What makes a civilization? What makes a culture?
I’m going to define a culture as a group with shared traditions and values, often regional, and a civilization as one or more cultures with a shared identity and system of government.
A civilization can be made up of one culture, but it would probably be small, with a very small regional footprint. Usually a civilization is made up of a group of cultures that have allied, or been conquered into falling in line under one rule. As we can see in real civilizations throughout the world, there can be no small amount strife between cultures under the hat of one civilization.
So how often, if you’re designing fantasy races such as civilization of elves, say, do you consider the cultures that exist within that civilization? Usually in fantasy they are divided along the lines of race, such as wood-elves, high-elves, dark-elves, etc…. and each “type” of elf has a singular civilization under a usually singular culture. I think the only time I see sub-cultures highlighted within a fantasy setting is if they are specifically trying to make an allegory for minorities within our own.
Speaking of allegory, there are some additional issues to contend with when you’re looking at designing cultures. These issues have been rife in fantasy for decades, and awareness of their importance, and how egregious they can be is only just coming into the public mind in a big way.
You know what? I was going to talk about some methods for developing fantasy and sci-fi civilizations for your world, but I think this talk needs to be had first, so we’re going to save the fun tables for next week and talk about this now.
This is actually what made me essentially toss-out my whole developed fantasy world. I may borrow snippets of ideas from it, but and may even revive it after some house-cleaning, but it was filled with simplifications and stereotypes rooted in racism. Lets look at a few of the pitfalls.
Dividing Along Racial Lines.
First some background (the following diatribe was loosely adapted from what I recall of a lecture from Anthropologist Stephen Jay Gould): There is this idea that was very popular in certain realms of anthropological studies that have (thankfully) mostly faded from wide acceptance. This is the idea that there are several “species” of human being. That homo sapiens evolved a few different times in separate locations throughout the world. This was used to explain the “races” and became a foundation from which to justify racism from a “scientific” basis.
Now it is very possible that this could have happened. Throughout the Eocene period there were many hominids who had evolved to a hominid form along separate lines from our own ancestors. Some of them even made it to the rudimentary stages of civilization before dying out, making jewelry and treating their dead with ceremonial reverence. (I’m looking at you, Denisovians).
So yes, it could have happened. It is not impossible or even unfeasible that that could have been the way things went. It’s just not. It didn’t happen that way. And we know that for a fact. Every human alive today is descended from one hominid that had already become a hominid. There is one minor divergence that occurred in Africa, so that maybe a third of Africans come from one ancestor, and every other human being on earth comes from the other. But it was still relatively recent, only detectable through the fine-tuned genetic analysis we have become capable of. We are one species, and strictly speaking, one race. Why is this little lecture relevant?
Because we still have a tendency to think along those racial lines. And our fantasy worlds, and alien worlds, if we are not careful, can reinforce that mindset. As mentioned above, the wood elves, high elves, dark elves. How are they different? Usually along similar lines as different human “races”. A change in skin color, hair color, maybe taller/shorter, and a universal/monolithic attitude.
I would say Tolkien really probably intended to show the different elves as one race, and the wood elves and high elves would have been two cultures within that race. Yet in many fantasy origins, they are treated as separate “races”. Maybe they can interbreed, so you wouldn’t call them separate species, but their “racial” differences are enough to warrant, say, different bonuses in different skills. These are the kinds of things that would be absolutely rotten with racism if it were applied to humans. Wood elves getting a bonus to one-ness with nature is not especially different from giving that bonus to an indigenous american in a modern setting. Or giving a black character a bonus to sports, an asian character a bonus to math, etc. It is easy to see how wrong it is when you take way the excuse of “fantasy”.
Why does it matter, if it IS a fantasy?
Yes it is a fantasy, but the entertainment we take in does shape our worldview. Just as the worldviews of people who designed it can shape the fantasy. If you understand systemic racism in law and policy, you can imagine how similar racist attitudes might have infiltrated the traditions of sword & sorcery. I mean, the golden age of S&S went right alongside the human rights movement. And it would be a mistake to think that racists today don’t take refuge in those fantasies where the “races” really are separate species they can hate with impunity.
Here are some explicit examples
The Drow. I mean, sure, they’re an evil race, and their skin is black. But it’s like, pitch black, like grey-scale black, not like human burnt-umber-chocolate black skin, right? It’s a fantasy!
So why are they black? Because they live underground? That makes no damn sense at all. Living underground would tend to strip a population of melanin over many generations, not overload their bodies with it. It comes down to the reasons being explained as “magical” which is really just an excuse for “this is how we want it”. and again, one has to ask WHY.
Because they’re evil! Right. they are wicked and gothy and they like spiders, and it is spooky to make them black and evil. Why does black skin mean evil? That is conditioning that is deeply rooted.
Consider that scene in LOTR when the Dark Lord Sauron is marshaling his forces. He commands the orcs, inhuman, monstrous, bloodthirsty…. how they even continue to exist as a civilization I have no idea, but who else does he bring in who fall in line alongside the orcs? The Easterlings and Haradrim. Brown-skinned foreigners with curved swords, heavy eye-liner, and cloth head coverings. Sometimes pointy hats.
But that was a long time ago, right? Take a quick looky-loo for me at the banking goblins in Harry Potter. Just take a little gander and tell me if you can spot the stereotype those MIGHT be a subtle reference to.
