Robert Harry Lowie (born German: Robert Heinrich Löwe; June 12, 1883 – September 21, 1957) was an Austrian-born American anthropologist. An expert on North American Indians, he was instrumental in the development of modern anthropology.
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Lowie was born in Vienna, but came to the United States in 1893. He graduated from the College of the City of New York (A.B.) in 1901, and from Columbia University (Ph.D.) in 1908, where he studied under Franz Boas. In 1909, he became assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History, New York. Influenced by Clark Wissler, Lowie became a specialist in American Indians. In 1917, he became assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1925 until his retirement in 1950, he was professor of anthropology at Berkeley, where, along with Alfred Louis Kroeber, he was a central figure in anthropological scholarship.
Lowie made numerous field expeditions to the Great Plains and did significant ethnographic fieldwork among the Arikara, Shoshone, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Crow peoples. He also spent shorter field periods among other peoples of the American Southwest and South America.
His theoretical orientation was within the Boasian mainstream of anthropological thought, emphasizing cultural relativism and opposed to the cultural evolutionism of the Victorian era. Like many prominent anthropologists of the day, including Boas, his scholarship originated in the German idealism and romanticism espoused by earlier thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder.
His principal works include: