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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Malmuria" data-source="post: 8531376" data-attributes="member: 7030755">Describing a people or culture as "primitive" in the real world?  No, unless I suppose you are talking about pre-homo-sapien groups of humans.  But what would it mean to describe a contemporary person or culture as "primitive"--that something about their minds and ways of associating with each other and organizing society are less "advanced"?  That's a completely arbitrary value judgement. Some people characterize the tools, technology, or art of contemporary people as "primitive," ie as associated with an earlier "stage" of technological evolution, but in doing so make the mistake that nineteenth and early twentieth century Euro-American social scientists made, which is to assume that human-produced technology "develops" in teleological fashion from "primitive" to "advanced" such that contemporary people can be characterized as "survivals" of a previous age.  Contemporary anthropologists <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20111114155909/http://www.theasa.org/news.shtml#asa" target="_blank">wholly reject</a> this line of thinking as having no real explanatory or descriptive power.</blockquote>