The term ‘primitive’ was created within the early development of anthropology to describe societies that European scholars considered less advanced than their own. During the nineteenth century, anthropology developed in the context of European colonial expansion, and many early anthropologists tried to classify human societies according to an evolutionary scale. European industrial society was generally placed at the highest stage, while small-scale, non-European societies were placed at earlier stages of human development. Terms such as ‘savage’, ‘barbarian’ and ‘primitive’ were therefore used to construct a hierarchy among cultures. The idea of the ‘primitive’ was strongly influenced by social evolutionary theories. Thinkers such as Edward B. Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan believed that human societies passed through common stages of development from simpler to more complex forms. In this framework, hunting and gathering societies were often regarded as representing