I'm reading a book published in 1971 (Harold Livermore's The Origins of Spain and Portugal), and the introduction has a rather superior and arrogant tone regarding the "primitive" peoples who occupied Iberia prior to the arrival of romanitas, as well as the period of Muslim rule in Iberia. I associate this attitude with an earlier mode of historiography. Am I way off on my timing here, or is Livermore actually out of sync with the academy, clinging to a pre-historicist way of thinking?
It's interesting to look across historical sub-disciplines, because one of the things you notice is that various fields are at different stages of epistemological and theoretical maturity. For example, western European medievalists often consider the Byzantine field to be approximately 20 years behind in this regard.
There are many reasons why a field can "fall behind" - the Byzantinists, for example, have a significantly steeper learning curve with respect to required languages for study (reading proficiency in at least 8), which sets the bar significantly higher. More important, however, is the silo-ing off of subdisciplines. I just attended a talk in the classics dept, for example, where a person presented her revolutionary thesis on the mental construction of law and social groups in 6th century Constantinople, something that medievalists have been talking about forever.
All this serves as a long preamble to this: I don't think academia has, as a whole, moved away from the notion of "primitive peoples", even if it has become a more marginal view. Different disciplines and sub-disciplines move at different rates.