Build Better Worlds:

An Introduction to Anthropology for Game Designers, Fiction Writers, and Filmmakers

Build Better Worlds: An Introduction to Anthropology for Game Designers, Fiction Writers and Filmmakers

First Edition. February 9, 2021.

Copyright © 2021 Michael Kilman and Kyra Wellstrom.

Although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure that the information in this book was correct at press time, the author and publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Publisher: Loridian’s Laboratory, LLC

Ebook Edition ISBN:

978-1-7323576-8-6

Print Edition ISBN:

978-1-7323576-9-3

Written by Michael Kilman and Kyra Wellstrom

Cover Art by: Michael Kilman

www.loridianslaboratory.com

Copy Editing by Chelsea Strabala

Michael Kilman. Build Better Worlds (Kindle Location 35). Loridian's Laboratory LLC.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 | Thinking Like an Anthropologist to Build Better Worlds

Chapter 2 | Understanding Culture

Chapter 3 | Why the Hell Did They Do That?: Understanding the Context, Conditions, and Choices Made by People and Fictional Characters

Chapter 4 | The Briefest Possible Explanation of Genetics

Chapter 5 | How Natural Selection Works (and How It Doesn't)

Chapter 6 | On the Bones of Our Ancestors: Fossils and Human Evolution

Chapter 7 | Honoring the Past: Why Cultures Create Myth, Imagine the Past, and What in the World It All Has To Do With Purity

Chapter 8 | Language, the Architect of Culture

Chapter 9 | The Things We Make and the Things We Leave Behind

Chapter 10 | Bring Out Your Dead! Disease, Populations, and Medicine

Chapter 11 | Gender vs Sex

Chapter 12 | Race in History and Imagination

Chapter 13 | Economics: More Than Money and Markets

Chapter 14 | Kinship, Marriage, and Sexuality: How We Persist Across Time

Chapter 15 | What Is Government Good for? Political Systems and Social Control

Chapter 16 | Studying the Sacred: Religion and Mysticism

Chapter 17 | Violence, Worthy Victims, and War

Chapter 18 | Invasion and Expanding Empire: Understanding Colonization

Chapter 19 | The Social Webs We Weave: Globalization and Culture

Chapter 20 | Ways of Knowing: An exploration of Science and Magic Across Culture and Fiction

Chapter 21 | Honoring the Dead: Funerals, Decomposition and Mourning

Chapter 22 | Monsters, Aliens, and Evil Androids: An Exploration of Fear and Anxiety

Additional Resources

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 | Thinking Like an Anthropologist to Build Better Worlds     2

Chapter 2 | Understanding Culture     12

Chapter 3 | Why the Hell Did They Do That?: Understanding the Context, Conditions,

and Choices Made by People and Fictional Characters     26

Chapter 4 | The Briefest Possible Explanation of Genetics    37

Chapter 5 | How Natural Selection Works (and How It Doesn't)      47

Chapter 6 | On the Bones of Our Ancestors: Fossils and Human Evolution   62

Chapter 7 | Honoring the Past: Why Cultures Create Myth, Imagine the Past,

and What in the World It All Has To Do With Purity   88 

Chapter 8 | Language, the Architect of Culture   100

Chapter 9 | The Things We Make and the Things We Leave Behind   116

Chapter 10 | Bring Out Your Dead! Disease, Populations, and Medicine   133

Chapter 11 | Gender vs Sex        149

Chapter 12 | Race in History and Imagination         167

Chapter 13 | Economics: More Than Money and Markets        188

Chapter 14 | Kinship, Marriage, and Sexuality: How We Persist Across Time     208

Chapter 15 | What Is Government Good for? Political Systems and Social Control     225

Chapter 16 | Studying the Sacred: Religion and Mysticism      240

Chapter 17 | Violence, Worthy Victims, and War     267

Chapter 18 | Invasion and Expanding Empire: Understanding Colonization      284

Chapter 19 | The Social Webs We Weave: Globalization and Culture        304 

Chapter 20 | Ways of Knowing: An exploration of Science

and Magic Across Culture and Fiction    321

Chapter 21 | Honoring the Dead: Funerals, Decomposition and Mourning     339

Chapter 22 | Monsters, Aliens, and Evil Androids: An Exploration of Fear and Anxiety   356

Chapter 1

Thinking Like an Anthropologist to Build Better Worlds

What Is Worldbuilding?

What does it mean to build a world? Worldbuilding is the art of crafting the world in which your story takes place. What makes this book unique is its use of the discipline of anthropology to seriously consider the numerous cultural options and diverse viewpoints of the human experience to frame that construction.

The truth of the matter is that when we make fictional worlds, we often only draw on our own cultural biases and ideas to fill those worlds with characters and settings. This can be fine if your goal is to craft a society similar to your own, but if you want to explore something diverse, an experience that most people haven’t considered, or want to make your world more unique and memorable, then understanding the core elements of anthropology can be a powerful tool to that end.

Why Should We Care About Worldbuilding?

You have your story; you have your characters; you have your idea. Worldbuilding is everything that surrounds those characters; the scaffolding upon which your story is staged. By worldbuilding, we can create a complete and complex culture that feels authentic. A properly crafted world will grow and function in a way that seems effortless. It will have a rich texture that allows for deeper immersion. Well-built fictional cultures become self-sustaining. Story after story, character after character will more easily emerge from a holistic world because, like life, there is a great diversity of viewpoints, conflict, and experiences that will help to shape them.

In this book we will also consider the impact of genetics, biology, and the environment, and the interplay of these elements within a culture. Culture is about adaptation to biological limits and environmental parameters. By understanding these elements, you will possess the building blocks of any fictional world. Does your civilization live in a space station where resources are carefully monitored? Do they live in a desert, tundra, or a similar wasteland where survival is harsh and difficult? These questions will have fundamental impacts on how your culture would develop in the real world, and they should in fiction as well.

Culture is holistic, which means that all the pieces of it are interconnected. It functions like a vast and intricate clock; some pieces large, some small, but all working together to make a functioning whole. The way its members think, the values they hold, their hopes and fears, even their physical bodies all fit within the greater machine of culture. A character is a product of their culture in the same way that a flower is a product of an ecosystem. The more an author understands the culture from which their characters emerged, the more genuine the characters will feel.

When you understand the basic elements of worlds, it can make plotting your story easier. Cultures and worlds have concrete rules and ideas. Every culture makes choices on how they run their society, and from those rules, conflict will naturally arise. New events or choices that characters make will have semi-predictable outcomes. What happens if you introduce currency into a culture that has never had it? What happens when a new religion is introduced or an empire takes over? Understanding the holistic nature of culture and knowing how these events happen in the real world will not only give your world greater depth and quality, but make your life a lot easier as well.

This does not mean that all this information has to go on the page. You don’t have to lay out every single element for the reader in some kind of ethnographic tome (unless, of course, you want to), but your understanding will show through just the same. An architect understands all the forces and tensions and raw material that make a building stand, but the people inside it only have to know that it does. You are the architect of your world.

In Search of More Vibrant Fiction

There is a trend in the world of fiction, be it gaming, films, or books: a large portion of the fictional worlds out there, especially in genres like sci-fi and fantasy, are cookie cutter copies of the same handful of cultures. It’s boring. But we get it; writers can only write what they know. This book is designed to help you get out of the bubble most of us live in and take a peek at the wide variety of options out there.

Fictional worlds, even if they seem alien, are created for and designed by humans. Consider humanity for a moment. There are well over 6,000 religions in the world, most of which do not have deities. There are 6,000 or so living languages, a great many of which have concepts and ideas that don’t translate into English. There are 6,000 distinct cultures with different kinship patterns, different concepts of gender, different ways of subsisting, different ways of interacting with their environment. By studying anthropology, we can take a look at the great diversity of the human story, and apply that knowledge to our fictional worlds.

Diversity makes a world dynamic. Worlds without it can end up feeling bare and lacking in vitality. For an example of this, let's look at J. R. R. Tolkien. Now, before you black out from rage, hear us out. There is little question that J. R. R. Tolkien was a literary genius or that his work and his worldbuilding changed the face of fiction forever. Tolkien meticulously crafted his world, highlighting endless cultural elements, built his own languages and mapped out endless mythology and lore in his world. The reason that we’ve chosen to use him as a cautionary tale, however, is that despite his status as a trailblazer, Tolkien’s races were often too mono-cultural. Even the races where there is a wealth of detail, like the humans, dwarves, elves, and hobbits, subscribe to one or maybe two cultural factions. Most of the other races turn into faceless bad guys. You aren’t going to find orc historians or goblin artists in Middle Earth. There is very little complexity of character outside of the protagonists. This can make a world feel flat and stagey, more like a parable than its own universe. And, while the works of Tolkien are still thoroughly enjoyable and have a wide fan base (including the authors of this text), there’s no denying there is something missing.

Compare this to the universe of Star Wars. Part of the reason that Star Wars is so fascinating is its rich vibrancy; every space port, cantina, and senate box is packed with motley characters, distinct and clear and interesting. Each race in the galaxy can have heroes and villains, politicians and pirates, scholars and servants. This intricacy has launched a seemingly endless stream of comics, games, books, movies, and TV shows. Creators need only to turn to a new planet, a new race, or a new era, and there is a fresh wellspring from which to draw. Much of the work was done right at the very beginning, which allows writers to select from the vast pantheon of races and worlds established in 1977 and let their imaginations run wild. There is a boundless quality to the worldbuilding, and people are drawn back to it again and again.

The more immersive your world, the more people will want to jump in. A rich texture provides innumerable avenues for exploration by your readers, which will consistently pull them back in for more. If you can really hook your audience, you don’t need Hollywood’s help to build that kind of devotion. Go to any convention, Etsy shop, or DeviantArt page. You’ll find thousands of examples of fan art for books that have never made it to film. And for every piece of fan art, every referential bit of swag, every tattoo, every fan board created, you’ll get new readers. Passion spreads, and better-built worlds have a much greater chance of creating that rabid, can’t-get-enough-of-your-work fanbase.

Draw From Life (Without Stepping on Anyone's Toes)

The vast array of cultural diversity in our world absolutely can and should provide inspiration for authors of speculative fiction. There is, after all, tremendous beauty and interest to be found in our world. It’s important, however, to draw on this diversity without straying into the realm of cultural appropriation. If you aren’t familiar with this term, cultural appropriation is the misuse of another culture’s practices and sacred elements. It is when one culture takes from another and then uses those concepts and ideas for their own profit or to belittle another culture. While we talk about it most commonly in arenas like fashion, sports, and commerce, it’s a common pitfall for authors as well.

One of the aims of this book is to demonstrate how to write diverse groups in a realistic and respectful way. There is a short and simple way to think about this, and it begins with respect. People seeking for more diverse worlds and characters often grab at low-hanging fruit; they look to the tired old tropes they’ve seen in a million old stories and the fashions and patterns they see on television. These patterns frequently show a lack of esteem for members of other cultures and a lack of understanding for their traditions. If you’ve never been on the other end of appropriation, this may not seem like much of a problem, but it has lasting, real-world consequences for people. It can perpetuate stereotypes and it devalues human experiences. It can turn the sacred into a joke, the meaningful into the trivial, and real human beings into caricatures.

Sometimes, in writing fiction, we can misrepresent people, or inadvertently increase stereotypes or oppression. Every thieving band of “gypsies” helps contribute to the oppression and mistreatment of Roma people. Every mystical and noble “Indian brave” helps readers forget that First Nations people are real by moving them into the realm of fantasy. Even applying real cultural traits to mythical monsters hurts someone. Does your race of bloodthirsty orcs look suspiciously like an actual cultural group? Do your evil witches draw from a real religion?

There has been a lot of discussion in fiction in the last decade as to who has the right to represent which cultures and how. We, unfortunately, don’t have a clear answer to that. It’s likely that no one has an answer, but the more understanding you have, the easier it is to avoid these problems. Before you borrow from another group, make sure you understand the value of the thing you’re using.

This is in no way intended to frighten you off from writing about diverse groups and even using real cultural elements to inspire your work. You cannot be a great writer if you do not write diversity. Use the world as your inspiration and use as much of it as you can; just be sure you’re doing it justice.

Remember, This Is a Toolkit, Not a Rulebook

At the end of the day, what you do with your work is entirely up to you. This book isn’t meant to be a rigid set of rules for you to follow. Instead, it’s a toolkit for understanding what’s in a functional and realistic world. It’s a road map. But, like the adventures of the characters you will write about, sometimes the road map can only take you so far in an adventure. This volume is an attempt to increase your awareness of what’s possible when you take the time to stop and consider the diversity of the human experience.

So, What Is Anthropology?

Anthropology is, simply stated, the study of humanity. Eric Wolf called it “both the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences.” The heart of understanding anthropology involves “making the strange familiar and the familiar strange”. Horace Miner, the anthropologist who first coined that phrase, was a master at this. He cleverly satirized American culture in his famous article, “Body Rituals Among the Nacirema.” It’s all about the strange and masochistic practices of the Nacirema tribe (Nacirema is American backwards) and caused a sensation at the time it was published. He did this show how bizarre cultural behaviors seem if you’re on the outside looking in. His article is still used today to shake students out of their own ideas and start looking at the world in a culturally relative way.

Now, we know you’re not here to read a boring academic text, but to understand some of the concepts ahead, you need to know two things about anthropology. The first is that anthropology is broken into four subfields: cultural, linguistic, biological, and archaeology. Cultural anthropology looks at modern human cultures and all the things they do. Linguistic anthropology studies their languages and how they frame and think about the world. Biological anthropology studies things like evolution, environment, and what we call bio-cultural relationships. Finally, archaeology studies the things that humans made and did in the past. Each of these four subfields will be covered in this text in various chapters, with the largest focus on cultural anthropology.

The second thing you need to know to better understand the text ahead is the anthropological perspective. This perspective is how anthropologists understand other cultures and has three components: holism, cross-cultural comparison, and cultural relativity. Considering each of these things alone will make your fictional world better.

Holism means that all elements of culture are interrelated, so when you change something in one area of a culture, like technology, it has impacts on every other element of society. For an easy example, think of how much the smart phone or the internet has changed our world in all elements of culture. Any good fictional world should be holistic. This volume will talk about holism at length across numerous categories.

Cross-cultural comparison is useful because you can look at the similarities and differences across the cultures in your own fictional world. While you may tell a story with only one culture, most often there will be several. Comparison helps us to understand what is necessary for cultures to do versus what is possible for a culture to do. By covering both what is necessary versus what is possible, your fictional world will make more sense and lean toward holism. Many case studies ahead will help us understand this dynamic of necessary versus possible.

Finally, there is cultural relativity. Cultural relativity is the guiding principle of anthropology. It’s the idea that you have to assess a culture on its own merits, not yours. It’s mentally stepping into another person’s shoes to try and understand the context, conditions, and choices of their lives (Chapter 3 in particular focuses on how to employ this with your characters). It is the attempt of the anthropologist to step back from their own cultural biases and ideas for a moment to try and understand what’s happening. This allows you to see more clearly and to try for scientific clarity. Once you get a grasp of how to do this, you’ll find crafting your own culture so much easier. At its heart, cultural relativism is empathy, and no one uses empathy more than fiction writers. The main goal of anthropology is simply to understand the human condition and our place in the universe, which is exactly what good fiction is supposed to do.

In this volume, you will come across many ideas you may want to explore further. For that purpose, there is a link in the back of this volume that leads to a series of resources that you can further explore around many different topics we discuss ahead. If you are interested in a wide variety of topics in anthropology, both authors are big fans of Sapiens.org. Sapiens is a website run by anthropologists that is filled with a number of fascinating articles from all four fields of anthropology and may provide you with some interesting things to consider as you build your fictional world.

