The concept of "Civilization"

The reading, "What is a Civilization?" confused me very much. I understood what it was taking about but it made me confused on what word I should really use. I think that finding the correct words for things such as 'civilizations' is something very hard and tricky to actually do. There are many things that can be said are wrong in a word used to describe or name something.

To me, the idea of having a right or wrong word for things is something almost unrealistic for someone to pick. I mean, one individual can think a word is perfect and can have multiple explanations as to why it is, and then another could find many things wrong with it and why it shouldn't be used. I think it really just depends on the people who have opinions on the word used. The point brought up in the reading was really interesting. The things that were being said about the word civilization made sense to me. Why is it that the word civilization is used to describe other.... Communities? Populations? When most of the time, the ones talked about are in one way or another considered a bit more primitive? Civilization has the word civilized in it, and to be civilized is to be more advanced, more modern while the opposite or lesser of civilized is almost considered an insult and means you are Uncivilized, a savage, one who lacks the communal intelligence or who isn't very up to date on technology, yet when we, the more “advanced” civilizations look back in time, we realize that we owe much of our advancement to these uncivilized civilizations.

I found it thought provoking when I read the quote by Marvin Harris that said, “Human beings learned for the first time how to bow, grovel, kneel, and kowtow.” Its true. With all the advancements brought to us by those previous to us, we also inherited a type of oppression that came from a kind of slavery/ captivity of ideology. We received many negatives from them and morphed them into worst version. These could be things easily seen as uncivilized actions, so I understand why it would create uneasiness to use civilizations as a word to describe them. It sounds better as complex societies. Complex, as in something hard to describe because every civilization has had good and bad, right and wrong, and having to explain them would be a very complex thing.

How do you know when something has become a civilization, or better said, a complex society? Do you know this by the amount of time it has been around, the population, or the advancements it has made? Does it not become clear until the complex society collapses and marks it’s end or is there a list it must fill before it can be considered one? In our world now, are we all just one big civilization/ complex society, or are we multiple small ones? I think its hard to actually know because we are living in it, the world as a whole is very connected to each other, but areas still have their own cultures, languages, etc. Is this what separates each group into their own complex society or is there something much more to it?