Skip Navigation

History

Conference Paper
Title: 'Against the Votaries of Race Cults': Robert Lowie’s Critique of Cultural Evolutionism and Eugenics
Conference: American Studies Association
Date: October 2006
Author(s): Jeannette Eileen Jones (Author)
Abstract: "Against the Votaries of Race Cults" focuses on anthropologist Robert Lowie’s literary output in the field of ethnology/cultural anthropology as it engaged broader discourses on race, culture, and progress in the first half of the twentieth century. It contextualizes Lowie in the cultural and intellectual history of that period, but looks back to the late nineteenth century, when the writings of Charles Darwin and Sir Francis Galton influenced notions of Manifest Destiny, the White Man’s Burden, and American exceptionality. These ideologies carried into the twentieth century and embraced by many scientists, underwrote many racist and sexist movements that Lowie deplored. Accordingly, this paper examines the rhetoric of cultural anthropology employed by Lowie in his literary fencing with scientists who use Darwinian evolution to justify their “philosophy of culture” and understandings of human progress. The paper reveals that Lowie’s antievolution stance in explaining the “determinants of culture” did not prevent him from racializing the world in much the same way as his adversaries. The paper divides Lowie’s thoughts on human progress into two major sections—(1) his views on the immigrant and “Negro” problems in the early twentieth century and (2) his refashioning of the “primitive.” Of particular focus is Lowie’s book Are We Civilized?, wherein he presents the chimpanzee as foil to humanity. In this text, Lowie questioned the basic assumptions/maxims of scientific racism and cultural evolutionism by discrediting the belief that a direct cultural evolutionary line could be drawn from “chimp” to “Negro” and other “primitives.” I argue that even as Lowie used his prolific writings to challenge the “propaganda” of the “votaries of race cults,” and the “new faith” of eugenics and other racist movements, he himself was caught in the tangled language of Culture, Race, and Progress. Although he disavowed any adherence to theories of racial superiority, his own acceptance of the paradigmatic shift to cultural relativism in anthropology did not preclude a belief in cultural backwardness, savagery, and primitivism. His defense of the “lower races” upheld a tradition of dividing the world into tribes and nations, primitive and civilized, Other and white/European. Although Lowie challenged the conclusions and findings of scientific racists, he did not overthrow the cultural categories from which they operated. Even as he encouraged his readers to think critically about what denoted primitivism or civilization, his acceptance of a “progressive” anthropological model of cultural stages perpetuated notions of the superiority of Western “civilization.” In this sense, Lowie reified evolutionary anthropology’s trope of “the dark-skinned savage.”