Chapter 2

Understanding Culture

“A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action. [...] Each people further and further consolidates its experience, and in proportion to the urgency of these drives the heterogenous items of behaviour take more and more congruous shape. [...] Such patterning of culture cannot be ignored as if it were an unimportant detail. The whole, as modern science is insisting in many fields, is not merely the sum of all its parts, but the result of a unique arrangement and interrelation of the parts that has brought about a new entity. Gunpowder is not merely the sum of sulphur and charcoal and saltpeter, and no amount of knowledge even of all three of tis elements in all the forms they take in the natural world will demonstrate the nature of gunpowder.” - Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture

Culture is one of those words that is difficult to define because there are somewhere around 6,000 distinct cultures (and many more subcultures) in the world. Culture is the things we wear or make; the things we do or say. Culture, at the core of our political and religious understandings of the world, of our thoughts about race, gender and class, and, most importantly, culture, at its core, is about perception.

Yet, culture is not only the way we perceive the world. It is a wellspring of knowledge, a repository of information from which we draw to make sense of each new experience. This means that each culture is likely to be unique in the way it asks questions. It’s why considering diversity is so important, especially in building a fictional world.

When we are trying to understand a particular culture, we look for the patterns and trends within a society. While it is fair to say that cultures are made up of patterns, those patterns are never absolutes. No culture exists in isolation; in fact, cultures often overlap, especially within the same region. Within a culture, you will find the interplay of established norms and the natural pushback against those norms. There are always individuals who ask questions, debate an established explanation, or just dislike what’s happening. It’s better to think of culture as a kind of blueprint for perception. A blueprint is useful for understanding the general outline, but when we actually spend time with a culture, we find a great deal of variation within that framework.

Homogenization vs Heterogenization

Cultural homogenization is when all members of a culture are the same or moving towards sameness. A great example in a fictional world is Star Trek’s Borg. The Borg, a collective cybernetic consciousness (see also: Doctor Who’s cybermen) that assimilates other cultures into its own by force, utilizes what we call a gestalt consciousness. In other words, all individualism is wiped out and each member of society becomes a unit in the greater whole. A gestalt consciousness is one that is greater than the sum of its parts. All knowledge from the assimilated individuals is entered into the Borg collective, which is used for the sole purpose of assimilating more Borg. Of course, if you already know of the Borg, you know that they aren’t exactly the good guys, they are bent on universal domination and obsessed with perfection and purity.

When looking at other cultures, we often make the mistake of assuming that they are like the Borg. We consider certain political philosophies and ideologies to be Borg-like, in that they risk wiping away individualism. For that reason, it’s important to understand that no culture in the history of the world has ever been truly homogeneous. Every culture has its trends (patterns) and its major focuses and beliefs, but that doesn’t mean the entire population agrees on everything. In fact, culture is in constant flux, even in small-scale societies. There is no such thing as a static, unchanging culture. All cultures are heterogeneous, the literal meaning of which is an amalgam of people or things coming together but retaining their individuality. Within a culture, individuals have different thoughts and inclinations about the same things.

Think of the origin myths of your nation. If you are in the United States, the culture has a tendency to agree, in principle, on the ideals and values set forth by the creators of this nation. We subscribe to individual liberty, to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and we share an imagined past (more on this in Chapter 8). Think about the debates surrounding gun rights and the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Most Americans subscribe to the right to bear arms, but they don’t agree on what that means.

In many instances, the United States Constitution is purposefully vague in many areas so future debates and discussions would be more organic and have enough flexibility to adapt to new circumstances. Interpretation of the Constitution is so constantly under debate that we have courts whose primary function is to interpret the meaning of those early documents in relation to issues we face today. Even before the establishment of the nation itself, there was a series of dialogues between individuals like Thomas Jefferson (the third president), James Madison (the fourth president), and Alexander Hamilton (an influential politician of the day), over what constitutes strong government, what is government overreach, and what rights and liberties should be secured for individuals. A review of the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers (which record many of those discussions) demonstrates that while all the designers of this nation agreed on the idea of individual liberty, what liberty actually meant was different depending on who you asked. This is especially visible in the early debates around slavery, the 3/5ths clause, and other problematic elements of the Constitution. What liberty and democracy looked like then is significantly different than what it looks like now, largely because of debates, protests, and violent conflict over many of these principles. This is an area that Howard Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States, examines in depth.

Think of it this way: if you were to knock on the doors of a dozen people who live near you and ask what they believe about a specific topic, do you think your beliefs on that subject would be the same? Would you have had the same life experiences? Of course not, but you are still all part of the same culture.

One of the gravest errors in writing fictional worlds is treating an entire planet as if it had one language, one culture, and one set of beliefs about how things are done. Even if your world includes a small group who rebel against that culture, you have not created a realistic representation of a planet, a nation, or even a city. The Borg, of course, are an exception to this rule. The purpose of the Borg is to get us thinking about the power of diversity and individuality. The Borg and the cybermen are a critique of things like white supremacy and hyper-nationalism, as well as an attempt to understand that the diversity of the Federation (an alliance of planets and cultures that serves as the good guys in all Star Trek stories) and is what makes it better and eventually stronger. So, if you’re writing about a mono-cultural, homogenous fictional world with one language, one ideology, one religion, and/or one experience, it’s important to do so for a specific reason, and not simply out of laziness. Star Trek had this very problem in its early days. While it was revolutionary for its time, it took until the mid-90s for its writers to really look at the choices individual aliens made in the face of their cultural patterns.

Always remember, patterns are a good place to start, but they will never provide the depth and nuance required for good storytelling. For every rule in a culture, there is almost always an exception.

Features of Culture

When writing about a fictional world or studying a real society, you want to think about some of the major features of culture. The first being that it is performed.

“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.” - William Shakespeare

What do we mean, culture is performed? Every single moment of every day (right now, in fact) you are performing aspects of your culture. It can be as simple as utilizing language to read this book. You may change your tone of voice or choose different words depending on the gender or rank of the person you are talking to. You may be dressed or groomed in a way that is a pattern in your culture and, if you actively choose not to follow those patterns, that is also a performance. The act of worship, the act of voting or otherwise participating in cultural life, the roles we take at our jobs or as family members or friends - all these elements of culture are performative to some degree.

Understanding culture in this way helps us see its inherent flexibility. One of the first things people do when they see someone behaving in a way that violates the status quo (the dominant patterns in a society), is to shame them or tell others (spread gossip) about their actions. This, too, is a performance; an action set to conserve the patterns of culture. Which brings us to the next feature.

Culture as Adaptation

Culture and its people are constantly undergoing new stimuli and experiences. The patterns built into a culture allow some things to change relatively freely, while other things are conserved under the guise of purity (the things cultures decide are “good”). Cultures must constantly adapt to the changing conditions of the world and when a culture fails to do so, the consequences can be dire, including political upheaval, economic difficulties, even war.

When introduced to fresh ideas, concepts, or technological innovations, cultures can either reject the idea, thereby conserving the status quo, or accept the new and undergo transformation. It is easy to see that culture is constantly in the process of either conservation or transformation. Of course, each individual may consider the new object or idea in a different way. Many of the cultural conflicts we see in the world emerge because some people want to embrace a new idea and some want to reject it. It’s rarely that simple. Most individuals fall somewhere in between this spectrum of that thought. They may like some elements of the change, while rejecting others. Humans, and thus culture, very rarely engage in binary, either/or experiences, even though it may seem that way when some people are deemed outsiders or enemies and labeled as being either with us or against us.

Cultural adaptation includes the environment and biology. One of the unique features of humanity is that it exists in every ecosystem on the planet. As warm-blooded mammals, we would struggle in many of these environments without cultural adaptations such as clothing, shelter, and so on. Humans are so adaptable that we can actually bottle our environment and venture into the vacuum of space. Adaptation often surrounds our basic needs and how we choose to address them.

Every generation faces the new. Perhaps new technology is developed, maybe a new trade route is established and there is exposure to outside ideas. Every generation gains new knowledge and loses some old knowledge. This is a natural process and the source of much inter-generational conflict in the real world, as well as a fantastic point of conflict among characters in a fictional one.

If you look at conservative and progressive movements across the globe, you can observe the nature of culture change. Conservatives often push back against the new in an attempt to preserve what they have, while progressives are more likely to embrace newness. It’s far from that simple, but ultimately, cultures take what they like and discard what they don’t. Subcultures and individuals may agree with the group consensus or reject it. This is exactly why every generation criticizes the one that comes after it. The context and conditions (see Chapter 4 for more on this) have changed so people born 20 or 30 years after their parents have different life experiences and different kinds of tools and knowledge with which to move through the world.

Culture Is Taught

A lot of anthropology books talk about the idea that culture as learned. But “learned” is really too passive. Most cultures actively teach new members (growing children or immigrants) their morals and values. These lessons provide what Clifford Geertz described as a kind of recipe or program for instructing behavior and thought. Of course, you can learn things from outside your culture, but most societies spend a great deal of time actively teaching the rules and behaviors necessary to survive in their culture. If, for example, we look at primary education, we find that it doesn’t so much impart knowledge; it prepares children to be acceptable members of society. Students learn the key rules for behavior, including how to conduct themselves in numerous situations, agreed-upon values and ideals, morals and symbols considered important, and the major mythologies (see Chapter 7 for why mythology isn’t just religion but includes politics and history).

Cultures and Symbols

Symbols are an integral part of a culture’s body of knowledge. As children learn about their culture, they encounter numerous symbols. Defining what a symbol is can be problematic, because no single definition necessarily fits all the criteria. For that reason, it is often more effective to look at what a symbol does.

Symbols are repositories of knowledge. They contain relevant information and provide guidance on how to move through the world. The different ways people perceive them can govern, and cause conflict in perception. Consider the image of the peace sign. Most people know what this symbol means and understand the general history surrounding it. We know it has something to do with the counterculture in the United States that began in the 1960s. If you see someone wearing this symbol in public, you can guess what kinds of ideas they subscribe to, or at least the patterns they likely follow. Always be wary of assumptions.

Some symbols carry a great deal of weight, like the swastika. When confronted with that symbol, most of us feel revulsion and recall images of death camps and Adolf Hitler. If we saw someone on the street with a swastika tattoo or t-shirt, we might experience anxiety or fear. The swastika and the peace sign both contain repositories of knowledge and historical context. Many people are unaware that the swastika had many meanings before it became the symbol of Nazi Germany. In Hinduism and Buddhism, it was a symbol of divinity or profound spiritual power and wisdom. In ancient Greece, Rome, and the Norse religions, it was a symbol of lightning and associated with deities like Zeus, Thor, and Jupiter. Today, however, its previous meanings are lost because it has become so associated with hate and terror.

Symbols, like cultures, are constantly taking on new meaning and changing. Despite this, they also remain a way of conveying a lot of information in a short time.

What Is a Key Symbol

In her 1976 article, “On Key Symbols,” Sherry Ortner highlighted elements that help us define a key symbol, or a symbol that contains a great deal of weight and cultural significance. She included the following criteria to consider when looking for key symbols in a culture:

People say the symbol is important

The symbol comes up in a wide variety of cultural arenas

The symbol creates a lot of emotional arousal (positive or negative, i.e., the swastika)

There is a lot of elaboration around the symbol, including specialized language, discussion, and history

There are cultural restrictions surrounding the symbol. It may be restricted to certain places, considered sacred, or limited because it is considered offensive

What kinds of key symbols could you include in your fictional world?

Thinking About a Little Flame

In a lecture by the famous Buddhist teacher, Thich Naht Hahn, the teacher holds up an unlit match and asks us to consider the nature of life and death. He then strikes the match and asks us to consider all the things in the world that had to come together for that match to light at that precise moment. The conditions of the air, the flick of his wrist, his birth, the lives of the people in the room, and so on. Culture is like this. Nothing happens in a vacuum. There are no elements of culture that exist without a series of conditions creating them. Consider the sentence you just read and think for a moment about all the events in your life, our lives, and the other elements that came together in exactly the right way to place you where you are, reading this book, at this precise moment. The list is nearly endless. If you are creating a fictional world, think about the conditions that contributed to the culture you are creating. Think about what brought your character to the moment you are describing and what will influence their next action. You should know why individuals move through their world in the way they do, what conditions cause change, and how your characters will respond to that change.

Diversity and Progress

If we take a look at history, we often see that when cultures have little exposure to others and are largely homogeneous or isolated, progress and development of new ideas and culture change are slow or even semi-static. However, when cultures branch out and encounter other groups, when trade networks grow and new goods, experiences, histories, and religions are mixed together, we see significant developments in learning and science. The periods of great enlightenment throughout human history have all taken place in the cosmopolitan centers of empires where the diverse exchange of ideas and goods were most likely to occur. The most common example in European culture is the Renaissance, but the Golden Age of Islam was equally important. The numbers used most often today are even called Arabic numerals. They replaced Roman numerals, which are more than a little clunky and cumbersome. The prefix “al” comes from the Arabic word for “the” and is common in math, beginning words like algebra and algorithms.

Clearly, diversity is influential for its infusion of fresh ideas and perspectives. Areas that embrace diversity have a tendency to innovate more. Even the power of the Borg comes from the fact that they took the ideas, technologies, and knowledge of those they assimilated and integrated into their existing culture in order to move toward their concept of perfection. The Borg are so powerful and formidable because they have all the knowledge contained in thousands of cultures.

We live in a world with a number of very serious existential problems. Humans are approaching a point where every day we have more power to destroy ourselves, and our planet, through sheer force of will and/or inaction in dealing with problems like climate change. Diversity in viewpoints, scientific backgrounds, and between cultures, offers the answers. After all, if everyone approaches a problem in the same way and it fails, we have to look somewhere else. (More about this in Chapter 20 when we discuss indigenous knowledge and its relationship to the modern world.)

Culture as a Range of Human Experiences

In future chapters, we will look at humanity’s biological makeup, its relationship to culture, and why it’s important to consider in creating fictional worlds. For example, a desert-dwelling culture has to deal with its arid environment, so its culture will necessarily adapt to the situation. However, no species is infinite in their ability to adapt because biology and environment are sometimes insurmountable. Despite that, cultures are a marriage of the necessary and the optional in order to do what all cultures must, survive and persist. How that goal is realized creates the fascinating multiplicity of diverse perspectives.

Why is understanding culture important in writing fiction? Because any good story is, at its center, about significant culture change caused by external factors or the attempt by someone or something to create culture change. Those might include the change of a political or religious landscape, alterations to the relationship between genders or classes, or anything else you can think of that would cause a major disruption of the status quo. Just remember, culture is holistic and a change in one part of culture will have ramifications to a greater or lesser degree everywhere else.

Things to consider in your fictional world:

What symbols are important in your culture? How does that influence people’s thoughts and experiences and what social information does it contain?

Since culture is largely an adaptation to a given environment (socially and physically) what things might individuals in your culture need to address to survive and persist?

How is cultural knowledge passed on in your world?

How are different elements of your culture performed? What rituals are present? How do they relate to wider needs of adaptation?

What are the things in your culture that are pushing homogenization vs heterogenization?

Culture is holistic, so how are different elements of your culture related?

Chapter 3

Why the Hell Did They Do That?: Understanding the Context, Conditions, and Choices Made by People and Fictional Characters

Have you ever read a book or watched a movie and thought to yourself, why in the hell would a character do that? This seems to prove doubly true when you look at the world through the eyes of your fictional villain. Or perhaps, you were watching the news and saw another story about a terrorist bombing or a mass shooting?

This chapter is a map; a place to begin to understand complex human choices. No matter whether you are working on crafting a fictional world or just trying to make sense of the daily news, there is one thing to remember: You don’t have to like it, but you should try to understand it.

And really, you can completely disagree with something. You might find it vile or disgusting, but the better you understand the motivations behind it, the more you will understand what is happening in real life and the more realistic your story will be. Better understanding of the actions of individuals around the world leads to better chances of solving complex issues like terrorism, oppression, and climate change.

In The Beginning, There Was Context

Have you ever seen a politician quoted saying something inappropriate or embarrassing? Their first response is usually, “that was taken out of context.” Oftentimes, this is an attempt at misdirection (hoping people will focus on the reporter doing something wrong rather than what they said) or an attempt to control the narrative.

