[KatoabamyHant]

Sometimes one can hear the term primitive (and many other, worse terms to) being applied to different peoples, often tribal and aboriginal peoples. The term originally means something original or primeval. But many time it is used as analogous to underdeveloped, perhaps ignorant and even savage.

I once read a passage in book by a anthropologist which is an anthology with oral and written accounts from different Native American peoples in North, Central and south America. The anthropologist questioned the notion that aboriginal, tribal people were primitive and pointed out that they had a long development, many times with a sophisticated adaption to different environments, creating a mosaic of different ways of living. He also pointed out that the individual in many of these kind of societies has a more varied and multifaceted role and where not so locked up in specialisation or predisposed roles as in more stratified or, so called, advanced societies. He made a comparison with our own modern, western or westernized society where the individuals are more valued just for their ability to produce and create money and profit

As said before, tribal peoples can not be seen as primeval, they have their own special development and adaptation, and when it comes to the role and value of the individual they are both sofisticated and complicated.

Its dangerous to generalize but one dare to say that many of those societies that existed before the big formations of states and later the industrialized societies, and which structures still can be seen among tribal peoples had, and have, a more multidimensional evaluation of the role of the individual. If you see society as a unit consisting of several horisontal structures, then the individual has a role in every: religion, family, artistic expression, agriculture, hunting, handicrafts and so on. In a society where the individual is not specialized in his or her profession, but has a part in the total social activity, the evaluation becomes more balanced; if you are less prominent, yes even if you are totally impossible, in one of the roles then it is compensated by other or maybe even by one single role, The risk to get individuals that are outcasts becomes minimal.

In our western, or westernized, society one of the structures, or more correctly a part of one of the structures, has become the totally dominating, the only measurment of value and have in extreme cases become a philosophical framework.

To have just one norm to value things, Money and economic profit, has caused the other structures to get a flawed function (as art here in many western countries) or no function at all. The structures atrophy and a real primitivisation of man himself sets in. To only have ONE norm of value, and not only for man himself but also for the environment and nature, is indeed primitive and have maybe not occured earlier in any kind of society. Whats your opinion? Are we living in a society that are getting more and more primitive in its values, norms and role of the individual?