ABSTRACT
Anthropologist Robert Lowie’s refl ection serves as an explicit recognition of Charles Darwin’s impact on Western systems of knowledge and the reach of the Darwinist episteme. Lowie mentions Darwin’s work in an effort to distance his own work from evolutionary approaches to cultural anthropology, which used the theory of evolution to create a hierarchy of cultures that reinforced prevailing ideas about race and biological determinism. However, Lowie did not reject Darwinism as a mode of inquiry for the scientist. Rather, like many intellectuals and writers “coming of age” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lowie recognized that the controversy surrounding Darwin’s publications (e.g., The Voyage of the Beagle, On the Origin of Species, and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex) constituted an epistemological break in how Westerners conceived their world. Whether one rejected or advocated Darwinism, there existed in many parts of the Atlantic world both a tacit and vocal acknowledgment that “Mr. Darwin” had to be taken seriously, as his theories forced many men and women to rethink their basic assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, and the sociopolitical order.
