[3] After a short stint as a teacher, he began studying chemistry at Columbia University, but soon switched to anthropology under the tutelage of Franz Boas, Livingston Farrand and Clark Wissler.
[4] Lowie undertook several expeditions to the Great Plains, where he conducted ethnographic fieldwork at the Absarokee (Crow, 1907, 1910–1916, 1931), Arikaree, Hidatsa, Mandan and Shoshone (1906, 1912–1916).
[5] Shorter research expeditions led him to the southwestern United States, the Great Basin and to South America where he was inspired by Curt Nimuendajú.
In his book The German People: A Social Portrait to 1914, Lowie took a cautious approach and stressed his ignorance of what was going on in his country of origin at this time.
[2] Like many prominent anthropologists at the time, including Boas, his scholarship originated in the school of German idealism and romanticism espoused by earlier thinkers such as Kant, Georg Hegel and Johann Gottfried Herder.
In 1919, Lowie published primitive society, which "criticized the hypothetical reconstruction of the stages of the evolution of civilization as postulated by Lewis H.
[2] The book has been seen as a key text in the promotion of theories of social organization in anthropology, being praised by Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski.