childhood. 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. Once the war ended, Lowie made several short trips to Germany. Influences Together with Alfred Kroeber, Lowie was one of the first generation of students of Franz Boas. 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 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. Lowie, somewhat stronger than his mentor Boas, emphasized historical components and the element of variability in his works. For him, cultures were not finished constructs, but always changing and he stressed the idea that cultures could interact. In 1919, Lowie published Primitive Society, which "criticized the hypothetical reconstruction of the stages of the evolution of civilization as postulated by Lewis H. Morgan". 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. It was also the work that inspired Claude Levi-Strauss to move his intellectual interest from philosophy to anthropology. Kinship Lowie influenced the discipline of social anthropology through his use of a system to distinguish kinship relationships: he identified four main systems, which differed based on the names of the relatives of the first ascending generation, i.e. the parent generation. His Classification Scheme was slightly modified by George P. Murdock by dividing one of Lowie's four systems into a further three types. Honours Lowie was give honorary membership of a number of societies such as the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, the Instituto do Cerara in Brazil, the American Philosophical Society and the New York Academy of Science. Lowie twice served as editor of the American Anthropologist. He also served as chairman of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology of the National Research Council. Lowie was President of the American Folklore Society from 1916-17. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1931. Writings His principal works include: Societies of the Arikara Indians (1914) Dances and Societies of the Plains Shoshones (1915) Notes on the social Organization and Customs