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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Monadology" data-source="post: 8338109" data-attributes="member: 7022090">The notion that the word 'primitive' would fit any actual situation 'perfectly' is an absurd position to take. Do you really think anything is that simple? There are very general words we use despite the inaccuracies that come along with their generality: for example, it seems reasonable and useful to characterize Southern California as 'hot,' but no one would suggest that 'hot' is a perfect descriptor of Southern California. It does get cold at times during the winter, and there are temperate spots like San Diego. But the label is useful because peak and average temperatures are valuable to emphasize for a number of different purposes.The primitive/advanced distinction is an unsophisticated, general distinction. If there is some reason to use it, it's not because it is an especially precise conceptual tool. There must be a valuable purpose for reducing actual historical nuance to generalities. I asked earlier in this thread: what is that valuable purpose? Why is it important to say 'The British won the Anglo-Zulu war because the Zulu were primitive' rather than 'The British won the Anglo-Zulu war in part because British firearms provided a significant tactical advantage over traditional Zulu weaponry?'  The latter is an explanation that can be productively expanded on and discussed. I don't see how the former provides any meaningful insight, since 'primitive' and 'ineffective in war' are not obviously correlated in any robust way. Just look at the effectiveness of booby traps during the Vietnam war: they would surely count as 'primitive' if we are going to be using the primitive/advanced distinction.As has been pointed out in numerous places in this thread (most recently by pemerton), the distinction certainly had its uses to the British and other colonizers: to rationalize the classification of other cultures as lesser and justify colonization, imperialism and all the horrors that came along with those. Clearly you think it has some other kind of use, one totally divorced from these kinds of uses. So, again, what's the point of keeping it around? On what grounds is considering the objective historical record of the origins of the contemporary primitive/advanced distinction in evaluating it non-objective? No one is 'bringing race into it.' Race has been in it, for literally centuries. Reams of posts in this thread have provided evidence of this.</blockquote>

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