Regardless of what the politician is attempting to do, we are all contextual beings. As the first of anthropology’s three C’s, context underlies everything.

You are a contextual being raised in a particular culture, during a particular moment in history, speaking a particular language. These things are the starting point for your context, and a great place to begin when crafting a fictional world. Throughout this volume, we will investigate the many elements of cultural context, including environment, biology, history, language, and culture. Your context begins before you take your first breath, and, as you grow, it influences your identity.

Every cultural system has a context, which includes a body of knowledge and a number of conscious and subconscious assumptions about what the world is, why we are here, where we are going, and what is good and right.

Context is the wider cultural experience. It is all the knowledge and history a culture possesses at any specific moment. For example, on September 11, 2001, in the space of a few minutes, the context of American culture changed forever. This moment continues to define Americans and America almost two decades later. The repercussions of that event changed other cultural contexts as well, especially in the countries America and its allies invaded in the aftermath of that day.

Both culture and context are holistic. Just because you don’t participate in one or more aspects of your culture doesn’t mean they are not a part of your context. Everything important to a culture (even the ugly stuff) is part of the wider context and adds to greater understanding of that culture.

Imagine for a moment that you’re an alien visiting our world from a galaxy far, far away. Having no knowledge of our world and thus no context through which to understand our actions, what kinds of strange things might you assume? This is an idea sci-fi writers have been playing with for generations. Ray Bradbury, one of the heroes of the genre, wrote several short stories from this perspective. The short story, “They’re Made of Meat,” is one that really captures the kinds of confusion beings with no context might experience.

In the Thick of Things: How Conditions Shape Identity

You emerged from your context. It’s not just that you were born, but that you are a product of your culture. To paraphrase the 1960s philosopher and self-proclaimed spiritual entertainer Alan Watts: just as an apple tree apples, this planet peoples. It’s one of those things we rarely consider. For example, had the conditions of your parents' lives been just a little different, you might not be reading this right now; you might not exist at all. What Watts is hinting at is that the concept of individual identity is problematic. Apples don’t just randomly grow; they grow if certain conditions are met (remember our discussion of the little flame from Chapter 3). You, as “you”, emerge from your culture and much of your identity is wrapped up its cultural context and social interactions.

The second of the three C’s, conditions, is about individual experiences within the cultural context. The home you grew up in, your gender, your religion (or lack thereof), your skin color, your class, are all examples of conditions that frame the way you see the wider context of your culture, and, as a result, how you interact (at least initially) with other cultures. Like a Russian nesting doll, your conditions are inside of your context. Even if you are one of those people who grew up in a multiplicity of different cultures, that must mean your context is broader than people who grew up in relatively static situations.

We are going to spend a lot of space in this text discussing possible conditions in various places, but for now, just keep in mind that even if you grew up on the same block as your best friend, the conditions of your lives differ in a number of ways. If one of you grew up wealthy and the other struggled financially, that changes each person’s outlook. If your best friend is a different gender, if they are a different religion, if their parents have different political views or different primary languages, these conditions will cause the two of you to differ, even if you grow up in an identical cultural context.

Free Will or Preprogrammed? Agency and Personal Choices

Choice is our third C and the center of our Russian nesting doll. As we move through the world, we tend to think we have near unlimited choices, but if you consider both context and conditions of your life, you begin to realize that our choices are far more limited than we realize. In fact, in anthropology, we don’t use the word “choice” very often. Instead, we use the word “agency.” which is the ability to act or make choices within your culture. It doesn’t mean you are free to do anything. It means your cultural sphere and the society you live in govern your ability to make choices. Power dynamics, gender, religion, race, economics, and government structure all play parts in the choices you are free to make.

No one likes to be told that they have limitations to their choices, but we all do. You might love to purchase a yacht and sail around the world, but for most people, this isn’t an option. The amount of money up front, the loss of work and income, the care of dependents, and other factors prevent this for a large portion of people. Your context and conditions govern, at least in part, what you can and can’t do on many levels.

But limitations come from more than economics. Some come from a person’s race, gender, or religion as they reflect their society’s acceptance or intolerance. Take a moment to think about your favorite fictional world in book, game, or film format. What limitations do the characters face as a result of their context and conditions?

Another consideration is how often the choices we make are truly conscious. The reality is, most of what we do is react based on past experience. The context and conditions of our lives have much more impact on how we react to new ideas and experiences than most of us want to admit. The way you interpret the words someone uses, how you react to certain flavors or smells, and the way you internalize news from around the world largely depends on the things you experienced in the past and what you know. Most of us reserve careful consideration for the big choices, and even then, we may be making assumptions based on past experience. The reality? We are often prisoners of our own pasts. This doesn’t mean we can’t break free or do something different, but a lifetime of experiences and habits make changes difficult. Charles Duhigg’s book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, demonstrates how these habits form, how we shift into a kind of mental default mode, and how much work is required to change our patterns.

In crafting a fictional world, what are the things that keep coming up for your characters? What things stay in their mind? What things weigh on them constantly or pour salt into their wounds? If you want great examples of characters who get stuck in one frame of thought, both George R.R. Martin (Game of Thrones) and Stephen King (The Dark Tower, The Stand, and It) are excellent illustrations of what happens when someone gets stuck on the same thought and how that influences future choices. On an internal (perhaps even subconscious) level, these characters regularly relive important moments from their lives. Over the course of the narrative, they are forced to think and rethink their experiences or insecurities. Both authors are successful at demonstrating how, amidst changing conditions, characters can change their opinions and interpretations of those same moments.

Case Study: The Making of a Human Bomb

Now that we understand the three Cs, let’s apply them to a real-world study. Remember, you don’t have to agree with what happens, or like it, but we want to understand it. In 2009, Nasser Abufarha published The Making of a Human Bomb: An Ethnography of the Palestinian Resistance.

The central question of this book is, why in the world would anyone strap on a bomb and run into a civilian population? In addition to growing up in the region and spending several years conducting research, Abufarha analyzed 213 strategic operations that the Palestinian resistance carried out, 80 of which were martyrdom events (suicide bombing).

A good anthropologist looks at the context of a situation and the conditions of the individuals within the cultures, so that they can better understand their choices. This case is an intense example: someone using violence and fear to make a political statement.

But what is the context of these 80 bombers? What conditions drove these individuals to make choices that took their lives and those of innocent bystanders?

Abufarha reviews the history and current cultural circumstances of the region. He includes interviews from planners of these actions as well as peaceful activists, artists, and everyday individuals to create a picture of what resistance looks like for average people (not just suicide bombers), living under the Israeli regime. This helps us to understand the conditions of the situation on the ground and we get a holistic picture of the reasons behind the martyrdom events. There are numerous major factors that Abufarha discusses including, the transcendence of physical, mental, and emotional boundaries such as walls and checkpoints, the revival of Palestine through self-sacrifice, the belief that such actions will assert Palestinian personhood in the face of overwhelming lack of global support, the assertion of independence, and vengeance for unpredictable Israeli military attacks.

The last one may be the most important. Consider that in any military encounter, civilians are the worst group of people to be. On a daily basis, Palestinians feel threatened by a constant circling of drones overhead. Their farms are demolished based on the whims of some far-away politician who is violating territorial agreements. Palestinians of all ages, genders, and backgrounds die at the hands of the Israeli military at regular intervals.

Whether or not the military actions are justified isn’t the question we need to ask to understand the position of the Palestinians. As anthropologists, we do our best not to enter situations with preconceived notions of right and wrong, victim and perpetrator. Our job is to observe, interact, and try to understand. We want to know what is driving the behavior. Their perception is that it is dangerous to go to a restaurant, ride on a bus, or go about their daily lives. There are often afraid to leave their house and be out in public because of excessive state violence.

They live in a constant state of terror and therefore, from their point of view, they are terrorized by the state of Israel. Part of the purpose of martyrdom then is that the suicide bombers return that same fear to the Israeli public. Civilians on the Israeli side share in the terror of the Palestinians with every launched rocket and suicide bomber event. Right or wrong, it shows that violence begets violence and terror begets terror.

Understanding the perspectives is the only way to solve the violence in any region of the world. We need to understand people’s context and conditions, so that we may understand (again, understand, not approve of) their choices.

In your fictional world, if you want your reader to understand the choices your hero or villain make, giving them the context and conditions (sometimes called the backstory) allows the reader to understand why they make the choices they make. It also makes the world you are creating more immersive and realistic and your characters more lifelike.

Why Anthropology Can Be Difficult To Grasp

As a cultural anthropologist, one of the hardest things to do is step away from yourself and your own culture. This requires trying your best to understand the context and conditions of each individual without being influenced by your own context and conditions. We know that complete objectivity is impossible. In the face of that, we use our training to be as objective as humanly possible. Encounters with other cultures and people who differ in their worldview can cause us to question our own values and ideas. This is a good thing. Without it, one can all too easily fall into the trap of ethnocentrism.

What Is Ethnocentrism?

Simply put, ethnocentrism is the idea that my culture and worldview are superior to any other culture and worldview. Ethnocentrism manifests in a wide variety of ways but is often expressed as discomfort or even disgust when faced with the behaviors and practices of other cultures. Remember our discussion of the body rituals of the Nacirema from Chapter 2? Miner’s goal in that article was to expose the ethnocentrism that existed within the field of anthropology. Modern anthropologists do their best to employ cultural relativism so they can better understand other cultures.

The majority of human knowledge is passed from generation to generation. Things like racism, sexism, and terrorism (among many others) are taught behaviors. They aren’t just learned; they are actively taught by our communities as we grow and encounter the world. Slight changes to someone’s conditions and context can result in major changes in their choices, which can lead to changes in the culture around them. Of course, not all cultural practices and behaviors we are taught are negative. A great many things are either positive or benign. Think of that family recipe you use during the holidays, the great literature, art, and music that are part of your cultural identity. When we attempt to understand other people, it’s important to take a holistic approach to grasp their unique context, conditions, and choices. In writing fiction, the three C’s can be useful tools in getting to know your characters’ backstories, which will include their context, conditions, and choices.

Things to consider in your fictional world:

What are the three C’s of your major characters? Mapping these can be especially helpful when writing complex villains

What biases might the context and conditions of a character create? Where are their blind spots? How might this impact their choices?

How much agency does each character have? What’s limiting that?

Chapter 4

The Briefest Possible Explanation of Genetics

Before we begin, we have to make one thing very clear: this chapter is not designed to be a genetics course. For every concept presented here, there is a whole textbook somewhere dedicated to the same thing. This chapter is designed to be a primer; a sketch of the process by which animals inherit and demonstrate variation within our species. You probably already know more than you think about DNA. We all know at least a few basics, like “DNA is the blueprint for the body.” But how does DNA actually work and what is it, really?

DNA is a wonderful and complex molecule. The detailed structure of it is far too small to be seen with even a powerful microscope, yet we know there is six and half feet of it in every cell of our body (with the exception of red blood cells). It has only four “letters” to make up its code, but they can be combined, recombined, shuffled, and reordered into tens of thousands of different genes. We share it, in its basic form, with every living thing on this planet. Even viruses, which aren’t technically alive, have DNA. So, what is it?

What Is DNA?

DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a molecule composed of many nucleotides twisted into a shape called a double helix. A double helix is essentially two twisting strands wrapped around one another. You can think of it like a spiral staircase; the bannisters twist around one another, connected by the treads in between. In DNA, each bannister is made of a long chain of sugars and phosphates, aptly named the sugar-phosphate backbone. The treads are made of by nitrogenous bases. These three pieces; the sugar, phosphate, and nitrogenous base, form what is called a nucleotide. Many, many nucleotides make up each half of each double helix.

The nitrogenous bases are what give us the “code” of DNA. There are four of them: adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C), and guanine (G). Each tread is made of two of these bases linked together by a hydrogen bond. Because of the shape of the connector regions on these bases, adenine may only bond to thymine and cytosine may only bind to guanine. These pairings are essential to making DNA transcribable and translatable.

DNA is housed inside the nucleus of the cell. This keeps it safe and away from all of the complicated cellular machinery that’s going on in the cytoplasm. The reason DNA stays put is because of its thymine, which is too large to pass through the pores in the nuclear envelope, the membrane surrounding the nucleus. This is essential; if the DNA becomes damaged, that cell can no longer function. DNA is only allowed out when the cell divides. More on that later.

Blueprint for What?

When we describe DNA as a “blueprint,” we mean that it shows the cell how to build proteins. A recipe is possibly a more apt comparison: the code in DNA tells the protein building mechanisms of the cell what amino acids they need to combine in order to get a functioning protein. Proteins make up the vast majority of your body: blood, mucus, muscle, hair, hormones, enzymes, and more. They are chains of amino acids connected to one another and folded into a shape by molecular bonding. They are absolutely essential for the functioning of the body and are responsible for the visible variation that we see in the human form (in everything’s form, for that matter). Proteins are how we go from genotype (the genetic code underlying physical traits), to phenotypes (the observable, physical traits). Some easy-to-spot examples of phenotypes are the traits produced by melanin.

Melanin is the protein that produces the colors we see in the skin, hair, and eyes of mammals. In the skin, special cells called melanocytes produce the protein melanin at varying levels determined by ethnic origin, sun exposure (tanning), and some other factors. In human skin, its primary purpose is to filter sunlight; a sort of biological sunscreen. In our eyes, different amounts and tones of melanin filter light and produce a visible color. If you’re wondering why we have different eye colors, we actually haven’t found a reason yet. They appear to be the result of random mutation.

So, how does DNA, trapped in the nucleus, produce these proteins? Just like in the larger world, the blueprint itself doesn’t build anything. Builders take the information contained within it and use that to tell them how to do the actual construction. This is exactly how it works in cells, except the builders don’t look like any construction workers you’ve ever seen.

Protein Synthesis

The process starts with transcription, which transcribes the genetic code from one form (DNA), to another: a molecule called RNA (ribonucleic acid). There are many types of RNA. The type responsible for transcription is called messenger RNA, or mRNA, and it’s small enough to pass through tiny pores in the nuclear envelope. mRNA is how DNA gets its message out into the cell.

The actual process of transcription itself begins with RNA polymerase. This enzyme essentially unzips the two strands of DNA, leaving the nitrogenous bases open and unpaired. It then guides the nucleotides of the mRNA, which are free-floating in the cytoplasm of the nucleus, into the correct order based on their sequence in the DNA. As the base pairs of the RNA bond to the now unpaired bases in the DNA, their backbones instantly hook together to form a chain, creating one long strand of mRNA that’s an exact copy of the gene. The main difference between the DNA and mRNA is that, instead of being paired with thymine, mRNA contains a nucleotide called uracil that pairs with adenine. Remember, thymine is too large to pass out of the nuclear envelope. The smaller uracil molecule can get through the pores fine. The RNA polymerase then separates the mRNA strand from the DNA and zips it back together, leaving the mRNA free to go about its business. This whole process happens at a blistering speed.

The sections the RNA transcribes are known as genes. Genes are the sequences that code for proteins. The sections of code used for genes can be cut, swapped, and switched along the strand, so a tremendous number of sequences can be formed using the same strand of DNA. Once the mRNA has transcribed the gene, the mRNA can exit the nucleus.

Making Protein

Outside the nucleus, the mRNA meets up with a ribosome. This is the cellular machine that produces protein. The ribosome hooks on to the “start” region of the mRNA and begins to feed it through like a tape, “reading” three letters at a time as it is pulled through. These segments of three letters are called codons. Each codon sends a signal to the outside of the ribosome. This signal attracts transfer RNA, or tRNA, which acts like a courier. Each molecule of tRNA carries an amino acid, and when the ribosome gets the codon for a specific amino acid, it pulls in a tRNA carrying the correct one. Once the tRNA has dropped off its amino acid, it moves back out into the cytoplasm to collect another, ready for the next round. Those amino acids link together and begin to fold into a protein. After these proteins are built, they can leave the cell and do their work in the body.

Inheritance

So now that we know how DNA works, how do you get it in the first place? We know that we inherit things from our parents, but the process seems slightly mysterious. Why do we get certain things and not others? Where does new variation come from? Why do some traits seem to come directly from great grandparents and some seem copied directly from one parent or another?

