Culture & Ethnology

In this slender, electrifying volume from 1917, Robert Harry Lowie mounts a passionate argument that would reshape how we understand human difference: culture is not inherited but acquired. Drawing on lectures delivered at the American Museum of Natural History, Lowie systematically dismantles the era's assumption that racial and ethnic behaviors are innate. He argues that psychology illuminates individual minds but fails to explain collective cultural phenomena, which emerge from learned traditions rather than biological inheritance. Through comparative analysis of so-called primitive and modern societies, Lowie demonstrates that what we mistake for natural difference is actually the product of social transmission. This is early anthropology doing its most vital work: proving that human diversity stems from shared capacity rather than fixed hierarchy. The book remains essential reading not as a textbook but as a record of the discipline's founding convictions.