I'm with you on this one. Unlike the guy below who simplistically shouts out 'bigotry, racism, xenophobia', I don't use the word primitive because I hate another culture, how ridiculous. I do generally avoid it because it has some negative connotations to it, but I wonder if the negative connotations are the problem rather than the concept altogether. I get it, it's very hard/impossible to compare two large complex cultures in any way, but can't we compare simple technologies? An automobile does what a horse and buggy wants to do, and it does it better. A shotgun means less energy spent per calorie of food hunted, compared to a blade. These are not completely arbitrary variations on the previous technology, they are tools that do exactly what the previous version did, but with more effectiveness. The knife maker strives to accomplish what the gun maker accomplishes easily.

The problem is that people think primitive = bad. This not only leads to cultural chauvinism, but makes the subject of 'primitive' taboo for everyone. But primitive is not bad, life is not a race for technology. A fat pasty white dude who spends his whole life on the computer (may or may not be drawing inspiration from myself...) is typically not happier than a member of a hunter-gatherer tribe in Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact I hear a lot of evidence that the western way of living leads to psychological unhappiness across the board. I think there is value in 'primitive', and we shouldn't be afraid to consider that our technology is taking us so far away from our evolutionary roots that it could have unpredictable effects on us. So I guess what I'm saying is, I do think the San people are less complex than Americans. However, I do not think this makes them in any way worse than Westerners, and I've even been toying with the idea that perhaps they're better off.