Since we, along with nearly all multicellular organisms, reproduce sexually, we give only half of our DNA to our offspring. Each gamete, or sex cell, contains half the genetic material of the parent. In humans, the gametes are sperm and eggs.

How does the DNA get into the gametes? First, it must be replicated and the cell must divide to create the sex cells. This process of division and replication is very similar to mitosis, which is how our body’s cells replace themselves so we can physically grow and heal wounds. First things first, though. Replication involves making a copy of the DNA. An enzyme known as helicase attaches to the DNA strand and "unzips" it. It then begins to move along the strand, attaching free-floating nucleotides to the open halves of the molecule and re-zipping them. By the time it reaches the end, there are two complete strands of DNA.

The cell then begins the process of division. The DNA is bundled into chromosomes, which means that all those long, wiggling strands of DNA are packaged up tight, ready to be moved. The chromosomes are lined up in the center of the cell as the nucleus dissolves. Long filaments then reach out from the far ends of the cell and grab onto these chromosomes, pulling one half of the double set to each side of the cell. The cell then pinches together until the cellular membrane cleaves and two identical daughter cells are formed. These cells are called diploid cells and they have the full complement of DNA; all 46 chromosomes, if we’re discussing humans. In mitosis, the process stops here; the nucleus reforms and the process of protein production continues. In the production of gametes, however, this is only the halfway mark in a process called meiosis.

Meiosis I is the process we just looked at with the creation of two diploid daughters. During meiosis II, the cells split again, but this time they do it without replication, so each daughter cell has only 23 chromosomes. These 23-chromosome cells are called haploid cells. These haploid daughters become sperm in males and eggs in females. Haploid cells include one copy each of the sex chromosomes; an X for every egg (which is why females have XX chromosomes) and either an X or a Y for every sperm (which is why males have an X and a Y chromosome).

When the sperm and egg combine, the 23 chromosomes will combine to make the full 46 needed for a functioning human body. The newly formed cell is known as a zygote and will eventually form an embryo by a process of cell division.

This duplication and recombination of the parents’ DNA is what gives offspring their mix of characteristics. The chromosomes are split randomly in each cell that undergoes meiosis, so the half one offspring inherits can be wildly different from the half their sibling inherits. Imagine each parent has a deck of cards. The mother deals red, the father deals blue. With each offspring, both a red deck and a blue deck are shuffled, cut in half, then shuffled together. Half the offspring’s deck is from each parent, but the individual cards they get are in a completely random order. Maybe you get eight aces, maybe three, maybe you get none. Occasionally, you can get a joker.

Mutation

Mutations are the wild cards of our genetic decks. Occasionally there will be a hiccup somewhere in the process, an error in the replication or division of DNA that leads to something new. The system is massively complex, after all, and complex systems are prone to error.

We call these new codes mutations. Mutations are simply errors in the genetic code. If these occur in the somatic cells, or the cells of the body, the result will often be cell death or something like cancer. If the mutation occurs in the gametes, it will be passed down to offspring. Mutations frequently happen during meiosis I when the DNA is replicating. A single nucleotide can be swapped for a different one (point mutation) or the DNA can be “read” incorrectly, causing any number of errors. Genes may be copied multiple times, leading to an increased effect, their order may be swapped, or they may be deleted altogether.

The vast majority of these mutations will either cause termination or have little to no effect on the offspring. Occasionally, they will produce a noticeable effect such as a sight difference in the organization of blood vessels, a different coloration, or a new chemical sensor. Sometimes quite dramatic and large-scale effects can occur. Achondroplasia, or achondroplastic dwarfism, is produced by a mutation in a single gene (fibroblast growth factor receptor 3). The wide-reaching effects on growth and development caused by this gene are easy to see in someone with the condition.

Mutations can be beneficial, neutral, or bad, and each of these outcomes is determined by survival and evolution. Beneficial mutations are anything that helps the survival and fitness of an organism. Bad mutations, obviously, are any that will cause the organism to die or be unable to reproduce. Neutral mutations are just that: neutral. Conditions like polydactyly (extra toes or fingers), for instance, have no effect at all on the organism who has them because an inability to find shoes and gloves that fit is inconvenient but not evolutionarily relevant. Neutral mutations are passed on in a more or less random way. Bad mutations are obviously short-lived in the gene pool, while beneficial mutations can go on to shape whole species.

It is this constant process of replication, mutation, inheritance, and protein production that allows us to adapt to our environments. Without our DNA, evolution would be impossible.

Things to consider in your fictional world:

DNA is a blueprint for how to build life.

Inheritance and adaptation are important components of building a realistic fictional world with unique creatures (See How Natural Selection Works for more).

With unique creatures, what selective pressures forced them to adapt?

Mutations are rarely positive and most often neutral. If they are bad, the creature is often selected out by environmental factors.

Conversely, a good mutation can spread fairly quickly in the right conditions.

Chapter 5

How Natural Selection Works (and How It Doesn't)

Evolution is an observable fact. From the moment Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was accepted by the scientific community, people have set out to prove, refine, and observe the way it works. While we may have to piece together the story of our own evolution from fossils, DNA, and comparative anatomy, we can actually watch it happening in other species. Through painstaking observation over time, scientists have managed to confirm and bolster every conclusion drawn by Darwin, Wallace, Bates, and countless others over the last two centuries. But how does evolution actually work?

Natural Selection

The clockwork behind evolution lies in genetic inheritance and natural selection, which is the process by which the environment “selects” for beneficial traits and against negative ones. In this chapter, we’ll learn how that works and what the results are. We know that natural selection produces organisms that are near-perfect matches for their environment, with traits that help them survive. In order for this process to occur, a few conditions must be met.

First, variation must already be present in the population. This is important; natural selection cannot create anything new. The traits which are selected for or against are already present in the organism based on genetic variation or mutation.

Second, this variation must be heritable; it must be a trait that can be passed down to the next generation. Theoretically, dying your hair might make you a more suitable color for your environment, but your offspring will have to work with the same old colors you have in your DNA. So, no matter how good it is for you as an individual organism, it will have no effect genetically, and natural selection will have no way to share it with your offspring.

The process of selection is often called “survival of the fittest.” You’ve probably heard this phrase before and pictured only the biggest and strongest animals surviving. “Fitness,” after all, is most often understood to mean a strong and healthy state of being. In evolution, however, fittest does not mean strongest. Fitness is a measure of relative reproductive success, not health. Organisms that succeed in reproducing pass their genes down to the next generation, thus ensuring those genes become part of the gene pool. Organisms that cannot or do not reproduce, or organisms which cannot reproduce at a high enough rate, get washed out of the gene pool. Any trait that aids in reproduction, no matter how trivial, is a successful trait.

Negative traits are anything that hinders or prevents reproduction. This can mean anything from killing the organism outright, killing offspring in infancy, or preventing the successful development or delivery of offspring. The success or failure of a particular trait is dependent on a specific environment and a change in that environment can cause a dramatic shift in selection pressures.

Evolution in Action

To better understand the process of evolution, let’s look at a classic example of natural selection in action: the peppered moth. Due to a preponderance of Britons in the 18th and 19th centuries with nothing better to do than pursue their passion for observing the natural world, we have records of direct observation of evolution in the peppered moth’s population as its environment changed around it. There are two genetically controlled colors found in the peppered moth population: white with dark speckles, and black. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the white moths dominated the gene pool. The moth’s primary habitat was woodlands where the trees were naturally covered with light-colored lichen. The white speckled moths blended in almost perfectly with the lichen, making it nearly impossible for predators like birds to spot them. The black, or melanic moths, occurred as a chance mutation once in a while and, because they were exceptionally visible against the light trees, were easy prey for birds.

In 1848, lepidopterists began to notice more black moths, and by 1898, 99% of the peppered moth population was black. What happened? Their environment changed and they adapted in order to survive. The Industrial Revolution was dumping an unprecedented amount of coal smoke into the atmosphere. It blanketed the landscape, coating everything, buildings, rocks, and even trees, in a layer of black soot. The white lichen on the trees died or was coated in this powdery black substance. Suddenly, those random mutations had a distinct edge: the moth’s black wings blended perfectly with the new color on the trees, while the white moths stood out like a beacon to any hungry predators.

In the mid-twentieth century, environmental controls and massive clean-up efforts began to remove that century-old layer of soot. White lichen returned and, since then, the balance of white and black moths has nearly returned to its pre-Industrial Revolution levels, with white being more populous than black. This species perfectly demonstrates environmental selection: variation exists, certain variations are advantageous, the environment changes, different variations become advantageous.

So how does this existing variation become an adaptation? Adaptations are permanent changes in a species that allow it to be better suited to survive in its environment. Adaptations are the result of natural selection working on existing variation for many generations. Darwin’s finches are a classic example. A single species, with variation in the shape of its beak, spread out over the Galapagos Islands. On each island, there was a different supply of food. On islands where the best source of food was grubs that burrow into cactus flesh, the birds with the slimmest and most dexterous beaks got the most food and were able to have the most offspring. Since the birds with slim beaks were breeding with one another, their offspring also had slim beaks. Once in a while, a random mutation or just the recombination of traits from parents would create an offspring with an even slimmer beak. This bird would be able to reach even more grubs and would have more offspring. Over many generations, these birds developed an almost perfect beak for fishing their food out of cacti. Other birds on other islands with different food sources developed differently shaped beaks to fit into their specific environment. It is this process of honing specific traits which provide an advantage to an organism in a specific environment that leads to the adaptations and species which seem tailor-made for their ecological niche. The “tailor” in this case is just many generations of competition for resources, mates, or survival.

Human Adaptations

We tend to think of humans as being above this system, as though we are separate somehow from these forces of selection and evolution. We aren’t. We adapt to our environment just like every other organism. Humans are a polymorphic species on a grand scale, which actually gives us a tremendous advantage in the natural selection game. Remember, natural selection cannot create variation, it can only act upon it. Humans have a dazzling range of variation in color, shape, and function for natural selection to work on. Any number of factors can give us a reproductive edge in a range of environments. Human skin color is a great example. It seems almost useless at first glance; it doesn’t camouflage us like a tiger’s stripes, it doesn’t attract mates like the colorful plumage of birds, it doesn’t deter predators like the color on dart frogs. What it does do, however, is allow varying levels of UV radiation to penetrate the skin. While this might not seem like much, it has a huge effect on our reproductive success.

Human skin color is the product of the protein melanin. Melanin blocks UVA and UVB rays from penetrating the skin. Dark skin can have a protection factor of up to 4 SPF. It makes sense, then, that darker skin would evolve in sunnier climates. To really understand why, though, we have to dig a little deeper. Most people, when asked how the sun acts as a selection factor, jump immediately to skin cancer. While deadly, skin cancer doesn’t begin to manifest until later in life; certainly, after the bulk of reproduction will have happened. This cannot be the answer then, as it is evolutionarily null. The answer lies in fetal development.

UV radiation deteriorates foliate in the blood. As well as being an essential nutrient in adult life, folate is essential for neural tube development in utero. If folic acid levels get too low, the spinal cord will not close properly, leading to conditions from spina bifida (failure of the spinal cord to close) to anencephaly (failure of part or all of the brain to form). Many forms of spina bifida are treatable with modern medicine (anencephaly is always fatal), but in the past it was almost certainly a death sentence. This dramatically reduces fitness. So, in areas with high UV exposure, parents with darker skin had a higher chance of their offspring surviving. The areas of highest and most consistent UV exposure on Earth are the latitudes at and around the equator, so populations there were under a constant selection pressure for dark skin.

If this were the only pressure facing humans in regard to skin color, we would see universally dark skin. Another tenant of evolution is, “if it ain't broke, don’t fix it.” As a result, if there were no other selection pressures in play, humans would never have been forced to adapt any other way. However, as you go higher and higher in latitude, the amount of UV radiation decreases rapidly. While this removes the danger of decreased folate, it presents another problem: we need sunlight to help us produce vitamin D. Vitamin D is vital for the health and survival of both pregnant women and their offspring. In areas of the world where UV is scarce, then, it was advantageous to have lighter skin. An exception to prove this rule can be found in Native Arctic populations. Their diet consists in large part of the meat and organs of marine mammals, which contain high natural levels of vitamin D. By adjusting their diet, they bypassed the evolutionary need for light skin. This is an example of biocultural interaction in humans.

Environmental Adaptation in Fiction

Littered with examples of evolution, fiction provides a fascinating window into how creatures adapt to their habitat. It turns out, Dungeons and Dragons has numerous excellent examples of creatures that display a remarkable ability to adapt to their surroundings. Wizards of the Coast is known for its immersive worlds, and its creators put a tremendous amount of thought into the beings they create. The “races” in D&D are all based on creatures from mythology and fantasy. Each race has special traits and abilities, based on the adaptations they would have acquired in each of their native environments. Creatures that live in darkness or are active at night, like gnomes, dwarves, and elves, all have darkvision and can see further and better in darkness than the diurnal races.

Players of the game often discuss “dungeon ecology”: the ecosystem within the game. Dungeon masters are encouraged to think about how characters and monsters fit into a larger food chain, what sorts of environments monsters are likely to appear in, and the types of animals likely to be found in different areas. This ecological worldbuilding exists throughout the game.

Dragons have different “elemental affinities” based on their color. Green dragons, for instance, live in dense forests and prefer to hunt woodland creatures and races. They breathe poisonous gas (sometimes acid). They even incubate their eggs in a solution of acid, a powerful deterrent to thieves or predators. Similarly, dragonborn (anthropoid dragons) are resistant to the element that aligns with the color they inherited from their draconic ancestors. Green dragonborn are resistant to any damage by poison or acid.

One of the most specially adapted creatures in this vast menagerie is the roper, which has evolved to look like stalactites. Thousands of cilia on their bases allow them to creep along cave walls and up onto ceilings, finding safe places from which to ambush prey. They have a single eye and a large mouth, both of which can be shut tightly so the creature is almost indistinguishable from the rock formations around it. When prey approaches, long tentacles whip out and reel the prey up to its mouth. It can eat nearly anything and has a voracious appetite for meat.

Could there be a more perfectly evolved predator for a dungeon crawling world? The various worlds of D&D are littered with massive cave systems, usually teeming with monsters, goblins, drow, and adventurers. There is even the Underdark, a cave system nearly as geographically wide as the surface lands above it. Whole races live there. The roper feels like a genuine adaptation; something that could really have been shaped by evolution to inhabit a special type of world.

Disease as Adaptation

By now, you’re probably thinking of adaptation as a sort of miracle. Remember, however, that fitness has nothing to do with the actual lifespan or health of an animal. Its only measure of success is reproductive rate. That is why diseases that kill later in life, like cancer, have stuck around for centuries. The vast majority of cancer deaths happen well after any genes might have been passed on. Even things like bad feet and back pain tend to stick around, because while they may be debilitating later in life, they have little to no effect during reproductive years. Even things that are harmful to an individual can have enough benefit for a species that they are selected for. A classic example of this is high potential for certain populations to develop sickle cell disease. This disease can be debilitating and often deadly, and before modern medicine arrived, was nearly guaranteed to kill the sufferer before they reached reproductive age. Even though this should be strongly selected against, 10-40% of all people born in equatorial Africa are carriers. The reason for this can be found in the environment.

Sickle cell is caused by a single mutation in the formation of the protein hemoglobin, which causes the gene to produce a faulty protein. In this case, instead of being able to carry oxygen properly, the hemoglobin becomes misshapen, causing the whole red blood cell to warp and become sticky and sickle-shaped. This is a catastrophic failure in the cell; it cannot perform any of its normal functions and can easily become clotted and stuck in capillaries. Because the gene which forms hemoglobin is discrete, or found in a single locus of the chromosome, a person may have either one or two copies, one on each side of the sister chromatids. If a person only has one copy of the gene, they are a carrier. They themselves will have limited symptoms and, without any medical treatment, can live into their fifties with little difficulty in reproducing. If a person has two copies of the gene, having inherited one each from two carrier parents, they are almost certain to die in childhood without the intervention of modern medicine.

