Primitive culture

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. Some Western authors, such as anthropologists and historians, used it to describe pre-industrial indigenous cultures, although such usage has become politically incorrect. Historically, assigning "primitive" to other people has been used to justify conquering them.

The phrase "primitive culture" is the title of an 1871 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.

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