a key term in a discourse use for justifying various imperial and/or nationalist projects from, i'd guess, roughly the seventeenth century to today. not much else. i'd bet it comes out of the twist german romanticist historicism (esp. Herder) gave to the enlightenment's historical self-understanding. but there is quite a bit of literature out there on this, actually, cf. especially post-colonial theory.

I don't have any straight answer for the question, but this is the internet, so I feel obligated to add my two cents because no one cares... Good old internet!

I try to stay away from using the word 'civilization', precisely because of this question and the points others have brought up in trying to address it. Civilization implies civilized, which is at best an arbitrary judgement, and at worst a put down, as in 'un-'. In the past, very specific and arbitrary factors have been used to determine what is and is not civilized: the type and amount of clothing worn, the type of food eaten and how/when food is consumed, the amount of warfare, the religious ceremonies... things that could and should vary widely from group to group (should being a statement that uniformity is just no fun!).

When describing the subject, I prefer the term 'society'... it's more neutral, to me, and describes the situation a bit better. A group of people in a constant social setting. It's about the socialibility of the thing: norms, values, laws, cooperation, etc.

I'm under the weather, so I'm going to stop there, because the cold medicine is making me vague. I just wanted to bring up the option of not using the word, if one finds that the lingering connotations of the word are unsatisfactory, etc.

Civilization is a term used as a symbol amongst others in a set for maintaining the boundaries of a community.
I mean, it's a subjective term that changes meaning depending on who uses it, and when, and in what context.
That's how I think civilization should be looked at as an anthropologist,
a way of reading an aspect of a culture's identity.

Having a value in the word itself, from an anthropologists point of view,
creates bias and prejudice.
There's no line of progress or distinction that the term civilized can discern.
Something isn't better then the other,
whether it be the materialistic nature itself or an idea of a normal identity.
It's fluid, created in the interaction amongst people.
Civilization changes, moves through and together with values and norms.

i like to think of "Civilized" as "Domesticated" - as thesaurus.com puts it, "calm, devoted, domiciliary, family, home, home-loving, homelike, homely, housewifely, indoor, pet, private, sedentary, settled, stay-at-home, subdued, submissive, tame, trained, tranquil, wifely"

i think it conveys the proper connotations inherent in "more complex" ("more controlled" ?) societies

Agriculture, structured division of labor, and specialization/trade/barter, and later currency, define cilivilization to me. And in more tongue in cheek terms, "Civilization!!!" is my tribal yell whenever I find a clean bathroom in some way out place on the planet. :-)

I think people have a civilization when they can think of someone as a neighbor without having met them before.

I'm posting a -- tentative -- couple of paragraphs from a preliminary draft of my dissertation, concerning "civilization." Comments welcome!

civilization: Winick's Dictionary of Anthropology defines "civilization": A degree of fairly advanced culture, in which the arts and sciences, are well developed.

V. Gordon Child sees the essential characteristics of civilization as internal social hierarchies, specialization, cities, and large populations, and the growth of mathematics and writing.

Oxford includes definitions of "civilization":

"2. The action or process of civilizing or of being civilized. ...
"3. (More usually) Civilized condition or state; a developed or advanced state of human society; a particular stage or a particular type of this. The dictionary definitions do not convey the full connotative 'load' of "civilized" and "civilized" as uncritically positive."

Anthropologists have wrested with non-value-laden words to use instead of "civilized," including "south," "Western," "metropolitan," and others. After an extensive search for a value-neutral word, Wub-e-ke-niew settled on Lislakh:

"I am using this word, which was brought into the English language by linguist Carleton Hodge, to refer to the inter-related and historically connected peoples who share societal, cultural, language and/or patrilineal roots within that usually referred to as an abstract entity, Western Civilization. Lislakh includes Germanic people and the heirs of the Roman Empire (who speak languages academically categorized as Indo-European), as well as the Arabic and other peoples whose languages are categorized as Semitic, and the Moorish and other North African and Middle Eastern peoples who have common and long-standing historical inter-relation­ships within the context of Western Civilization.

"Lislakh was coined as an abstract analytical category, although it describes historical and present reality. The word is used ... to refer not only to the common roots of the Lislakh people, but also to their often violent co-history during their millennia of expansion. That the word Lislakh is a neologism of limited circulation is itself a manifestation of the ethos of English-speaking and other Lislakh peoples, symptomatic of the abstract isolationism of their linguistic structures and of the extent to which these peoples have been severed from their roots and their own identity.

"In using the word Lislakh, I do not presume to define those people to whom I refer--especially not in the ways that they have tried to re-define and label the Aboriginal Indigenous people as Indians, and have imposed their derogatory names, projections and stereotypes onto the indigenous peoples whose land they have expropriated. I observe, however, that these people who have no name for themselves urgently need to come to terms with their identity, their past history, their roots, and their present reality: both as an inter-connected group of people, and as human beings with inherent responsibilities. The people to whom I refer as Lislakh must no longer go about stealing from each other and from other peoples; they can not continue to shirk their responsibilities toward Grandmother Earth. Because our concern in this dissertation includes the urbanized, hierarchical peoples of Asia, Africa, and Mesoamerica, Lislakh is inadequate." [quoted from Wub-e-ke-niew's 1995 book, We Have The Right To Exist.]


We shall therefore borrow the word · Sivilized from Mark Twain (1904:1, 388), since the meaning is clear and it is value-neutral.