The reason that 10-40% of people still carry the trait is because there is another selection pressure present in this environment: malaria. Malaria is a parasite transmitted through mosquito bites. It moves into the red blood cells of its host to reproduce. When it’s reproduced enough, it bursts the cell and moves into the blood to infect more cells for reproduction. This causes a hemolytic anemia that essentially causes a person to suffocate from the inside out because their red blood cells are systematically destroyed and can no longer carry oxygen within the body. In 2018, 405,000 people died of malaria. This number might not seem astronomical, but remember this is with modern anti-malarial drugs, all the benefits of modern medicine, and out of a population of 7.5 billion. In the past, the burden of this disease was enormous and its primary victims were children and pregnant women. If fitness is a measure of reproductive success, something which kills children and pregnant women constitutes a massive selective pressure.

This is where sickle cell disease comes in: malaria cannot live in the sickled cells. A carrier, a person with one copy of the gene rather than two, has a distinct advantage in a malarial environment. If they do contract the disease, they are much more likely to survive it than someone without the sickling trait. In a malarial environment where sickle cell anemia is present, you are in slightly more danger of dying from malaria than you are from inheriting two copies of the sickling trait. Humanity, and evolution, have found a balance between two deadly pressures that manages to keep most people in good enough health to produce offspring.

Remember: malaria does not cause sickle cell disease. Malaria existed and was killing people in the environment long before this disease existed. At some point, someone developed this simple point mutation and, even if they were sick, still had a dramatic edge over their competitors who were dying of malaria. That reproductive edge ensured that the sickling trait was passed down and down and down until we see it present in the proportions we do today.

How To Get a New Species

The examples above represent clear illustrations of polymorphic species shifting their phenotypic frequencies in response to the environment. But how does evolution lead to the creation of a whole new species? That is the result of a portion (or, rarely, all) of a species undergoing a combination of random mutation and natural selection until it becomes so different from its original form as to be unrecognizable. This process happens slowly; much more slowly than the microevolution we see happening between generations of humans, moths, or anything else, really.

Genetic Drift and Gene Flow

The process by which differences accrue in a population is called genetic drift which is any random genetic change within a population over time. This includes the creation of new variations resulting from mutations, as well as the removal of variations due to random, rather than selective, factors. The accumulation of mutation is fairly self-explanatory. They occur at a predictable rate and, assuming they are not deleterious, are then incorporated into the gene pool. If they are beneficial or even neutral, they may even proliferate. The removal of variation can happen any number of ways: a portion of the population may move, become isolated, or be killed off. When this happens, the new population formed has a different proportion of genetic material than the original. This is called the founder effect or a bottleneck. Although the genetic effect is the same, scientists usually use “founder effect” to denote the movement or isolation of a population and “bottleneck” to denote the demise of a portion of a population. Populations can be isolated by many things. They can physically move away from the main group in search of food or to escape predators. A geological or weather event such as a typhoon can push part of a population away either on the same land mass or on a piece of land that is washed out to sea like a raft. Or, as in the case of humans, one group may culturally isolate themselves. The factors that cause a die-off and the resultant bottleneck are numerous: a sudden spread of disease, a natural disaster, or an increase in hunting or violence.

These things count as genetic drift because they are evolutionarily random. Nothing is being selected for or against, the genes just land where they may. These events need not be catastrophic either. There are plenty of ways for species to become isolated from one another that do not involve earthquakes or typhoons.

Isolation

The concept of geographic isolation is well-known in biology. Different groups within a species often drift farther and farther apart. Orioles, brightly colored members of the blackbird family, are found all across North America. Those living on the east and west coasts are separated by enough distance (not to mention the Rocky Mountains) that the bulk of their populations will never interact. They have therefore developed into the Bullock’s and Baltimore orioles. Genetically, these two are still close enough to breed, and hybrids are often found along the border of the two ranges, but the geographic and genetic distance between the main populations puts them firmly into their own species categories.

The amount of distance needed for geographical isolation is not vast. Bonobos and chimpanzees are two distinct species of ape found on opposite sides of the Congo River. While they could easily cross the distance if it was dry ground, their inability to swim makes it nearly impossible for them to come in contact in the wild. After the two groups were separated by the river, genetic drift and behavioral changes over time turned them into two distinct species.

Behavioral isolation is also a common factor in the formation of new species. Differences in the mating or social practices of different groups can lead to an inability to recognize members of a separate group as being genetically similar. If one group wants males to select their mates and one group wants females to, miscommunications are inevitable.

Niche isolation, sometimes called ecological or temporal isolation, can also lead to the separation of species. In this case, members of one group split off into a new ecological niche to ease competition. Perhaps most of the group operates during the day, so some members begin to look for food at night. Or, one portion of the group may discover new food sources in a different layer of the rainforest canopy or begin to use marine resources while the main group does not. These new ecological niches provide enough isolation for the speciation process to occur.

All of these forms of isolation and separation come with new selection pressures. Couple this with genetic drift and enough time, and completely new species are created.

Things to consider for your fictional world:

Consider the key elements of the environment: What kinds of creatures would thrive, what would die off if there was a sudden and significant shift in environment or resources?

If you’re writing about a world with unique species, how did natural selection play a role in their present form?

Keep in mind, that if humans (or other species) colonize distant planets or locations, the founder effect may very well be a factor.

Consider genetic drift and gene flow in your populations.

Are there diseases or disorders like sickle cell that function as both a scourge and an adaptation to your culture?

Biological changes and social changes often pair together to create new arenas in societies or new problems to deal with. Biocultural interactions can be a powerful story mechanic in the right circumstances.

Chapter 6

On the Bones of Our Ancestors: Fossils and Human Evolution

On Species and Speciation

Species and speciation often confuse people, especially when it comes to the human lineage. You might have heard, or even asked, “If we evolved from monkeys, why do monkeys still exist?” The answer is pretty simple, actually.

Lee Berger, paleoanthropologist and the man responsible for the finds of both Homo naledi and Australopitihicus sediba, thinks that the metaphor of a “tree”, coming from a single root and ending in terminating, isolated branches, is not the best way to think of evolution. Instead, he describes it as a “braided stream”. Imagine a network of waterways, a great delta of rivers, streams, and tributaries. When a river forks, the original river still exists, continuing on its original course. The new stream goes off in its own direction, making a new path through the landscape. Sometimes, these little creeks and streams can merge together, creating new, hybridized rivers.

Speciation works much the same way, as we saw in chapter 6. Humans became human through the exact same process that other species developed over time. When we say we evolved from monkeys (or creatures that were-monkey like), we mean that our particular fork of the primate river began in the miocene epoch, between 23 and 25 million years ago, when creatures that resembled our modern monkeys were scampering happily through the trees across a large stretch of our planet. Then the river forked and while the rest of the monkeys carried on being monkeys, a group of them started off in their own evolutionary direction and began, slowly, to turn into apes. That course would eventually lead to us.

Ancestral Species and Last Common Ancestors

Before we really wade into this stream of human evolution, we need to get a few concepts straight. First, we need to know the difference between an ancestral species and a last common ancestor. When we discuss ancestral species, we mean any species that came before us on the same genetic line. These species no longer exist, the same way your personal ancestors, let’s say your great-great-grandparents, no longer exist. Your grandparents’ genetic material led to you in the same way that the genetic material of an ancestral species did. Last common ancestors, or LCAs, are slightly different. LCAs exist at the exact moment (or as close as we can get to that exact moment) where those evolutionary rivers branched off from one another. It was the last time those two species were the same. So, instead of being only ancestral to a single species, they are ancestral to several. To go back to our family analogy, you and your third cousin on your mother’s side both share the same great-great-great-grandparents, so those individuals would be your last common ancestors. You do not share great great-grandparents, so those individuals are your ancestors but not your third cousin’s ancestors.

How Do We Figure This Out?

We track these evolutionary ancestors in a number of ways. Obviously, we can’t go back in time and observe them and there’s no ancestry.com for the primate family. What we do have are clues; we find them in our DNA, our morphology, and in fossil records. The really important thing to remember is that our ideas can change as new information is discovered. It is a very foolish scientist indeed who assumes they have the whole picture from a handful of clues. As we find new evidence, our ideas must flex and change. This is why we try to use as many clues as we possibly can when creating a taxonomy. Taxonomy is the study of the classification and relatedness of organisms. It is the tool by which we fit ourselves, and everything else, into the great river of life.

Clues in Our DNA

Genetic mutations happen at a roughly predictable rate. Because of this, we can use what are called molecular clocks to determine how long ago in time any two species split apart. These rates can be a little difficult to pin down; specific clocks must be developed for individual genes in each individual species. Once you have them, however, determining the time since the evolutionary split becomes a simple math problem. Let’s say we’re looking at two species of macaques (small, mostly frugivorous monkeys who live across Asia, North Africa, and Gibraltar). We know what their shared DNA looks like, and we can look at a single gene from each group. If we know that gene mutates every ten thousand years and we find ten mutations between the two species, we know they must have split from one another 100,000 years ago. For a really accurate chart, we should use as many clocks per species as possible. The more we learn about DNA, the more accurate our clocks can become.

Clues in Our Morphology

Morphology can be a big help in determining the relatedness of species, both living and extinct. Homologies, or similarities of form derived from inheritance from a common ancestor, have long been observed by scientists and naturalists. Some homologies take us way back, like the structure of the arm. All land vertebrates and their descendants, at least those who still have forelimbs, share a similar pattern of bones. Bats, dolphins, alligators, humans, and all the others have a stout long bone connecting to the shoulder girdle, two long bones forming a joint (the elbow) at their proximal end, a series of small, irregular bones forming the wrist, and end in a series of digits. The bones are twisted and warped to serve the particular function required of them, but they all follow this recognizable pattern. We know that since we all share this same form, we must have gotten it from a common ancestor, in this case far, far back in our evolutionary history.

Morphological traits can also show who isn’t related. Mammals and reptiles have notable differences in the jaw and ear bones but similar forelimbs, meaning the jaw and ear traits evolved later than the forelimb and can be used as boundary markers between the two groups, which gets us closer to that fork in the river.

Some morphological traits are so specific that we know species who share them must be related. The human foot is a good example. Our feet are radically different from those of any other extant primates’ because of one major thing: we walk exclusively on our hind. We are a bipedal species, meaning we walk on just two limbs instead of four (quadrupedal). This caused a major rearrangement of the bones in our feet (more detail later). Any fossil primates we discover that shares our foot bones must be more closely related to us than those that do not.

Clues From Fossils

Fossils are our best and most elusive clue to our past. They are the best because they provide actual, physical evidence of the species that came before us. We can use DNA and morphology to hypothesize about our ancestors, often with a fair degree of accuracy, but there’s no substitute for actually finding that ancestor. Sadly, fossils are also elusive. The process of fossilization involves dozens of factors going exactly right after an organism dies.

First, an organism must die and be deposited in sediment that is conducive to fossilization, usually soft sand in or near water. Sediment must then cover the organism quickly, before decomposition or damage can occur. Then the bones (and sometimes other tissues) begin to absorb the minerals in that sediment. Over enough time, the minerals replace the organic material, effectively turning the organism into stone in a process called petrifaction. Occasionally, trace fossils, like the imprints of feet or feathers can be filled in and petrify as well.

This process is difficult enough; most organisms are decomposed, trampled, eaten, or broken before the petrifaction process can even begin. If the organism does fossilize, it becomes a matter of finding it. Even something relatively large, like a mammoth or a dinosaur, is dwarfed by the enormity of the planet’s surface. “Needle in a haystack” doesn’t even come close to describing how difficult they can be to find. So, when we look at fossils, we always have to be aware that we are looking at an incomplete record. Even if we know a creature must exist because our other models say it must, it’s possible that not even one of that creature ever fossilized. It’s equally probable a member of that species did fossilize, but we just haven’t found it yet.

This is why scientists get so excited by any fossil we do find, particularly one related to human evolution. These tantalizing little clues are like finding a puzzle piece you’ve been hunting for. You know it must be there, you know what it must look like, but there’s still no substitute for the tangible proof that it exists. Remember, however, that with fossil evidence, just like with our other clues, we must be flexible. The creatures we hypothesize don’t always look the way we expect and sometimes we find creatures we had no idea were part of the family history at all. We are constantly rewriting the human lineage to include more relatives as we find evidence of them.

Reconstructing the Past

When we do find the fossil of a human ancestor, or hominin, we want to learn as much as we possibly can from it. Among the things we can learn from a hominin fossil is how old they were when they died, what they ate, what they looked like, how and when they died, even something about their social structures. In order to answer all these questions, we need to look at a lot of evidence. We’ll start with the question everyone asks first: how old is it?

How Old Is It?

There are myriad ways we can determine the age of fossils. Which test you use can depend on a lot of factors: the amount of material you have at hand, the degree to which it is petrified, or what equipment you have access to. Most people want a date in years, a nice, clean number to attach to the fossil. Methods that give a date in years are called absolute dating methods. There are a bunch of these tests, but they all rely on the same principle: radioactive decay. The world is full of radioactive elements. Even elements which are normally stable, like carbon, can have a radioactive isotope. When an isotope is radioactive, that means that it decays. Particles occasionally break off from the unstable molecules and when this happens, the parent molecule is altered into a daughter product. Thankfully, rates of radioactive decay are standard, so the ratio of parent to daughter can be measured and the time since deposition can be calculated. We generally measure this ratio in half-lives, or the time it takes for half of the product to decay.

Potassium-40 (K) is one of these radioactive isotopes. When it decays, it turns into argon-40 (Ar). Both parent and daughter are found in rocks. When the rocks are melted into magma below the Earth’s surface, the argon-40 escapes, leaving only the potassium-40 behind. When the rock cools after being exposed to air, the potassium-40, as well as its eventual daughter product, is trapped. This allows us to measure the ratio of potassium-40 to argon-40 in volcanic rocks. Potassium-40 has a long half-life - more than one billion years (1.248 billion, to be exact). Since we can reliably calculate up to seven half-lives, K-Ar dating can be used to date rocks all the way back to the birth of the planet (about 4.5 billion years ago). Other elements have different half-lives and can be used to measure different materials.

Since we’re discussing dating methods, we have to talk about the one you’ve most likely heard of: carbon-14. Unfortunately, despite what you’ve been told by just about every work of fiction ever, carbon-14 cannot be used to date fossils. First of all, its half-life is too short; only 5,730 years. Seven half-lives only gets us to about 45,000 years ago, not enough time for anything earlier than the Homo lineage. The other problem with Carbon-14 and fossils is that you can only measure it in organic material. Even though fossils used to be organic, they are now stone. This absolutely does not mean that carbon-14 is useless. It’s a wonderful method for dating archaeological finds, it just doesn’t help us in human evolution.

When we do find hominin and primate fossils, we tend to date the matrix (rock material) around them instead of the fossils themselves. The reason is that isotope tests require the destruction of the material. We pulverize the sample and measure the isotopes in the resulting dust. Given how rare fossils are, we really can’t afford to go around smashing them.

This is why the dates for the famous Homo naledi fossil took so long to establish. Instead of being found in a solid rock matrix, which could easily be dated, they were found in soft sand at the bottom of a cave. We had no way of knowing if the sand was the same age as the fossils. In the end, scientists had to sacrifice three teeth to get their date. Teeth were chosen because they had so many of them.

This brings us to our other type of dating: relative dating. Relative dating uses context clues, all those things found around the fossil, to give a relative idea of how old it is. From the description alone, it doesn’t sound like much, but remember, we have a lot of contextual data to build on. Was the fossil found in the same layer as some volcanic stone? Date that stone. Were there fossils of an animal nearby? Good news: other studies have pinpointed the time when that animal went extinct, so we know that the fossil had to have been deposited before that happened. Thankfully, a massive pool of information exists that helps us cross-reference any new dates we find. It’s like a huge temporal map that we just need to fit new clues into.

