The excerpt below is copyrighted material from Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 18-21.  It should not be copied or otherwise reproduced except for the proper purposes of the current educational course.

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            The word primitive first appeared in English in the fifteenth century to signify the "original or ancestor" of animals, perhaps of men. In its dominant meanings through the eighteenth century, it referred to "the first, earliest age, period, or stage," usually of church history, later of biological tissue. It acquired specialized meanings in many fields, including art, mathematics, and grammar—the common element being that primitive always implied "original," "pure," "simple"—as the dictionary says, "with implications of either commendation or the reverse." Its references to "aboriginals," "inhabitants of prehistoric times," "natives" in non-European lands date from the end of the eighteenth century.

            In art history, primitive originally referred to painters before the Renaissance; then it broadened to include all early art—ancient, courtly (Chinese or Aztec, for example), and tribal. By the 1920S, the ancient and courtly had been removed from the category of the primitive, which from then on referred exclusively to "tribal" art—Native American, Eskimo, African, and Oceanic. Since the twenties, the tendency to describe European prehistorical societies, the Greeks and Romans, and Chinese or other courtly cultures as primitive has markedly diminished. When we say "primitive" today, we generally designate certain social formations within relatively isolated areas of Africa, Oceania, South America, and other areas of the world—social formations characterized perhaps most clearly by the absence of tools and technology widely available elsewhere. Such societies have been the traditional objects of ethnographic research and have thus been represented in the West according to available ethnographic categories.

            As early as the 1890s, but quite strongly by the teens and twenties, anthropologists like Franz Boas argued for the diversity and complexity of primitive social and mental formations (as opposed now to technological capacity), thereby cutting to the heart of the term's evolutionist connotations. Like Levi-Strauss [a prominent modern anthropologist] in later decades, they claimed that primitive modes of thinking and cultures were not "simpler," just different from Western thinking and cultures. The antievolutionist, cultural relativity of these views was available fairly early in the history of anthropology, and it competed with views of primitive societies as "early," "simple," and "developing" forms of human existence. But cultural relativism needed time to really take hold since it challenged so strongly Western assumptions of superiority. It required readjustments in thought that stripped away decades, even centuries, of usage which saw primitive societies not as various and complete in themselves but as developing toward Western norms. Along with the processes that led to decolonization, this adjustment in thinking put the word primitive in disfavor in the decades after World War II—made it go into quotation marks. Increasingly, as cultures once characterized as primitive have become actors on the world stage or come into contact with urban, technological societies, the word primitive—with its aura of unchangeability, voicelessness, mystery, and difference from the West—has come to be understood as problematic. . . .

. . . Given the mixed history of the word primitive, the urge to jettison it is understandable. But before we could responsibly do that we would need a viable alternative to designate the kinds of societies it describes. Currently, we do not, since all its synonyms are either inexact or duplicate in various ways the problematics of the term primitive itself. And here I include savage, pre-Columbian, tribal, third world, underdeveloped, developing, archaic, traditional, exotic, "the anthropological record," non-Western, and Other. Some of these alternatives (third world, underdeveloped, exotic) blur necessary, indeed vital, distinctions between third world nations (which are often urban and industrial) and the remote, relatively primitive, societies they may still harbor. All take the West as norm and define the rest as inferior, different, deviant, subordinate, and subordinatable. We simply do not have a neutral, politically acceptable vocabulary. Short of reaching the true, essential Primitive (a goal even dedicated ethnographers have disavowed), the best we can do is to uncover, from a political and cultural perspective, the kinds of work key terms like primitive have performed within modern and postmodern culture and the kinds of work they have evaded or shortchanged.