Primitive as a Concept

 

Sociology and social anthropology emerged from a paradigm shift from a divine origin of human society to a conceptualisation of society as an outcome of human agency. The major transformations in European society, such as the French Revolution and the transition to a industrialized society, led to the expectation that societies would transform and have a past. Scholars like Compte, Spencer, Lubbock, and others formulated an evolutionary schema of social development, keeping European societies at the apex. Lamarck's influence is seen in the postulation of a stage-by-stage evolution rather than a gradual one. Darwin's theory of monogenesis and psychic unity of mankind supported the consolidation of the entire human species.

By the nineteenth century, universal humanism replaced theories of savages with no sense of kinship or morality. The question was not just whether non-western societies had religion or forms of marriage but why the manifestations of these universal human institutions were so varied in different parts of the world. Taylor found a solution by transforming spatial difference into temporal ones, arguing that those who were different were at different stages of culture that was universal for all humans. He used the comparative method borrowed from biology to put on a fictitious time scale all or most human cultures about which knowledge was obtained through various sources.

The term primitive came to denote living populations as primitives in the contemporary world, which had far-reaching implications for the notion of development long after the demise of classical evolutionary theories. Many societies are still judged as primitive, meaning they do not fulfill the criteria of civilization as embodied in western societies and those following the western model. This branding of some cultures as lower stages of a common human culture justified European colonization as a reformative project.