Relative dating works because of stratigraphy, or the study of the layers of the Earth. Because of the way gravity works, anything that falls (dust, leaves, dying animals) ends up laying on the ground. Over time, these things are covered by more things and strata, or layers, begin to form. Necessarily, things that are newer will cover up things that are older. We call this the Law of Superposition. Some layers even cover the whole earth. The KT boundary, for example, came into being when the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs struck the Earth, creating a world-wide layer of ash and dust. Anything above it, therefore, had to have happened after that impact.

Hold on, you may be saying, I can dig a hole and voila! I’ve thwarted the whole newer-on-top-older-underneath thing. Fortunately, we can see that too. Digging a hole leaves a visible disturbance in the strata. The Law of Cross-cutting Relationships states that an event which crosses multiple layers must be newer than all of the layers it crosses. Makes sense, right? You can’t dig a hole through something that isn’t there yet. You begin your hole on the top layer and go down through time.

We can even use stratigraphy to date things like the formation of mountains. The Law of Original Horizontality states that because of gravity, all layers had to have been horizontal, or flat, at one time. You can’t get a layer built up on a cliff face. Take a formation like the Dakota Hogback in Colorado. You can look at the strata, clearly visible along the roadcut, match them up with the horizontal strata in the surrounding valley, and you know when it must have been upheaved (in this case about 50 million years ago).

What Was the Environment Like?

This type of stratigraphy is useful for more than just dating. Sediments that are good for fossilization tend to be rich in fossils. Think of the bed of a pond or the bank of a river. You don’t usually see a single animal all alone there. There may be other animals, as well as plant material, leaf litter, scat from other animals, seeds, fish, flowers, bugs, chewed bones... all sorts of detritus. Much of it has the potential to fossilize and all of it can give us clues. Does your fossil layer have lots of water-plants, big leaves, and bugs? It was most likely a warm, marshy environment. Grazing animals and grasses? Grassland. Birds, leaves, and grass? Woodland. Elementary, my dear Watson.

What Were They Like?

This is where our detection work goes from Sherlock Holmes to CSI. We obviously want to know everything we can about our ancestors, but how do we find out? Sometimes, we’re lucky and we can find artifacts. Tools, since they are designed for a purpose, are extremely helpful in determining activity. Without tools, we need to look to the bones and teeth. We can sometimes get isotopes from the bones that will tell us what the organism ate. You are what you eat in a very literal sense. This, however, poses the same problem as isotope dating does: it destroys your sample. With teeth, we can look at microwear, microscopic scratches on the enamel of teeth made by whatever you chewed last. This field of study is growing in popularity and more and more studies are being done to help narrow down what the marks made by different foods look like.

Teeth can tell us lots of other things as well. Plaque on teeth can eventually calcify into a substance called calculus, which essentially freezes microscopic bits of your food in time. Analyzing this calculus can tell us what the fossilized organism ate with a great deal of accuracy. It was by analyzing calculus that we learned that Neandertals were treating themselves with medicinal plants in the form of yarrow and chamomile . Studies of wear on teeth have suggested the use of toothpicks in the prehistoric past, as well as the use of teeth as tools for various purposes.

Combining the information gathered from isotopes, calculus, and microwear provides the best indicator of diet. The isotopes in your teeth show what you were eating in the first part of your life, while your teeth were forming. Isotopes in bones and particles in the calculus on your teeth can indicate your diet in the last four to seven years before your death, and microwear can tell us about your last meal.

Clues to behavior can often come through morphology. In primates, polygynous species (dominated by a small number of males ruling over a large group of females) show pronounced sexual dimorphism, with males being larger than females. Mixed-sex groups have less dimorphism. Large canines are usually used to display and defend dominance, so more combative species tend to have larger canines than they would need for just eating. Adding all these clues together can create a decent picture of our ancestors.

The Road To Humans

Let's look more closely at what we know so far. This is by no means an exhaustive discussion on human evolution. Rather than a deep dive, think of this more as an aerial view. We’re looking down at that braided stream that leads, eventually, to us and our cousins.

Humans are mammals in the order Primate. Primates include all monkeys, apes (including humans), tarsiers, lemurs, and lorises. All members of the primate order have large brains for our body size, fingernails instead of claws, grasping hands, and long childhoods. Primates as a group began evolving around 65 million years ago, just after the extinction of the dinosaurs. We, as mammals, were the beneficiaries of a massive change in environment. 66 million years ago the impact of an asteroid up to nine miles across caused an upheaval that darkened the sky, cooled the planet, wiped out tremendous numbers of plant and animal species, and even changed the composition of the atmosphere. Mammals, who were mostly very small in order to compete with the dinosaurs for resources and space, suddenly had the world almost all to themselves. We see an immense proliferation in diversity at this time. Mammals found new ecological niches, exploited new food resources, and adapted in all sorts of new ways. We call this phenomenon adaptive radiation.

The animals we currently believe to be the precursors to earliest primates began emerging at this time. The world would have been warm and wet, with enormous jungles full of fruits and flowers. As near as we can tell, the group that primates emerged from was what scientists call Plesiadapiforms. There are more than one hundred named species of plesiadapiform. They don’t look much like modern primates. In fact they look a bit like rodents with monkey arms, and they lack some of the major qualifiers for primate status, like nails. But, they exist at the right time, in the right habitat, and have enough similarities to be the best candidate we have at the moment for our precursor.

Around the Eocene epoch, about 55 million years ago, we see the first real primates begin to emerge. There were two main groups: the adapids and the omomyids. Adapids are called lemuriformes (they look like lemurs) and eventually evolved into the strepsirhines: lemurs, lorises, and galegos. They were diverse in size, between 3.5 oz and about 15 lbs, diurnal (active during the day), and spanned nearly the whole northern hemisphere. The omomyids are called tarsiiformes, meaning they looked a lot like modern tarsiers. They were small, with the largest one found weighing in at around 5 lbs. They were quick leapers and ate mostly insects. Their habitat spanned most of the northern hemisphere, although we aren’t sure if they lived in Africa.

The planet was cooling steadily at this point. Throughout the Eocene and into the Miocene, environments began to change drastically. As temperatures went down, rainfall began to slow and the lush forests these little primates called home began to disappear, shrinking closer and closer to the equator. The adapids died out in North America and Europe remaining only in the forests of southeast Asia where they evolved into lorises and Africa, where they evolved into galegos (you might know them better as “bush babies”) The few isolated on Madagascar evolved into the wide variety of lemurs we see today. The changes that occurred over time in adapids were mostly small, with today’s members of the strepsirrhine family looking a fair bit like their ancient ancestors.

Omomyids, which would later become the haplorhines, underwent a dramatic split. One group remained nearly unchanged. They found a niche and they stuck with it. They hopped through tropical trees eating insects just as they had always done, although they could only do it in the ever shrinking rainforests. Their descendants persist as the tarsiers in Southeast Asia. The other branch of omomyids, however, changed dramatically. This is the branch that began to evolve into monkeys around 40 million years ago.

Monkeys, even these early ones, had an evolutionary edge on their Eocene cousins and their morphologically similar descendants. They were less specifically adapted to one environment. Additionally, their brains were bigger, their skulls were sturdier, and they had a more diverse diet than their predecessors. They could inhabit a wider variety of environments and their larger brain and more flexible behavior made them less sensitive to the still cooling and changing climate. Primates had become extinct in North America by this time, but we find plenty of evidence of them in Europe and Asia.

Somewhere between 40 and 25 million years ago, monkeys split into two major groups: the New World monkeys, or platyrrhines, and the Old World monkeys, or the catarrhines. This is a classic case of geographical isolation. Somehow, a group of monkeys crossed from Africa to South America. We aren’t exactly sure how they did it. Some theories say that they “hopped” from island to island along a chain of islands that no longer exists across the modern Atlantic Ocean. Another theory is that they “rafted” across the then-smaller ocean. While this may call to mind images of Huckleberry Finn, rafting in ecological terms means something different. The coastlines of tropical forests tend to be dense snarls of interlocking trees, roots, and other plant matter, often extending far beyond the actual coast. Picture the mangrove forests in the southern United States and Southeast Asia. During a storm surge, huge masses of this “coastline” can detach. The already floating plants and trees can drift long distances across the open ocean, carrying the animals that live there with them. Once in South America, these intrepid (or possibly hapless) monkeys became their own evolutionary river fork, accumulating different mutations and adaptations than their Old World cousins. We find unique features in the platyrrhines, like prehensile tails, an extra premolar, and a tendency to give birth to twins (marmosets and tamarins).

The catarrhines continued to diversify in Asia, Africa, and Europe (remember it was still much warmer than it is today). Around 25 million years ago, we see another major fork in the river: the start of the evolution of the first apes. The difference between these early apes and the monkeys they diverged from wasn’t much. The Miocene apes were similar in size and morphology to their monkey cousins. There was one big difference though: their teeth. Monkeys have a bilophodont molar, well suited to tearing through leaves and plant material. These early apes had a Y-5 molar. It’s wider, flatter, and has more cusps, which makes it more suitable for grinding tough foods like meat and nuts. If you want a better idea of what a Y-5 molar looks like, grab a mirror and open your mouth. We inherited our teeth from those first apes.

By 20 million years ago, we see “true” apes in Africa. Apes, as opposed to monkeys, have short, stiff lower backs, larger brains, and a suspensory shoulder anatomy, which means we can rotate our arms in a complete circle and hang straight down from our hands. Apes began to spread and diversify. Between 12 and 8 million years ago, the ancestors of the gibbons and siamangs (graceful, monogamous, duet-singing apes of Southeast Asia) began appearing in what is now Europe. On the Indian subcontinent, sivapithicus gave rise to orangutans and the now-extinct gigantopithecus.

The origin of the African apes, gorillas, bonobos, chimpanzees, and eventually us, is murky. We think their ancestors, after having left Africa sometime between 20 and 12 million years ago, evolved in Europe before moving back to Africa between 12 and 10 million years ago. After the return to Africa, genetic clocks tell us that gorillas split apart about 10 million years ago and that we split from chimpanzees somewhere between 10 and 7 million years ago. What did these ancient apes look like? Unfortunately, we just don’t know. We haven’t found many fossils from that time.

Hominins

Around 7 million years ago, we begin to see the human line emerge. What makes a hominin? While there are a number of clues that can give us a hint, the real test of whether a fossil belongs in the hominin group is bipedalism. Remember, bipedalism is a unique adaptation in the primate line. Any fossil species which shows it must be related to us, because no other groups show that trait. That doesn’t mean our line is without its off-shoots, but it does mean we can accurately put that organism in the “hominin” category.

Before we take a look at the members of the hominin group, let's talk about bipedalism. Obviously, it means “walking on two legs”, but there are a whole host of physiological changes that had to happen before it was possible. The whole skeleton and a lot of the musculature had to change. Starting from the top and working down, the skull had to reorient a bit. The foramen magnum, the hole at the base of the skull through which the spinal cord passes, needed to move. In quadrupedal animals, it is positioned far toward the posterior of the skull. There is also a wide ridge of bone along the nuchal area that allows for strong neck muscles to attach. This allows the skull to be oriented forward from a spine that runs parallel to the ground. In bipedal animals, the foramen magnum moves forward toward the anterior of the skull. This allows the head to balance on the spinal column like a ball on a stick. The nuchal crest shrinks not only because those huge muscles have become unnecessary, but because they would add unnecessary weight and thus strain on the back of the skull.

The spine also had to change. Quadrupedal animals have a “c-shaped” spine that arches upwards from the ground along its length. If our spines were curved like this, we would be constantly tipping forward. This balance problem was solved by the development of the “S-shaped” spine. Instead of one long curve, our spines have three curves, which allows the weight to balance vertically.

The pelvis also changed dramatically. In quadrupeds it is long and thin, running along the back. This forms a sort of flat roof to the body and allows the weight of the organs to hang down from it. In bipeds, the pelvis is shortened and twisted. It forms a sort of wide, shallow bowl that can support the weight of the body and organs.

The legs lengthened considerably. Long legs mean a longer stride and more efficient motion.

Eventually, the arms shortened as well, although we don’t see this until much further down the evolutionary line. We just didn’t need arms that long once we were not walking on them anymore.

The feet are one of the areas that changed the most. If you look at the hands and feet of other primates, even our closest relatives, you can see how alike they look. The feet of other primates, just like their hands, have a divergent first digit for grasping branches. Their toes are long and flexible and the foot has no arch. Our toes are short and the first digit is in line with the others. Our metatarsals, the bones on the “top” of the feet, are long and straight and the bones of our ankles form an arch. This arrangement is critical for efficient bipedalism. The arch and aligned toes allow for a rolling, springing step that helps to propel us forward as we walk. This permits us to walk for long distances without expending too much energy. In our earliest bipedal ancestors, who would have had limited ranges within woodlands, we don’t find these straight, springy feet. Once we moved into open spaces and began to walk great distances in search of food however, we begin to see the change.

Now, remember that evolution is not a perfect system. No one is designing it, it is happening through random chance and multi-generational trial and error. The human back and foot are famously flawed designs. Back pain, slipped disks, fallen arches, sciatica... all these plague the human animal. None of these problems, however, lower our fitness. Unless you’re unlucky, these problems won’t affect you until later in life. Even when they do show up in young people, they generally won’t stop a person from reproducing.

The one area that does negatively affect our fitness is the pelvis. The human pelvis is not well designed for giving birth. The twisting and shortening that had to happen to get us upright created a tiny birth canal, which, when combined with our massive heads, is a distinct problem. Remember: increased difficulty giving birth means decreased fitness, and it got harder and harder as our brains (and the heads that hold them) got bigger.

So why did it happen? Well, first, our big brains didn’t happen right away. We were bipedal for millions of years before our heads started ballooning. Second, it means that the benefits of bipedalism were so great that they outweighed the drawbacks. We used to think that, as the rift valley opened, the chimpanzee line got left behind in the jungle and our line got stranded in the grassland. It was a beautiful theory: the taller posture let us see over tall grass, the long legs let us run down prey efficiently, the decreased exposure to sun (your whole back versus just your head and shoulders) allowed us to keep cool. The only problem is, that isn’t what happened. New fossil evidence shows that we evolved bipedalism in the woodlands. Not as dense as the jungle, granted, but nothing like the open savanna.

Our new theory is a more complex one. We tend to shy away from those because they aren’t as narratively convenient as a unified theory, but they are often far more accurate. Bipedalism allowed us to carry things (infants, food, tools) more easily. Longer legs allowed us to walk between trees easily. Still-long arms allowed us to climb around easily in those trees. More food and tools, wider range, and more efficient childcare all lead to an increase in fitness. By the time we moved onto the plains, we were well-suited for the transition. Greater and more sophisticated tools and their use require the brain to become more complex to keep up. Eventually, the change from four legs to two led us all the way to what we are today.

The Earliest Hominins

Between about 7 and 5 million years ago, we have found limited evidence of hominins. Two species, Sahelanthropus tchadensis and Orrorin tugenensis, appear to have been bipedal but we know little about either. The genus Ardipithecus, which lived between 5.8 and 4.4 million years ago, was definitely bipedal. This is also the genus that turned our ideas about the rift valley upside down. They lived in woodlands and have a mix of arboreal and terrestrial traits. Their pelvis seems to be mid-twist, on its way to the one we recognize as ours. They had divergent big toes and their feet had no real arch, but they were undoubtedly bipedal. They had long arms with curved fingers for grasping branches and relatively small brains.

Australopithecus is where we begin to see a creature that looks like us. Their faces would have been different, with greater prognathism and bigger teeth, and they would have been small, somewhere in the neighborhood of four feet. Their feet were nearly identical to ours. Thanks to some trace fossils, we can even see how they would have walked. At Laetoli, about 3.7 million years ago, there was a volcanic eruption that covered a swath of Tanzania with soft volcanic ash. A pair of Australopithecus afarensis walked through it, leaving footprints behind them. The prints fossilized and we can now analyze them to see exactly how their feet would have looked and how they would have moved.

