A month ago I posted an entry lamenting the 'thinness of fantasy thinking', in which I described modern fantasy literature, and fantasy RPGs, as generally simply replicating the thinking of post-enlightenment liberals dressed up in fantasy furniture, rather than engaging deeply with the question of how people in radically different worlds would think and engage with the reality around them.
This video casts a bit of light on this. It is an interview with some members of one of the last true 'hunter-gatherer' societies, the Hadza of northern Tanzania, ostensibly concerning 'life's biggest questions'. Take a look:
What is astonishing about their answers is how unexpectedly practical they are. To the Western mind, filled with prior conceptions about what people in such societies think and do, the assumption is that they will have views on life that are steeped in spirituality, emotion, and transcendence. But actually they don't mention those things at all. What are the most important things in life? Meat, honey and corn porridge. Oh, and water. What happens after death? Well, you get put in the ground and everybody goes away. We think a person goes to the sun after death but we don't really know. What is your happiest day? Well, you need meat and honey to be happy, so a happy day is when you have those things. What's your greatest fear? Lions. What's your biggest struggle? Getting hungry. What does the moon mean? Nothing, but a full moon is bad for hunting. What do your dogs mean to you? They help us catch bush pigs, elan and baboons.
There are three thoughts that spring to mind. The first is that, trite as it might be, there is something genuinely humbling about the fact that there are people in the world (many millions of people, of course) for whom there are no 'first world problems', and who, when you ask them about their biggest struggle in life, will say 'finding food'. Yes, it is a cliche to say that this gives one perspective, but it undoubtedly does - or ought to. Most of the things in life that we worry about don't actually matter and would disappear tomorrow if we had to start caring about actively satisfying our physical needs. This does not mean it would be a good thing if that were to happen, but it ought to give one pause the next time one is minded to complain about how 'stressful' one's life is.
The second, deeper point is that these are people who very clearly live in a coherent culture, and that this has a profound affect on how they think and converse. Their answers are those of people whose thoughts are embedded in a particular way of seeing the world, and who therefore do not really consider alternatives. What are the most important things in life? You or I would think carefully about this question and come up with answers, I suspect, like 'family', or 'justice', or 'freedom', or 'fairness', or any number of other abstract concepts. This is because we are used to values being contested, and having to be justified vis-a-vis other values. My interpretation of this clip is that the people being interviewed probably have a set of values which they do not really reflect upon (they are the water in which they swim, so to speak), and so when asked what is important in life their immediate responses are only practical and physical. This is not to say that they are simple or unintelligent. (I tend to agree from my own experience with Jared Diamond's assessment that people who grow up in supposedly 'primitive' societies are often more intelligent and curious than those who grew up in 'developed' ones.) Rather, it is that their experience of the world comes from being rooted in a relatively fixed and autonomous conceptual framework. It is premodern, for want of a better word, in that it takes most things as given and hence not really worthy of comment - as opposed to a modern post-enlightenment perspective, which sees nothing as given and seeks to put everything before the 'tribunal of the intellect' (as Michael Oakeshott once put it).
The third is how deeply in touch they are both with each other and with their surroundings. Notice how they mimic the sounds of the various animals they refer to and how animated they are in describing them. Animals are so important to them that just talking about the subject energises them. Notice also how they incorporate the same gestures when they are talking, as though it is second nature. These are people who live together and hunt together and spend every day cooperating with one another. It is totally natural for them to adopt the same mannerisms and speak in unison - they are not people who are accustomed to reflecting on their own individuality, bur rather to their collectivity. This is abundantly evident.
It is useful to reflect upon evidence like this when considering how differently one would think and behave if one was embedded not just in a coherent and premodern culture as these people are (as much as I dislike the term 'premodern' in this context), but one in which there was actually real magic, a real spiritual world, real monsters, real other planes of exitence, and so on. How To Think Like a Fantasy Person is a topic about which we have not even scratched the surface, and merely to open the door to the subject is to allow a Pandora's box-worth of fascinating topics out into the world.
I do not, unfortunately, have much to add here, but I did want to just say thank you. Great video and astute and interesting set of observations!
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DeleteHave you read Reindeer Moon? It's got a pretty strong depiction of a magic-infused setting where the characters have a clearly non-modern (like premodern, but more so) mindset, including taking animals seriously, so to speak. The author grew up in a family of anthropologists (like LeGuin - no coincidence!) and lived among !Kung for a while, which definitely informs her speculative hunter-gatherer society. It's also unapologetically and unpolemically a work with a female POV in which men and women are different, which is refreshing to me at least.
ReplyDeleteGreat recommendation - thanks!
DeleteI had seen that video, and I think it's likely to be a case of poor translation from the interviewer. Not that I know the language of the Hadza, but there is every likelihood that the translator did not convey the intention in the question. "What's the most important thing in life?" can easily be mis-rendered in other languages to mean something like, "What's the most important thing for living?" or "What is the most necessary thing for sustenance?" Then the answers, "meat, honey, and corn porridge" are not antimystical or profound in any way, because they were given to a question that was not understood as profound. Yes, they Hadza live quite differently from you or me, but this looks to me like another example of exoticization based on very slight mistranslations. As somebody whose profession is studying people in preindustrial societies and what they said and did long ago, I see this exoticization happening constantly. That said, I agree it's worth considering how people living in a Fantasy World with Real Magic would go about life with different expectations.
ReplyDeleteImpossible to know the truth for either of us whether it is due to mistranslation or different ways of thinking. Neither would surprise me.
