Thursday 28 April 2016

Shaving the Subcultural Sausage into Slivers

When human beings get into something, they become obsessed with subdividing it in ways that, to an outsider, often seem utterly obscure.

Here is a chart showing all of the different styles of karate originating from Okinawa, which any non-karate person would see as more or less exactly the same if they saw them in action.



Underneath it is a chart of different styles of metal. For a non-metal fan (like me), I can just about discern that there is a difference between black metal, which is the kind where the guy shrieks like he is having his testicles mangled in a vice, and death metal, which is the kind where the guy sounds like he is so depressed and angry that he wishes he was having his testicles mangled in a vice. But it turns out that if you are into metal you are usually also really into its cladistics: there are dozens of different ways of screaming and dozens of different kinds of testicle-mangling devices.




And, you've guessed it, here is a chart showing (some?) of the different varieties of D&D and its retroclones. You and I both know that all of this, to somebody who has no interest in D&D (particularly before 3rd edition), is all just footnotes on the original version: to all intents and purposes none of it actually matters. Yet still. 



(I wish I could find a proper version of this image in a scale which is readable, but you get the point.)

I find this sort of genealogy fascinating. What to one person is hitting and kicking people, playing a guitar really loud and screaming a lot, or pretending to be an elf, to another is a vast and complex field of nuance stretching to each and every horizon and beyond. The particular tiny distinctions between different ways of pretending to be an elf matter.

I want to go out on a limb and say that men - a certain type of man - find this stuff important to a greater degree than women do. For some reason it's more often the case that when somebody is getting uptight about how something is categorised, nine times out of ten it's a man. Why is this? To play armchair anthropologist, is it something to do with a testosterone-driven need to organise and structure the world - to maintain order over complexity? To reduce the confusion, chaos and happenstance of human experience to a set of strictly delineated categories which can then be discussed, compared, critiqued, loved, hated, and (perhaps most importantly) named?

16 comments:

  1. One thing to do is take a look at the many classification systems in female-dominated and female-facing fields.

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    1. Maybe some of the art stuff women have been forced into in patriarchies? I bet there's a shitload of important distinctions running between crotchet and knitting/sewing or makeup techniques/something else that is similar to what you're talking about.
      Or current female-dominated industries; psychology, education, nursing (1) probably all have distinct systems for classifying schools of methodology.

      (1) http://www.dol.gov/wb/factsheets/QS-womenwork2010.htm

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  2. To add a data point, one of my friends is a pre-school teacher. I can't remember the context, but she observed to me the other day how fascinated the little boys are with classification ("This Star Wars guy is a a Jedi, this guy is a Sith, Han Solo is from Corellia, wait I thought he was from Alderaan...." etc etc), but there is no equivalent for the little girls. Obviously there are toys and whatnot that they are super into, but they do not have these in-depth discussions about classification of those toys and characters like the boys do.

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    1. That chimes with my own experience. I think most women tend to see that sort of thing as pointless and pedantic.

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    2. I am largely to their way of thinking.

      Though interestingly, I find that one area where women meet or exceed men in excruciating classification is language. I think I have met just as many (if not more) female "grammar nazis" than male. I'm not sure why that sort of classification would be more gender balanced.

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  3. @ Noisms:

    Women have nuance, too, but my base reaction is it's based on feelings over naming/classifying. It's just that we (men folk) tend not to put much value in their brand of nuance...which often gets us in trouble.

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    1. I don't want to give the impression that I think women don't have nuance! The opposite really. I think women are more willing than men to just accept the world is messy and go with it. Men have a tendency to want to impose structure and order on it. To speak in very general terms obviously.

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  4. My wife says that women do this with dieting fads, parenting lifestyles, and fanfiction.

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  5. The family tree on Flickr:
    https://www.flickr.com/photos/11013303@N04/8330272603

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  6. Yeah Taxonomy theory. Thing is You'll never get agreement between lumpers and splitters. What distinctions matter and what are trivial? In the end it tends to be like beauty - in the eye of the beholder.

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  7. As a counter-example, it might be worth noting that librarianship - a female-dominated field in North America - is very concerned with classification and categorization. Some aspects of fashion might also be relevant to consider.

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  8. If you're going to implicate testosterone, I would look more toward the need to establish dominance by being the one to describe and organize a field, which gives one implicit power to describe and organize the people who take part in it, if only through the act of labeling and categorizing them - that control is more the motivating force than order, which is just a byproduct of the attempt to control.

    But before you can really implicate testosterone, you'd need to eliminate other possible sources in a rigorous way. Even assuming your impression is correct, and men do it more than women, is that because of biology or because of culture? And what does it mean that only "a certain type of man" is susceptible?

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  9. My wife has told me on many occassions why I can't wear THIS item of red clothing with THAT item of red clothing because they clash and everyone will notice....she'll also refer to clothes as mauve or lavender etc and I'll be like "do you mean the light purple blouse or the dark purple blouse?"

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  10. This : https://xkcd.com/915/ and this : https://xkcd.com/1095/ may come in handy ^^

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    1. I came to the comments to add the 'straws' one!

      Shamefully, I had never heard of 'Long Live the Fighting Men and Magic Users!'.

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