Robert Lowie facts for kids

Robert Harry Lowie (born Robert Heinrich Löwe; June 12, 1883 – September 21, 1957) was an American anthropologist who was born in Austria. He was known for his studies of different cultures, especially Native American tribes.

Early Life and Learning

Robert Lowie was born in Vienna, Austria, on June 12, 1883. His mother was Austrian and his father was Hungarian. He lived in Vienna until he was ten years old. Then, his family moved to New York City in the United States.

Even in New York, he stayed close to his German friends and family. He even kept speaking Viennese at home. Because of this, he always felt like he belonged to both American and German-Austrian cultures.

He went to the College of the City of New York. There, he studied Latin, Greek, philosophy, and science. He graduated in 1901. After college, he worked as a teacher in New York City for three years.

In 1904, he started graduate school at Columbia University. This is where he met Franz Boas, a very famous anthropologist. Boas became Lowie's teacher and a big inspiration. Lowie liked Boas because they both had German backgrounds. They also both liked to focus on small details about human cultures, rather than big, general ideas.

As a student, Boas asked Lowie to write about the Native American Crow tribe. This project made Lowie very interested in other Native American tribes. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1908.

After graduating, he worked at the Natural History Museum in New York City until 1921. He loved to research and write, and he continued to do so throughout his life. During this time, he did a lot of field work. He studied more than nine different Native American tribes. Later, from 1921 to 1950, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley.

People Are Different

One of Franz Boas's main ideas was that every person is unique. Lowie agreed with this idea. He started talking about how much people can vary in the 1910s.

Lowie first used this idea to argue against people who believed that one "race" was better than others. Some people thought that the "Nordic race" had more different kinds of smart people. They thought this made their culture superior. Lowie argued that all groups of people have the same amount of differences within them. He said no one group was naturally better.

Fighting Against Racism

In the early 1900s, many people wrongly believed that white people were better than all others. Lowie strongly disagreed with this. He argued that all groups of people have unique individuals. He said no group was superior.

He used statistics to show his point. He explained that if a group had more people, it was more likely to have more very smart individuals. This was not because one group was better, but simply because it was bigger.

Lowie also believed that people in all societies, even older ones, had different personalities and skills. In his book Primitive Society (1920), he wrote that the way people think is the same in both "simpler" and "higher" societies. It was brave of him to share these ideas when racism was very common.

Lowie was always most interested in culture and how people think. He studied topics like race, environment, and relationships. He believed that people were different, but he did not think one group was better than another. He held this belief even during World War II, when he was alive.

During the war, he supported German scientists. He also spoke out against "scientific racism." This is when people use fake science to try and justify treating certain groups of people unfairly.

He also disagreed with two other famous anthropologists, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. They thought that people within the same culture had very similar personalities. Lowie believed that even in older cultures, people were not all the same.

Famous Books

Robert Lowie wrote many important books. Some of his most famous ones include:

• Culture and Ethnology (1917)
• Primitive Society (1920)
• Primitive Religion (1924)
• Are We Civilized (1929)
• Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (1934)
• History of Ethnological Theory (1937)
• The German People (1945)
• Toward Understanding Germany (1954)

He also wrote 33 papers that were collected in a book called Selected Papers in Anthropology (1960). These papers were written between 1911 and 1957.

See also

In Spanish: Robert Lowie para niños