ABSTRACT

The word “primitive,” applied to a society or to the mental state of an individual, is linked to a context defined by the role of language. With regard to a society, a primitive culture is one that has not developed a written language. Written language is necessary when the members of a culture require a means of communicating their group identity as an objective social reality which extends beyond the here and now, and presupposes the ability to frame social reality by a process of consensual validation, as Harry Stack Sullivan (1950b, p. 214) termed it. It is taken as a sign that the individual members of the society have achieved a level of consensually defined self-and object-representation needed to schematize social reality beyond their own subjective needs, and that the process of communication uses language not only as a tool to get what one wants but also as a means of expressing who one is. 2