Primitive culture

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In older anthropology texts and discussions, the term "primitive culture" refers to a society believed to lack cultural, technological, or economic sophistication or development. For instance, a culture that lacks a written language might be considered less culturally sophisticated than cultures with writing systems; or a hunter-gatherer society might be considered less developed than an industrial capitalist society. While becoming less politically correct, some Western authors, such as anthropologists and historians, used it to describe pre-industrial indigenous cultures. Historically, assigning "primitive" to other people has been used to justify conquering them.

It is also the title of a book by Edward Burnett Tylor, in which he defines religion as animism—which, in turn, he defines by reference to contemporary indigenous and other religious data as belief in spirits. Another defining characteristic of primitive cultures is a greater amount of leisure time than in more complex societies.^[1]

Notes

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Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive, Transaction Publishers, U.S. 1987, ISBN 0-87855-582-X
Adam Kuper, The Reinvention of Primitive Society. Transformations of a Myth, Taylor & Francis Ltd. 2005, ISBN 0-415-35761-6
Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, Viking, 1959; reissued by Penguin, 1991 ISBN 978-0-14-019443-2
Joseph Campbell, The Historical Atlas of World Mythology, vols. I and II, Harper and Row 1988, 1989.

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