The other day I visited an aquarium. Call me a bleeding-heart liberal if you like (nobody else does), but I find it very hard nowadays to go to a zoo; even in the enlightened conditions of the modern ones I still find myself feeling a sense of pity for the animals which is a bit too overwhelming. Aquariums are different because - perhaps entirely wrongly - I can convince myself that fish haven't got much of a clue what's going on anyway and can be reasonably happy if fed, kept healthy, and given plenty of space.
Anyway, the aquarium in question had among many other things a "mini Lake Malawi zone" with a huge tank populated entirely by different types of Lake Malawi cichilds. It is very effectively set up, with the surface of the water at roughly eye level and fake beaches (with real sand) arranged around it, along with background art that creates the feel of being really there. Squint a bit and stretch your imagination slightly and you can half-imagine being a snorkeler in the waters of the lake one hot morning before breakfast.
It got me thinking about Lake Malawi as a D&D campaign setting. A vast freshwater sea, in effect, populated by many varieties of cichlid-people, giant catfish (and catfish-people?), dangerous spirits formed from millions of zephyr-like lake flies, and tribes of fishermen who capture starlight to use as magic. The PCs could be Traveller-esque (or Mercator-esque) traders, perhaps, sailing from one port to another, trading rare and strange commodities and avoiding lake-monsters. Or hopping from island to island exploring ruined temples, cave systems, or baobab forests full of weird nature spirits. And that's just the ideas that pop into my head in the space of 5 minutes.
Throw a dart at a world map (you're allowed a re-throw if it falls in the ocean) and investigate the immediate area around where it hits. The chances are high you'll be able to base a D&D campaign on something roughly inspired by it. Some might call this geographical appropriation - why don't you set your game in the environs you're familiar with? I call it an easy way to come up with something new but accessible.
I don't have a problem with cultural appropriation - in almost all cases if viewed in good faith, anything that could be called "cultural appropriation" turns into imitation-as-sincerest-form-of-flattery. The same is just as true of geographical appropriation. I don't know much about Lake Malawi. But I like what I do know about it. Read the wikipedia entry: is it not a place to be celebrated? Isn't everywhere? (Well, not Greater Manchester.)
A lot of people get really hung up about being 'authentic' to the culture you're borrowing from, which is true if you're writing historical fiction or something, but if you're just using it as inspiration for a purely fantastical setting I don't see what the issue is. No matter which location you pick, the end result will inevitably be a new creation altogether. Forged from any prior knowledge/new research of the foreign land, but with subtle bits and pieces of your native culture sneaking in alongside it. That's one of my favorite parts of cultural exchange; looking at the back-and-forth between the West and Japan in regards to the fantasy genre in particular is fascinating.
ReplyDeleteAgreed.
DeleteSadly, in my experience the imitation is usually less about flattery than it is about perpetuating stereotypes – intentionally or unintentionally. Which seems to fall into one of two categories: ignorant savage or noble savage, neither of which truly tells the story of a people.
ReplyDeleteBut even when the portrayal is more balanced and is merely wrong it causes a problem. For people who are desperately trying to preserve their cultures, or at least the memory of their cultures, the spread of disinformation about those cultures makes the battle harder. It does not help when their own children are exposed to falsehoods about their culture because of how it is presented by the dominant culture.
As a result, you get tourists attending upon First Nation reserves and dismissing the people they encounter there for not being “real Indians” because they are wearing jeans instead of buckskins, feathers and beads. Or referring to the women as “squaws”, which is a word which I think originated in certain small subset of indigenous languages, but through appropriation and misuse has become about the most offensive thing you can say to an indigenous woman.
These are not matters the dominant cultures of the world particularly need to worry about, partly because the world is inundated with their images, but also because they are not in danger of extinction. But for indigenous cultures that consist of perhaps a couple of thousand people, which have spent the last century or two resisting a concerted effort to Christianize them and strip them of their religious beliefs, cultural practices and traditional livelihoods, the misrepresentation of their culture by members of the dominant culture presents a real danger.
To say nothing of intellectual property rights. It is galling for First Nations to lose control over their own symbols, some of which are deeply sacred to them, and to have to worry about not being able to use their words and symbols for their own organizations because some company has trademarked them to flog its wretched stuff.
If you forbid people from engaging with other cultures, you are enforcing segregation. And that's the worst way to interact with other cultures.
DeleteCulture is a tool. Don't be a slave to your tools.
DeleteAnd "intellectual property" is nonsense. Copyrights, patents, and trademarks are not property; they are privileges granted by governments which can be taken away at any time and which should be granted sparingly and for a limited time. One of the great boons of the invention of the scientific method was illustrating how much sharing discoveries and inventions, instead of hoarding, increases the rate at which new discoveries are made. The push to return to a guild system is backwards and appalling.
I sympathise with the viewpoint, Beoric, but I wouldn't consider any of that relevant to D&D specifically. If I put a sweat lodge in my D&D campaign, I'm not making any kind of statement about Great Plains culture. It doesn't matter if the portrayal of the sweat lodge is accurate or not, because it's fantasy - nobody in their right mind is taking it as indicative of anything about real world culture.
DeleteWhile I understand your complaint Yora, I think there's very much a difference between meaningfully engaging with a culture and reproducing a pop-cultural stereotype as costume or dressing. Players in a hypothetical Peter Pan RPG aren't engaging with an indigenous culture or becoming "less segregated from it" by interacting with Tiger Lily, honestly I'd argue the opposite.
DeleteI am sensitive to cultural appropriation, yet, I think the term gets used as a hammer.
DeleteYou raise some valid concerns, but I feel like the path is for those of the dominant culture to be more sensitive. If it is pointed out that the "thing" you are using has a more sacred meaning that your use, be respectful and stop using the "thing" that way (thing could be a song, a word, an item, whatever).
If I went crazy on cultural appropriation I'm not sure what I'd eat. I'm of German (or maybe Czech) and English and Scottish descent (and since I haven't done 23andme, who knows what else), but there is little continuity in what I grew up eating from those traditions. Given my background, is it cultural appropriation to eat spaghetti?
If we only run games in places where we are familiar with, what sorts of campaigns do I run? Heck, what I'm familiar with is one massive appropriation from a non-dominant culture. To be honest, is ANYONE from a dominant culture living somewhere (geography) or somehow (culture) that wasn't appropriated?
Forgive me for this being not really on-topic, but I just want to take a moment to appreciate that Sinclair and I are apparently a mirrored pair.
DeleteWhat we have here with "cultural appropriation" is a concept which provides a good description of fairly niche situations, embraced by extremely online people and then widely applied in contexts where it has no business being used.
DeleteNike trying to trademark an ethnographic pattern and litigating against autochthonous communities is evil. Jill and Jane dressing up in kimonos, Sal's Diner serving a burrito menu, or someone writing an RPG supplement about the Mysterious Orient is utterly harmless (and is in fact mostly a sign of healthy interest in other cultures).
Yeah, I agree with Melan. Companies trademarking patterns and whatnot is not just for first nations - it happens in the Pacific Islands as well. It's horrendous. But borrowing ideas from e.g. native mythology as a homage seems more in the vein of flattery and cultural exchange than theft, to me.
DeleteI agree with you. I'm a firm believer in that real-world stuff is unbeatable as world-building material. I'm reading The East India Company by Anthony Wild (a compatriot of yours if I'm not mistaken) and it's FASCINATING!
ReplyDeleteI have half a mind to make a mini-supplement for Yoon-Suin about the Purple Land Company, imagining adventurers from the 18th century British Empire exploring Yoon-Suin through a portal.
Delete