 1960); DuBois's introductory essay lends valuable perspectives on his work, and the volume contains a fascinatingly detailed syllabus for a graduate seminar that Lowie led on his own work. The biographical picture, along with an acute modern appraisal of his theories, is sensitively filled out in Robert F. Murphy's Robert H. Lowie (New York, 1972), which also reprints some of Lowie's articles, including a posthumously published essay titled "Religion in Human Life." Lowie's major statement on religion, Primitive Religion, rev. ed. (New York, 1948), is summarized above. The flavor of Lowie's ethnographic description of religion can be sampled in his classic monograph, The Crow Indians (1935; reprint, New York, 1956), and in the chapter on religion in his popular survey Indians of the Plains (New York, 1954), reissued, with an introduction by Raymond J. De Mallie, in 1982.

Raymond D. Fogelson (1987)