Primitive societies - in reality, primitive people - are inventions of the Western imagination. This does not mean that the concepts of the primitive serve no purpose. Just like the alternative worlds of science fiction, the ideas about primitive society help us think about our own societies.

The primitive, the barbarian, the savage are our opposite dimensions. They are what we are not. They define us just as we define them. This is an old story in the West. Thucydides pointed out that Homer did not refer to his heroes as Greeks. He doesn’t even use the term barbarian, noting possibly because the Greeks had not yet separated from the rest of the world with a distinct name. Immediately, however, as soon as the idea of the Greeks was conceived, its opposite had been invented. The Greeks and the barbarians were twin births.

Primitive people are mutable creatures who can play many roles. Our image of what is primitive depends on what, at any given moment, we might consider civilized. If we are feeling confident, we scorn the primitives for lacking our advantages. If we are pessimistic, they seem to offer the model of a better, more free, healthier, and more natural way of life. If we are skeptics, we might echo Montaigne and argue that we are no better than the primitives.

The ancient Greeks were particularly interested in the politics of the barbarians, modern German scholars in their mythology, the Victorian English in their customs and laws, while French painters from Gauguin and Picasso to the surrealists were fascinated by what they called primitive art. These ideas are not fixed, as the image we have of ourselves can change. However, they are often remarkably enduring.

(From the author's preface for the Greek edition) The striking feature of the theory of 'primitive society' is its durability and resilience over the years that followed, against its ethnographic disproofs and despite the differing positions of the theoretical schools that adopted it. For interpreting this remarkable continuity, Cooper invokes two concepts: the notion of the transformation of ideas and that of myth [...].

The resilience of the myth of primitive society lies in the fact that it referred to significant social issues such as the family, the state, and citizenship, offered possibilities for transformations that could respond to any specific interest, regardless of other theoretical premises, and lastly created a tradition of problem-solving with reference only to its existence.

[Excerpt from the text of the introduction of the edition]