Robert Lowie

Robert Lowie was an Austrian-American anthropologist and one of Franz Boas's earliest students, who became a leading figure in American cultural anthropology's rejection of unilinear evolutionary schemes. In Primitive Society (1920) he surveyed kinship, marriage, and property across a wide range of societies to argue against the classical evolutionary claim that all human societies pass through a fixed, universal sequence of social stages, insisting instead on the historical particularity and diversity of actual social institutions. Lowie also produced influential ethnographic and theoretical work on political organization in stateless societies, most notably through his extensive fieldwork among the Crow of the northern Great Plains, published in The Crow Indians (1935), and his comparative studies helped establish political anthropology as a systematic field of inquiry within the discipline.