Robert Harry Lowie

Robert Harry Lowie (1883 - 1957) born in Austria, is a American ethnologist. Expert of the Indian populations of North America, it strongly took part in the development of the theories of modern anthropology.

Biography

In 1883, Robert Harry Lowie is born in Austria, under American nationality. In 1921, it is named professor of anthropology at the university of Berkeley. Moreover, it spent long years to work with the American Museum off Natural History . He dies in 1957.

Work

Anthropologist of ground above all, it gives the priority to the facts on the theories. Its privileged ground: Indians of the plains of the center of the United States.

Political anthropology: work on the conditions of emergence of the State. In the Traité primitive sociology two chapters are devoted to the government and justice. It publishes The Origin off the State (the origin of the State in 1927 when it shows that there does not exist cut between companies without States and companies with State. It shows that the policy also exists apart from the State, because the territorial bond is not characteristic of the official system, moreover the capacity does not make the State. The embryo of the policy would be to seek in the system of association: an age group, a chalk-lining, a secret society. The appearance of the State would result often from external causes, rather than internal.

Systems of relationship and terminologies : work which is still recognized today. While being based on work of Kroeber, Lowie proposes a method of analysis of the systems of relationship which proposes the relations of filiation and the relations collateral, in a intergénérationnelle way.

Anthropology of the monk

Refutation of the evolutionary theory : particularly in its study on the Indians Shoshone (North America). He studies and compares the situations at the Indians, in Philippines. Disciple of Franz Boas, it is regarded as one of the founders of the cultural anthropology.

Publications

Ancient society , 1930. (French Translation: Treaty of primitive sociology , date?).
Primitive religion , 1924.
The origin off the state , 1927.
The history off ethnological theory , 1937. (French Translation: History of the traditional ethnology of the origins at the Second world war , Payot, 1971).

See too

External bonds

of primitive sociology (1936) '': electronic edition in free access.

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