Whether one culture is more "primitive" than another is indeed a disputable value judgement. But there is no dispute that the culture of the Yanomamö is vastlydifferent from the culture of modern industrial societies. There's nothing racist about asking why that might be.
By the way, the word "primitive" occurs exactly once in the article, in a non-central context.
It’s not a value judgment, things like writing systems, time keeping, and various societal structures can be objectively measured since they have an impact on how large a given culture or society can be.
This war over words and language really needs to stop. Anthropology moved from using savages to primitives and now has more and more terms that eventually mean the same thing.
No, it’s not a matter of mere “difference.” Societies that don’t have computers and space ships and cars are more primitive—they live more like humans did originally, and like animals still do—than societies that have those things. It’s a tremendously bad idea to lose sight of the that.
Whether “primitive” is the same thing as “bad” or “good” is indeed a value judgment. There’s certainly benefits to a primitive lifestyle (lesser rates of chronic diseases, etc.)
Yes, in a technical usage of the word "primitive" sometimes encountered in discussions of evolution, it refers simply to something that comes early. For instance, one might ask whether a trait shared by two species is "primitive", meaning it was present in their common ancestor, or instead evolved independently in the two species. There is no value judgement there.
However, in non-technical discussions, "primitive" is often taken to mean "not as good", which is indeed a value judgement, and that's the usage meant in my comment.
If I have a a spaceship and you have a burning stick, you are technologically primitive. Being technologically primitive does not necessarily make you culturally primitive, for example...
If I use that spaceship to explode your technologically primitive culture to little bits because I can, it's highly likely that my culture is underdeveloped when it comes to finding non-violent solutions.
Technology is a facet of culture. Think about how useless a phone would be without the people and knowledge maintaining electrical grids, software, and data infrastructure.
Now consider that if the planet is a burnt out carcass that can't support life beyond bacteria that the project of technology maybe didn't serve us humans too well in the end.
> Now consider that if the planet is a burnt out carcass that can't support life beyond bacteria that the project of technology maybe didn't serve us humans too well in the end.
Sure, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't seem to be.
If you don't feel the need to put a probability on your hypothetical scenario, you can doomsay anything, including what I would guess your preferred strategy to be: "Now consider that if the planet gets struck by a rogue cosmic body and shattered into an asteroid belt that the project of controlled deindustrialization and focus on conservation and social justice maybe didn't serve us humans too well in the end."
I don't see how what you're saying disagrees with the parent. In your first paragraph, no one is disagreeing that technology builds upon itself. In your second paragraph, the parent already concedes that if the technology is used badly, it'll...end badly, which is what you're saying too.
Are you saying that a particular assertion made in the article is factually wrong, or just that making some assertion or using some term to describe the condition of, say, Yanomami society, is immoral in your eyes? In the former case, it would help if you could point out what.
In the latter, well, okay, but you should be clear that you are not disputing the correctness of the theory.
If some cultures aren’t less advanced than others, then we also can’t really talk about some cultures being more advanced, either relative to other cultures or to themselves across the span of time.
That is completely false understanding of the article. What are you saying, if one culture has rockets, and one has sticks, that technology can't even be talked about because it would be racist.