Myself, I grew up playing a LARP which, we never wanted to see it this way, and I get that there is still some debate here, but we definitely had people making themselves up as drow, going around in non-human fantasy-black-face with pointy ears. I mean, the make-up was really well done. We also had a race of “gypsies” that you could play if you wanbted to curse people, or “barbarians” with a berserker rage ability. Different human groups had different racial abilities as distinct as the differences between a “regular human” and a freakin’ cat-person.
It doesn’t have to be intentionally hateful to be harmful. You don’t have to be aware of it, for it to be harmful. All these ideas require to be harmful is to exist without being challenged. If you don’t see any problem with any of this potential racism, or don’t see it as harmful in any way, I mean, I’m really surprised you made it this far into the blog-post, but there is one other important detail that should matter to every writer anywhere:
Relying on stereotypes like this is just poor, lazy, bad writing.
I don’t just mean the banking-goblins or the Navi being blatant analogues to human minorities, I mean the orcs, too, and the elves, being reduced as a species to one ideology, one mind-set, one behavior pattern. A “monolith” as it were.
The “Evil” Race Problem
This has been the topic I’ve heard discussed most often of late… That large fantasy staples, such as D&D and Whitewolf, are having pushes within their organizations to move away from using human race stereotypes as analogues for fantasy races and avoiding the idea of the “evil” race altogether. Besides being lazy writing, it promotes reliance on, and casual acceptance of, stereotypes. So called “evil races” just don’t add much to the world.
So what do we do about it?
We consider complexity. We consider what goals and values groups have in opposition to one another that brings conflict and misunderstanding. We consider what stereotypes each group holds for each other, and what led to the stereotypes, and why they are seen as true.
(Studying the origins of real stereotypes, besides being just generally a good idea for a solid understanding of the world, can also really help give you an idea of what is more or less likely in a made-up setting like the ones we are creating.)
All this complexity only improves our work. It makes our “races” and even “species” more believable, and more substantive. So with all that in mind, lets see if we can’t come up with some new foundational rules. This will be more of an intellectual exercise, and next time we’ll make the fun culture-building charts.
Rules for Culture Building:
1: Don’t start with a stereotype.
It is probably the easiest way to create a new race/culture/species, because these stereotypes are a language we all speak. Just like my post before about building a setting, where you can say, “a tavern” and people will fill in the details you don’t put specifically in, a stereotype is exactly that. It’s a mental short-cut. If you use that as a starting point, anything you don’t specifically state will be inferred along the lines of the stereotype you initially prevented. So avoid starting there altogether.
Don’t start with “honorable warrior race”, or “nurturing nature-loving pacifists”, or “fascist magical elitists”. Just… don’t start there.
2: Define their environment.
Also any major differences in physical anatomy. This tells you what resources are available to them or not, what society-wide hardships they have to face.
If they have evolved in that environment, this can also define some physical variance compared to other societies. The closer they are to human, the more attention you should pay to what real variances you might see and WHY those happen in various environments. They are almost never random. There is a REASON people living close to the equator have darker skin. There is a REASON that blue eyes became useful to survival further north. There should be a reason for long pointy ears, but I’m not sure at this point, what that would be.
3: Use that to begin asking questions and forming a data pool.
Each question answered gets added to the data pool, to help answer more questions.
Questions like: What hardships do they face collectively? Individually? How do they solve those problems? What resources do they value? What is hard to get but they still want? What other cultures have influenced them? What arts do they value? How do they make music? What does their faith look like? What does their clothing and make-up look like (definitely influenced by environment and resources)? How do they show status? How are they governed?
There are endless questions, so be sure to ask the ones that are especially relevant to your story.
4: Refine the data-pool.
This is the other part that is particularly relevant to avoiding the pitfalls discussed earlier. Now you look at all the data you’ve written out, and you look for patterns. This is where you can both spot problematic connections that might draw up known stereotypes, and this is where you can find some really fascinating and unique concepts that will make the culture stand out as real-feeling.
Unify the ideas, draw lines of connection, make necessary adjustments. Make sure everything has a reason that is justified within the story. If you leave something in just because it’s cool, and it’s not well justified, or the justification seems thrown in just to make that one thing happen, it comes across as contrived. Anything thrown in to justify one thing will have to ripple outward and have effects on other aspects.
5: Tell their story.
Take the data pool you’ve formed. Look at the connections, the patterns that have emerged. Use this to write out the tradition, the story, that connects them all as a culture.
Every culture tells stories about themselves. Usually it is about their origin. It combines their history and a bit of mythology. It highlights their values and explains why they do what they do and why they are smart and clever to do it. It might be about their triumphs, or the crimes done to them. It may discuss their dreams of the future, a destiny or long-term desire. It may be laden with propaganda. Remember it is not just the story they tell themselves about themselves, it is the story they tell OTHER people about themselves. It usually puts them in a good light.
Conclusion
It takes a bit of work to avoid these pitfalls, but there are so many reasons to put the effort in. Better writing that stands out in a sea of writers who didn’t bother, a larger more diverse audience, showing respect for others, and a reasonable certainty that if you ever got a statue made of you, or an award or school or dog park named after you, it wouldn’t be changed or torn down to avoid associating with a backwards racist from the past.
I’d very much love to hear about what cultures you may create using these rules, and if you have more examples to discuss! Also, I must note that I am cisgender white male American, so I do not have much in the way of a personal perspective on this topic, hence my fairly analytical approach. I always welcome additional perspectives (not including nazi, alt-right, white-supremacist bullshit) so if I am mistaken about something, if you have something to correct or add, I would be very pleased if you took the time to comment or let me know. Thanks for reading!
See you next world,
—Charles