DeleteI think what interested me in the video is precisely the fact that it is not exotocised. To my eye, exoticisation would be the expectation that because the interviewees live simple lives in the wilderness that would grant them deep insights into the human experience unavailable to us Westerners. I found it refreshing that their 'deep' insights were deep in a very down-to-earth way.
That's a fascinating video, and channel, thanks. The video acknowledges some things are clearly being lost in translation. It is possible that the two guys were giving practical answers to a more explicitly practical translation of the question, as Tom Van Winkle suggests. We can't know?
DeleteI understood the original post as suggesting that most Moderns would never think to answer any variant of "What is the most important thing for living, sustenance, to live" etc in such a practical way, unless the question was explicitly coded in a biological exam-type context.
Is this reading exoticising the Hadzabe? I think that depends on your definition. I'm not an anthropologist or historian. While I defer to Tom's expertise, I think exoticising in the other direction is much more pernicious; imagining tribespeople as being more in touch with spiritual forces etc. This (still) happens frequently with indigenous peoples where I live and it gives me the heebie-jeebies.
I think some current fantasy (inc rpg) writers are particularly afraid of accusations of exoticising fantasy/alien cultures, which has a sadly chilling effect on outputs. I suspect that this in one reason why some many fictional cultures seem so like ours. It's not that the author can't imagine it, it's that they don't want to take the risk.
In a way, I wish I hadn't used the word exoticize, because I intended it more broadly, and not to scold. It's just something that everybody does towards those different. It can be harmful but it is not always so. That said, it does get in the way of understanding and communication. With the video at hand, somebody might interpret the answer "meat" as profound wisdom about how to live or about how "our human ancestors all lived," as if these people were living fossils. And that's exactly what several commenters on the video have said. People are reporting all kinds of feelings and reactions because Sokolo simply says you have to eat the most nutritious food at hand to sustain life, as if he doesn't have more profound feelings when he was never asked about them or was disinclined to state them to a stranger. I do suspect translation is the issue here, especially when involving an outsider who has no local expertise and specializes in making YouTube videos about visits to out-of-the way people. A down-to-earth answer is expected if the question seemed down-to-earth.
DeleteAn example of this kind of thing: If you could go back in time to Roman Syria and asked a Aramaic-speaking villager, "What is the most important thing in life?" the answer you would receive would depend on the words you chose, naturally. Setting aside "important," a touch word to translate in many languages, you could say "in life" in various ways. Two words might play a role. One means to live in the sense of "to prosper as a farmer, cultivate a civilization," in which case the answer might very well be "water and wheat." The other word means to live with the connotation "to survive" and typically "to survive after death, salvation" in which case you might get the answer "Trust in the anointed one" (i.e. what one today would call "faith in the Messiah [Jesus]), reflecting the religion growing most widespread then and there. "What is most the most important thing in life?" All depends on the words you use to ask the question, context, and other factors.
I agree with the general points made about the limitations of fantasy. Fictional cultures tend to be based on commonly held stereotypes, and there's no way around it. Our very close horizons constrain not private fantasy so much as shared fantasy. In this respect, it's easier to share fantasies when there is shared ignorance about the object of the fantasy.
Yes, as somebody who used to translate for a living, I assure you that I'm aware of these issues! But it is a genuinely vexed question (which I don't think it is possible for human beings to answer) as to whether the kind of problem you are talking about is due to errors in translation or due to the fact that people with different native languages have genuinely different concepts and thus express themselves and hear questions in different ways. Is the problem, in other words, a mistranslation or misunderstanding of the word 'important' and its nuances, or the fact that the concept of 'importance' is different in the two cultural contexts in which the language is deployed?
DeleteEven contexts themselves differ. If you ask a Western person 'what is important in life?' they will naturally tend to give an abstract answer precisely because they take concrete things like food for granted. But if you ask a hunter-gatherer, even granted that they have a word which means exactly the same thing as our word 'important' with all its nuances, they will (I think) more naturally give an answer pertaining to material need because they don't take those things for granted. Is that an error of translation? Not to my eye. In fact it says something important about how human beings are always embedded in a context.
Completely agree about context being a part of meaning. That's what the whole linguistic field of pragmatics is about, as I'm sure you know. Thanks for hosting the discussion.
DeleteNot to get too Wittgensteinian about it but the question then becomes how context is itself interpreted through language. No getting away from that thorny issue if one wants to think seriously about these matters.
DeleteA friend of mine works with marginalized kids in Southeast Asia (locally known as hill tribes) and says that often their languages don't have words for a lot of more meta concepts which is why they tend to use Thai for those. But that might be a case of the children only knowing part of their (dying) mother tongue.
DeleteI don't disagree with what you've written. That being said: I think it is a disservice to humans to place us in the same category as animals in terms of our priorities. Clearly our biological forms require "meat" (food) to survive. Humans can also choose (and often choose) to go without because of priorities. I, in my First World decadence, have no need to go without...and yet I have chosen to do so, on many occasions, for my own reasons.
ReplyDeleteI will not place subsistence living (or prioritizing of value) on a pedestal.
That being said, I understand that I speak from a position of privilege in comparison. But even so, humans are a very distinct species from other animals of our biosphere. I think it is important to remember...and emphasize...the fact.
Yes, I agree with that.
DeleteThanks for writing yo stuff that's not only relevant to rpgs but meaningful food for thought, too.
ReplyDeleteThanks!
DeleteThanks!
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