By any reasonable qualificaition of complexity, and from what I can tell, the authors own admission, “Civilized” cultures are vastly more complex than “Primitive” . The average city apartment has hundreds of items in it, each one desigend, produced, and distributed by hundreds of individuals. The average city dweller visits his in-laws in aircraft made from millions of parts, drives on roads that took millions of man-hours to make, etc, etc, and follows vast rulebooks of codified knowledge in order to do so properly. (He may be largely ignorant of precisely what these rules are, but he knows enough to to break too many of them.)

The point the author seems to make is that hunter gathers need no fewer skills, or less knowledge, then their city-going equivalents. This should be a “Well, of course” point to anyone who thinks about the subject matter in more than cursory manner. It does not contradict the point that urban societies, primary by virtue of having more people than anything else in particular, really are vastly more complex than their rural precursors.

So, my point is this, the author has identified a prejudice, but really, the statement “Primitive Cultures are Simple, Civilization is Complex” is not directly a falsehood unless it is overextended beyond certain boundaries….

I can go into more detail about mathematics, philosophy, written language, social hierarchy, or a million other things that evolve above a certain population size and density, but I assume that both author and audience are smart enough to figure all of this out for themselves.

So it seems the anthropologist (general) would be much better served trying to upset the internal logic of people who would like to believe that “Primitives” just strut about all day collecting fruit and rutting occasionally than anything else.. You do this by informing people about how other societies function, which is well, an anthropologist’s job is it not?