What's Wrong With the Word Civilization?

A question that we discussed a lot in History today was the question "What is wrong with the word civilization?"
We read a reading last thursday and discussed it in class today. 


We came up with a few answers for this question. The word "Civilization" suggests a higher form of society. And the opposite of civilized is barbaric, savage and uncivilized so therefor the word civilization implies civilized. This is a problem because not all civilizations are civilized and some can actually be very uncivilized. Savage is also the way that many civilizations thought of neighboring cities, so does that make those neighboring cities "uncivilizations"? No, because there is no such thing. A civilization, if thats what we think they called it back then, also implies that they even knew and had to same recognition of a bigger society as we do in modern time, but in actuality they had no idea. There is no way they could have known to call themselves a civilization because they most likely didn't travel to see all of the other civilizations out there so to them, they are the only thing out there that matters. The word civilization also implies that they so-called civilizations had distinct boundaries, which they didn't. And also that the people felt part of a shared community, which they probably didn't because the boundaries weren't really clear if there even were boundaries at all.  


In class, we decided that a more accurate word to describe the societies back then is the word "nation". The Dictionary definition of nation is "a large aggregate of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory : leading industrialized nations."    This makes a lot more sense to describe the "civilizations" back then because it doesn't imply them being civilized and but it still describes it perfectly. It also doesn't imply that there are strict boundaries, just that this one place is where a group of people inhabited.