The Australopithecines, which means “southern apes”, were a wide-spread and fairly diverse group. At present, we think there were around seven different species in the genus, which spanned much of Eastern and Southern Africa. They would have existed, in one form or another, between 4.2 and 1.9 million years ago and we believe them to be our direct ancestors. Scientists have a tremendous amount of information about them. Analysis of the bones of the famous Lucy fossil show that she probably died as a result of falling out of a tree. Scratch marks on the skull of the Taung child show that it was probably killed, or at least scavenged by, a large bird of prey. We even have evidence that Australopithecines used stone tools for butchering animals. The tools are not terribly refined, but they show preparation and thought. These early stone tools, called Oldowan after Olduvai Gorge, were made by taking a large rock and striking it with another to knock an edge out and create what we call a hand ax. While we know there are a number of other animals that use tools, the Australipiths were special. The crafting of these tools shows forethought, intelligence, and their creation led to the development of more complicated tools over time. In a way, these Oldowan tools are the direct ancestor to everything in your toolbox at home.

The Australopiths even had a group of cousins in the Paranthropus genus. The actual separateness of this genus is debated amongst scientists. Some believe them to be members of the Australopithecine group, while others believe they form their own unique genus. They are certainly related to the Australopiths, but they were very different in craniofacial morphology. They lived in roughly the same area, but had a different food source. We know they ate mostly nuts and tubers because they had enormous teeth. The group is sometimes nicknamed “Nutcracker man” because of their huge teeth and jaws, and the sagittal crests running front to back along their skulls, which would have allowed for the attachment of massive jaw muscles. They were bipedal and would have been approximately the same size as the Australopiths. We think that they were polygamous, in as much as that term can be applied to a species that existed millions of years ago. Females were considerably smaller than males, a trait which we find in polygynous, male dominated apes like gorillas. They would have lived between 2.5 and 1 million years ago, a time-frame which overlaps many of the Australopiths and even early Homo.

This means that, at one time, there were a great number of bipedal apes roaming the African plains. The adaptive radiation shows that this adaptation was a good one. What happened to those other guys? Well, we know the Paranthropus genus died out completely. We think they were too specially-adapted to a specific environment and food source, so, as the world continued to cool, Africa dried out, and the great ice age approached, their food source would have dwindled. The Australopiths, or at least a portion of them, evolved into the genus Homo.

Homo is a larger genus with a larger body and brain than their predecessors had. The first member of the genus we see is Homo habilis, or “handy man”, so named because they made and used tools. They would have existed between 2.4 and 1.4 million years ago. There is a long-standing debate as to whether two species that existed at this time (Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis) or just one. Regardless, we know they evolved into Homo erectus around 1.9 million years ago.

This is where our history becomes distinctly human. Homo erectus, instead of staying in the same plains and woodlands as their ancestors, left. They are the first hominins to leave Africa, and they spread over a huge swath of the world. As the Pleistocene, or Ice Age, began to set in, members of the genus Homo wandered across Africa and into Eastern Europe, East Asia, and the rainforests of Indonesia, which was one big peninsula known as Sunda. Some Homo erectus groups made new tools, known as Acheulean. Homo erectus even made art. The oldest piece of art we’ve found so far is a series of zig zags on a shell, carved by an H. erectus around 500,000 years ago.

At about 1 million years ago, our braided stream becomes a bit murky. We know there were a tremendous number of individuals in the genus Homo, but we don’t know where to draw the lines between species and subspecies. Depending on whom you ask, Homo erectus can be broken into as many as a dozen subspecies and potentially half a dozen separate species. More, if you decide to lump in species like H. luzonensis and H. floresiensis (a human species that become isolated on the island of Flores and shrank over time to a hobbit-like size). There is also Homo neanderthalensis, Homo antecessor, Homo naledi, and Homo heidelbergensis beginning to appear. Where we draw the lines is probably not so important. Well, it is if it is your job to do so, but for everyday purposes it doesn’t matter as much as the general patterns we begin to see emerging.

As stated above, we know that H. erectus made art. We know that some individuals survived long after they had lost their teeth and become disabled, meaning that their group members cared for them. They invented new tool traditions. They also migrated far beyond their native habitat into new environments. Homo naledi is suspected of burying their dead. We even see evidence of routine and possibly ritualistic cannibalism in Southern Europe. While some of these things are warmer and fuzzier than others, they are all remarkably human. Kindness, ritual, experimentation, imagination, and exploration are all traits that define our species today, and we can see the roots of them all the way back to the early Pleistocene.

When we finally begin to find evidence of Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens, we see a behavioral revolution. It’s possible that we are just finding more evidence of their behavior because we are looking at a much more recent period of Earth’s history (between 600,000 and 100,000 years ago) and it hasn’t had as long to decompose. Keep in mind that we aren’t sure that H. sapiens and Neanderthals are the only human species ever to do these things. However, beginning with these two species, we have clear evidence of fire. In Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens, we find very deliberate burials of dead group members. We see art, not just scratched on shells, but painted onto the walls of caves. We see evidence of medicine, cooking, and complex shelters. Homo sapiens even developed the atlatl for hunting, which was to hand spears what a sniper rifle is to a musket.

We know that H. sapiens interbred with Neandthals and Denisovans, a species we know almost exclusively through their DNA, as well as a species in West Africa that we know nothing about. All human beings alive today carry some DNA from these ancient cousins. We have enough Neanderthal DNA samples to know that we inherited a host of traits from these ancient hybridizations, including the gene for red hair. We’re just starting to figure out all the things we inherited from the Denisovans and the West African “ghost”.

Up until very recently, historically speaking, all these species lived right alongside us. Then, over a period of about 35,000 thousand years, they all started to disappear – except us of course. We think the Denisovans may have lived the longest, with a tentative end date for the species of about 15,000 years ago. What happened to them? We aren’t quite sure. People used to believe, long before we knew just how many other species there were and that we had interbred with them, that we had killed them all in some sort of Paleolithic genocide. That is no longer a popular theory because we just don’t have the kind of evidence we would find to show that level of violence, and, the amount of DNA we share with them does not point to a single one night stand, meaning we interbred with them regularly.

Anthropologists now think there may have been a combination of factors. True Homo sapiens evolved in Africa after the first wave of Homo erectus left. Then we migrated out of Africa a second time, which is when we came in contact with the Neanderthals and Denisovans. It’s possible that we brought diseases we had long since developed immunity to, but which struck our cousins hard. We also may have just been better at surviving. With the atlatl and the domestication of the dog, we would have been unparalleled hunters. Perhaps they just couldn’t keep up. We know enough about the physiology of Neandertals to know they were highly adapted to the cold. Perhaps as temperatures warmed at the end of the Pleistocene epoch they just went the way of Paranthropus.

What we do know is that by about 14,000 years ago, we were the last ones standing. Obviously, we’ve thrived since then. Being the last surviving member of our genus hasn’t held us back. Today we cover the entire globe and even have what amounts to a permanent outpost in space. However, everywhere you look, in our physiology, our DNA, our behavior, is evidence of our ancient ancestors. Even if they are no longer physically here, we carry traces of them, as will every generation that comes after us.

Things to consider for your fictional world:

What types of adaptations were helpful to survive in the past environments of your fictional world?

If you have a fictional species, what is their evolutionary history?

If you have fictional species, how are they adapted to their environment? How did they accumulate these adaptations?

If your characters are fossil hunters or biologists, how might they understand these sites and what methods would they use to analyze their data?

If your world has humans, are they the only species of humanoid?

Chapter 7

Honoring the Past: Why Cultures Create Myth, Imagine the Past, and What in the World It All Has To Do With Purity

“He who controls the past, controls the future, he who controls the present controls the past.” -George Orwell, 1984

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This ominous quote from George Orwell’s classic novel, 1984, resonates when you want to understand cultural interpretations of history. The quote, meant to highlight the oppressive power of a surveillance state and the results of its power to manipulate language, also serves as an entry point for our consideration of how cultures construct their history and how that relates to their identity.

Similarly, you may have heard the phrase, “history is written by the winners,” and while, to some degree, that’s true, it’s important to note that history is messy and confusing and written by a wide variety of people. It really depends on what culture you're presently sitting in, who is in power, and what values that culture relies on. Many of these factors influence both the culture as a whole and as an individual identity.

Imagined Past

Unless you have a time machine (if you do, please contact us immediately, we’d really like to speak with you), you have to use your imagination to consider the past seriously. Does that mean you can’t use facts and evidence to consider the past? Of course not, but all history ultimately lives in the imagination, and if you haven’t guessed by now, we are about to tell you imagination is bound by culture.

What does that mean for history? In many ways, history and mythology have a great deal in common. All cultures have a selective reading of history. They choose the parts they like, the things that emphasize the values and qualities they want their society to embody, and largely ignore anything that makes them look bad, or at least downplay them with comments such as, ‘it’s all in the past’ or ‘mistakes were made’.

History is an argument; a projection of the imagination that does a number of things for the life of a culture. If we examine Benedict Anderson’s book, Imagined Communities, we see that the formation of nationalism grows as a result of things like borders and boundaries (and the conflicts that surround them).

Anderson also examined the state census as a second influential way of establishing nationalism by making a count of the demographics of the population while providing information that legitimized colonial authority. Then he considered the museum, which is a powerful mechanism for making a historical argument about the legitimacy of your empire. All three of these things create imagined communities, which help foster political mythology.

Are Space and Culture the Same Thing?

In the article, Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson ask some important questions about the relationship between space and culture. Nationalism assumes that there are distinct cultural boundaries and identities within given borders. But, what about border zones? What about migrants and refugees? Can any place remain mono-cultural? Is there anywhere on the globe where we can say this culture exists here and nowhere else? And, even if that was possible 100 years ago, what are the effects of globalization?

Imagine you live on the American side of the US-Mexico border and work on the Mexican side. You have spent a majority of the waking hours of your 30-year career on the Mexican side. Many of your friends are there, some of your family live there, and your after-work adventures take you to locations on both sides of the border. Which culture are you? Where does your culture begin and end? What does this say about our notions of the relationship between culture and space?

Imagined Past and Origin Myths

Each imagined community has an imagined past, which includes an origin myth, an understanding of the things they value, and an agreed upon interpretation of past and present, as well as a common set of general expectations about the future. An imagined past is, quite simply, the culture’s interpretation of the past. It reflects the norms, values, and ideas that a culture deems important.

Case Study: The American Revolution

Mythology and the imagined past can sometimes share narratives. The origin of the United States of America is a perfect example. There are historical figures who have become a part of the national origin myth. There is a famous story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree and then confessing because he could not tell a lie (none of which ever happened). History gets mixed with legends and mythology until the two become inseparable. In school textbooks, consumer history books, and on social media, these figures are revered and discussed constantly to this very day. Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton (who now has a Broadway musical dedicated to him) are discussed as the embodiment of the qualities and values Americans hold dear. There are sacred documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. There are important events marking the birth of the nation, such as the Boston Tea Party, the Stamp Act Riots, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, and thus began “the great American experiment” of a democratic nation “of the people, by the people, and for the people”... at least, this is the story Americans are raised on: a singular, easy-to-follow narrative of the origins of a nation.

This is the mainstream American narrative, told by European colonizers. But what about the Native American perspective? For them, this was an invasion, an ethnic cleansing, and, in many cases, a genocide. Millions of Native Americans were killed or displaced as Europeans marched under the flag of manifest destiny. Instead of the history of what really happened, American schools teach children about the false narrative of pilgrims and Indians getting along, or skip over events like the Trail of Tears, the Wounded Knee Massacre or the 1973 uprising on Pine Ridge Reservation. Native American perspectives of American history are very different, and for good reason.

And what about enslaved peoples? What is the African American view of the American Revolution? Why are civil rights still an issue to this day? What about the 3/5ths clause that established that slaves only count as 3/5ths of a person in the Constitution? How does their enslavement match up against the values of the Founding Fathers, most of whom had slaves themselves? Events like Juneteenth or the Tulsa riots are either glossed over in American history classes and texts, or completely ignored.

What did the British think of these events? How did they view the American War for Independence? To them, Americans were ungrateful children at best, and militant revolutionaries at worst. In an era when the ethical practice of war was to line up your troops in brightly colored clothing and fire at one another from specified distances, Americans adopted guerilla warfare tactics. The British called the rebels cowards and accused them of behaving like snakes crawling on their bellies. To the British, the rebels were insurgents; an uprising against their empire that needed to be put down for the sake of civilization and order.

The point of this discussion is that all cultures are the heroes in their own creation narratives. However, in reality, all large-scale civilizations did some pretty awful things to form their societies.

What Is Mythology?

Often, when trying to understand something in a culture, anthropologists are less concerned with concrete definitions and more concerned with how knowledge and culture are impacted. Rather than being overly focused on a definition of mythology or religion, or the term “culture” itself, we want to understand the functions of those bodies of knowledge.

It’s important to note that, from an anthropological perspective, mythology isn’t about fact or fiction. Rather, myth is the story about the past/present/future a society shares in order to structure their culture in specific ways or to explain a variety of complex phenomena.

Imagined Past vs Mythology

Both imagined iast and mythology are repositories of knowledge. They are arenas of cultural content which individuals and cultures draw on in times of social stress, including exposure to new ideas and technology. After all, when faced with a crisis or a brand-new piece of technology, people draw on what they know in order to make sense of it. Both myth and imagined past mark who belongs in your group and who is an outsider. They define the parameters for imagined cultural boundaries and the limitations and rules society agrees upon for their status quo.

Myth, Imagined Past, and Purity

“Get your feet off the dinner table!” is a phrase you’ve likely used if you’ve spent enough time around toddlers. Toddlers are interesting creatures. They don’t understand the social norms and values that we, as adults, have come to take for granted, and they are a great place to start when talking about notions of purity. Much of what early education is concerned with is socialization, or making sure that people know how to behave in “polite society.”

Dirt, decay, pollution, taboo, grossness, filth... these are things that every culture concerns itself with. The primary purpose of culture is to organize and maintain humans in a way that allows them to persist into future generations. Across cultures, this often emerges in one of two forms: concepts of cleanliness/purty and the perceived need to maintain cultural order.

When we discuss cultural purity, you might have an image of Nazis or white supremacists, and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. The thing is though, everyone, including you reading this right now, has ideas about some things your culture should keep and some things it should do away with. What they are largely depends on your religion (or lack thereof), your political persuasion, your class status, your gender, and so on. Remember that holism thing?

The relationship between culture and the concept of purity ultimately rests on a culture's view of change and what it means. A primary goal of every culture is to persist. Notions of purity are a culture’s attempt to continue existence and to do well in the future, whatever “well” means to that culture.

In her 1966 award-winning book, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Mary Douglas investigates the relationship between cultural notions of purity and order, and the danger represented by violating those norms. Using the Hindu Vedas and the book of Leviticus in the Christian Bible, she explains how notions of purity are about maintaining cultural patterns and order. Douglas notes that much of what cultures consider pure or impure surrounds distinct identity markers. For example, some argue that the Jewish prohibition against eating pork was a rational ancient fear of the dangers of undercooked meat combined with a fear of animals living in filth. However, pigs in the wild are actually pretty clean creatures; it’s humans who give them filth to wallow in. It’s just as likely that the taboos against pork and shellfish were simply the ancient Israelites marking differences between themselves and their many oppressors (Persians, Babylonians, Egyptians) in the ancient world. The Vedas describe good marriages and standards of beauty as well as other elements that represent cultural purity and taboo.

A core element of cultural purity is the formation of in-groups and out-groups. Your in-group consists of the people within your culture or subculture, while the out-group is the people who are either outside your cultural sphere or in direct opposition to it. Notions of what is clean and what is dirty often manifest differently from culture to culture, and thus can be used to identify outsiders.

One of the easiest examples of this is the concept of ‘mudbloods’ in the Harry Potter universe. Muggles (those without magical powers), whether through intermarriage or a specific roll of the genetic dice, gave birth to magic users. A large portion of the storyline surrounds the question of the purity of the wizarding world’s kinship patterns.

Another series that highlights in-groups vs. out-groups and cultural purity is N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series about people who have tectonic magic that allows them to command earthquakes. Unlike the Harry Potter series, where the wielders of magic are presented as better than those ungifted, here, they are discriminated against and enslaved, and called “ragas” (a slur in this world). Should they let their emotions overwhelm them, they become volatile, as their uncontrolled feelings can cause tectonic shifts or volcanic eruptions. As a result, the non-magical beings in this world have labeled them “dangerous” and placed them under strictly controlled circumstances, even killing them if they deem it necessary.

In American culture, some people refer to poor white people as garbage, literally naming them “white trash”. This marks them and their behavior as a form of societal pollution; something to be eradicated, or at least looked down on. We will dive into this concept in Chapter 13 when we discuss race, why the concept of societal pollution exists, and what it means for whiteness in general.

Is Mythology Really All That Important in the Modern World?

The short answer is yes. In his Ted Talk, East vs West—The Myths that Mystify, Devdutt Pattanaik explores the relationship between business and mythology. He focuses on some of the major differences between the “one-life” culture of the European-based West, and the multi-life, reincarnation-based cultures in parts of the East. He considers the behaviors of working people and the basic assumptions made by those raised in each culture and the miscommunication they experience as a result of their different perceptions of time.

Mythology and the Status Quo

Mythology provides a culture’s blueprint for norms and the status quo in just about every arena of life. We can see this clearly when comparing the gender norms of some of the Native American tribes of the American Southwest to those found in European countries. In his article, “The Berdache Tradition,” Walter Williams examines the relationship between gender and mythology. Many Native American cultures recognize anywhere from two to five genders. Williams draws a direct line to their mythology when trying to understand and interpret these gender systems. Highlighting the Navajo creation story, which marks the birth and death of five distinct worlds that humans had to navigate, Williams highlights the characters of White Shell Woman and Tortoise Boy, both of whom fit into third and fourth genders and save humanity from death as the world around them is destroyed and remade. The narrative is similar to the Mesopotamian story in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Biblical story surrounding a great flood and a character who saves the day, Utnapishtim and Noah, respectively. Tortoise Boy and White Shell Woman play crucial roles in the Navaho creation myth, and their additional genders (known today as two-spirited male and two-spirited female), are considered vital and important within the traditional culture. Two-spirited individuals were often considered important figures who serve as mediators between other genders or political authorities. In other words, the myth system is directly related to the gender system.

Since culture is holistic, mythology impacts just about every element of society in one way or another. Of course, a great deal of conflict arises when multiple myth systems live side-by-side, even if there is a great deal of similarity among them. Notions of purity, myth and imagined past will constantly come into conflict when multiple systems overlap. Think about how much conflict exists between Muslims, Christians, and Jews, all of whom share quite a bit of mythology. In fact, Islam’s founder is a direct descendant of Abraham, who is considered the father of Judaism, and Jesus is one of the most referenced figures in the Koran.

Myth, Imagined Past, and Cultural Purity in a Fictional Setting

You may have already considered how the content of this chapter applies to your fictional world. Certainly, many great sci-fi/fantasy/horror stories focus on their own distinct mythology, imagined past, and notions of purity. Some of the best examples focus on the interplay, misunderstandings, and conflict that arise as a result of the collisions of cultures. Since great stories are always about great conflict, myth, imagined past, and concepts of purity are fertile ground to explore as you create your worlds. Whatever societies you choose to build, make sure your system is holistic and impacts every arena of society, not just a few.

Things to consider in your fictional world:

What values does your fictional culture find important?

What things are taboo? Why? How does this impact characters’ goals or ideas?

Is there a major event that changed the shape of the culture forever?

Does everyone agree on the accepted narrative of that event? (Keep in mind that if you say everyone does, you should have a compelling reason why that’s the case, because historians can’t agree on anything, and it is unlikely that a whole society can manage it.)

How does the culture’s mythology and imagined past relate to the values of the time in which the story occurs?

Chapter 8

Language, the Architect of Culture

Language is a frame; a way of thinking about our world.

If you think about it for a second, you’ll realize that much of our language contains a great deal of subtext. Even statements of fact include all kinds of social information. Embedded in things like word choice and sentence structure, language reveals our relationship to the world.

In a discussion of language and perception in her book, The Language Imperative, Suzette Haden Elgin uses the phrase, “I rode a horse,” to examine the social information contained within a single phrase. At first glance, this statement is simple and straightforward, but within it is a lot of hidden information. For example, the “I” is dominant over the “horse,” which exposes the concept of possession, or at least submission, of the horse by the “I”. If we know a little more about the culture than just this sentence, we can also know that a horse is a domesticated animal, and the relationship between the human and it is one of dominance. Elgin then translates the closest equivalent phrase of, “I rode a horse” from Navajo, offering two translations. “Animaling about with me” and “a horse and I were moving about together.” It doesn’t take a genius to understand that the English sentence compared against either of the Navaho sentences illustrate vastly different worldviews, highlighting major differences in the two cultures’ relationships with horses and that these differences in language can add up quickly across an entire culture.

This example doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the problem of translation. Language isn’t just words; it’s a repository for cultural knowledge and the boundaries and borders of perception. Every language has its own unique concepts and ideas that simply don’t translate well or are interpreted by outsiders in a way that reinforces stereotypes or misunderstandings. Mix that with bias, political will, gender, economics, religious tension, and other elements, and you get a whole stew of miscommunication and possible conflict. Remember, culture is holistic, and language definitely demonstrates this fact.

So many fictional worlds feature unique words and ideas. Some, like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings constructed entire languages. But unless you are a linguist or want to take up a new hobby, you probably aren’t going to sit down and construct a new language, nor do you need to. If building a fictional language is a sincere interest, check out the wonderful book The Art of Language Invention: From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves by David J. Peterson, the creator of Dothraki, the fictional language spoken in the Game of Thrones TV series.

This chapter explores the relationship between language and culture, and provides some tips and ideas on how incorporating just a few unique ideas or terms into a fictional world can give your reader a deeper and more immersive experience. It also explores the ways in which language creates implicit, subconscious assumptions and how that, in and of itself, prevents mutual understanding.

What Is Language?

Simply put, a language is a system of communication which derives from sounds, words, and grammar. Language as a system is an important point because it requires a significant amount of agreement. If I called a chair a chair, and you called a chair a feather, and we did this with dozens or hundreds of terms, it wouldn’t make for a very good language. The structure of the language and its component parts, such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, must also have an agreed-upon system, or else we would all just speak unstructured gibberish to one another. Language must be systematic for it to function.

Language Is a Symbol

All language is symbolic. Words aren’t the thing you are describing. They are an agreed upon symbol; a stand-in for that thing or idea. This means the words we choose are arbitrary, or rather, that there is nothing essential about the words we use. Take again, for instance, the word, “chair.” There is no inherent “chairness” about a chair that demands it be called a chair. If there was, then every one of the approximately 6,000 languages on earth would use that word, chair, to describe that thing. Language is a symbolic stand-in that allows mutual understanding within a cultural group.

Connotative vs Denotative

Language has layers, like a cake. Among these layers are denotative and connotative language. Denotative language is the direct and literal meaning of a word. If we point to an object with four wheels moving down the highway and say “car,” that’s an example of denotative language.

Connotative language consists of the thoughts, feelings, and associations you have with a word or phrase. On top of the literal definition of the word car, as a result of your culture and your experiences, hearing that word brings up whatever feelings you have about cars. Maybe you like fast cars; maybe you really love the old 80s cartoon Transformers; perhaps certain car colors have more positive meaning than others. So, when you see a car, or when your characters see a car, they have thoughts, feelings, and experiences that are triggered by the word on either a conscious or subconscious level.

In the real world, and in fictional ones, a single word can have the same denotative, literal meaning, but carry with it a different weight for different groups of people. Take, for example, the word “redskin.” To fans of the NFL team, the word can be a positive thing, but for Native Americans, the word can evoke a different meaning. The term “redskin” originated as a description of the color of the skin of Native Americans, but in a review of documents from the 18th and 19th century, we begin to see another use or connotation. In some of the periodicals from those eras, there are calls for bringing in “redskins” with prices listed; literally a call for the skins of slain people. In this instance, and others, “redskin” became a derogatory term for Native Americans that served to dehumanize them further, and the prices were the payment white Europeans would receive for bringing in the scalps taken from murdered individuals as proof of their death. This became the center of the brutal practice of hunting down and slaughtering Native Americans for money. This example clearly illustrates the way one group, who perhaps doesn’t know the history of the term because their only experience with it is associated with their football team, may have a very different interpretation of the word than a Native American, whose ancestors were the target of racism and violence.

Language vs Dialect

A dialect differs from a language in one major way: mutual intelligibility. You can understand someone who speaks a different dialect of your language, even if it’s sometimes difficult, or a few terms or phrases have to be explained. But no one would argue that English and German are the same language, even though many of their words come from the same root language. The moment you can no longer communicate with another person, it becomes a different language. Often, dialects are baby languages that, with some isolation and certain conditions, eventually “grow up” into a language in their own right.

According to Robert Delany of Long Island University, the United States has 24 major dialects. It's important to remember that a dialect and an accent are not always the same thing. There is often overlap, but an accent is just about pronunciation, while a dialect will often have its own slang, grammar, and syntax, as well as rules about proper pronunciation.

Verbal vs Non-Verbal

A verbal language is one that uses words. Written language is verbal, spoken language is verbal, and yes, sign language is also a verbal language.

Non-verbal language is the portion of communication that helps provide context and clues as to the intentions and/or emotions of the speaker.

Non-verbals come in a wide variety of forms that include gestures, clothing, facial expressions, paralanguage, space and position of the body, and concepts of time. All non-verbals provide context and communication clues to verbal language. Every language and dialect has its own rules on conversational style and rituals.

Non-verbals differ, not just across cultures, but also across dialects and even subcultures. A gesture or body position in one culture can mean something different in another. Think of Trekkies using the Vulcan gesture for “live long and prosper.” If you don't know the context, the hand sign is meaningless. When you know the context, there is a wealth of meaning behind it.

Paralanguage

Paralanguage is the contextual clues that accompany verbal language. They include tone (which changes depending on the status, rank, and gender of the person you're speaking to relative to your own), speed/cadence, hints of emotion, gasps, sighs, yawns, laughs, and other indicators of the context of verbal communication.

Have you ever had a miscommunication over text or email? Most of us have. The reason they happen so often is that textual communication lacks the element of paralanguage. If you watched the suggested video above, you saw how quickly things escalated (in a comedic way) to conflict. Because the vast majority of our communication is now textual, we’ve had to come up with a way to include paralanguage. Emojis are a huge part of this. They mimic the facial expressions that are lacking when we aren’t actually looking at our interlocutor. We even send animated gifs to mimic body motions.

We can vary the pitch and tone of our texts by altering case and punctuation. If someone types in all caps, they are yelling. Putting an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence denotes an excited upturn. Similarly, a question mark indicates an interrogative tone. We can even mimic the oscillating tones of a sarcastic sentence by alternating between upper- and lower-case letters in the same word or sentence.

Despite claims on the internet, emojis are highly unlikely to become their own language. They are paralanguage, providing context for text-based communication, and useful for revealing the thoughts and emotions behind the word choices of the user.

Sign Language Is a Verbal Language

Sign language is often thought of as an extension of spoken languages, but the truth is, people who communicate in sign language and spoken language are bilingual. Because it uses words, sign language is a verbal language. Many of the words, phrases, and adjectives we use in spoken English are not present in American Sign Language (ASL), and ASL, like any other language, has concepts that are unique and don’t translate well into English. Interestingly, despite commonalities between American English and British English, ASL has little in common with British Sign Language (BSL), and the two forms of sign language are mutually unintelligible. For example, ASL uses one-handed letters, while BSL uses two-handed letters for spelling. FSL (French Sign Language) has much more in common with ASL, since ASL was largely based on FSL.

Paralanguage in sign language includes things like the force at which someone signs, the rapidity, and sometimes repetition to stress certain things. ASL uses the body itself as a form of paralanguage in small and subtle ways that an English speaker might miss. Like with spoken languages, ASL has its own colloquialisms and dialects that vary from region to region.

The Order of Adjectives

Most of you have probably never given a second thought to the order in which you use adjectives. However, the English language has a very specific order, and if you try to change it, your sentence often sounds awkward and uncomfortable.

According to the Cambridge dictionary, the appropriate order is as follows: opinion, size, physical quality, shape, age, color, origin, material, type, purpose.

For example, a native English speaker wouldn’t say, “a yellow, large dog walked through the white, small gate.” Instead, you would say, “A large, yellow dog walked through the small, white gate.” This is one of the problems facing new speakers of a language, as different languages order their adjectives, nouns, and verbs differently. This is one of the many reasons those who translate language are called “interpreters.” They have to make thoughts expressed in one language make sense in another.

All languages have subconscious rules like this that speakers may not even consider in a conscious way. Really, do you think about which order you are going to place descriptive words in a sentence? Not likely. You just say them in the “right” order automatically. For that reason, these assumptions contain a great deal of social knowledge about what kind of information is prioritized in a culture.

Consider switching up your adjectives in a real conversation and see what response your friends, family, or coworkers have. Will they notice? Will they say anything?

Language and Power

Much of our language and culture provides a framework of subconscious assumptions that indicate power dynamics and social relationships. For example, most of us use very different vocabulary with someone who is of a higher rank or status than us than we would with our best friend. We must use more formal terminology or more polite language with our boss, our grandmother, or our professor. In Spanish, the word “you” has two major forms: tu and usted. Tu is used for informal situations, while usted is used for formal interactions. There are subconscious cultural elements that indicate status, rank, or social situation, depending on which form is used. Remember how we talked about language containing lots of social information?

We also see this with gendered language. We can actually learn a lot about gender dynamics and power relationships across genders simply by looking at the language and the words used. For example, a spinster (more commonly called a “cat lady” these days), has a lot of negative connotations. It means an old, unmarried woman. Because traditionally in much of European culture, a woman was considered of less value if she didn’t marry and have children, spinster and cat lady are insults. What about an unmarried old man? For that, we use the term bachelor, which has a very different connotation. That’s because, in that culture, an old unmarried man wasn’t considered outside the norm because men’s value was tied up in things other than family life. Once you know what you’re looking for, you can see problematic assumptions about equality and gender roles within the words themselves.

Further, some words are used more frequently for certain genders. For example, in English, we don’t often use the word “handsome” to describe a woman or “voluptuous” to describe a man. You can certainly use those terms outside the norm, but cultures create certain notions about which word usages are appropriate, and using them in different ways may seem strange or outside the linguistic concepts of purity. English speaking grandmothers will frequently say that some words aren’t “ladylike” or shouldn’t be spoken “in polite society” which illustrates the idea of linguistic purity operating on many levels.

Language Ideology and Linguistic Bias

Language ideology is the assumption that your language, your particular accent, and the words you use are the best way to communicate. Every culture has an ideal language and an ideal accent which changes over time and across regions.

Every language has concepts of good words and bad words. There are numerous words that are considered impolite and not to be used in specific social situations. However, language ideology is more about societal “rules” or assumptions about which language it considers best. Language ideology is also one of the deepest and most difficult biases to overcome, because we have the concept drilled into us from the moment we learn the language.

Consider what we think about accents. The default accent (any time something is considered default or neutral, it is a sign of power) in the United States is the midwestern accent. That’s the accent you most commonly hear on the news and in the media. But remember, the United States has 24 dialects, each with their own pronunciations. Midwestern is just one of them. Each of the other accents and dialects is viewed in a variety of ways. Consider the stereotype of the tough-guy New York accent, or the impressions some northerners have of southern accents. Northerners tend to view southern accents as inferior, and the people who speak them less intelligent. Every language large enough to have multiple dialects has its own version of these prejudices and stereotypes.

Accident or no, in the film Forrest Gump, the accent the writers choose to give Forrest definitely has a relationship with language ideology. Forrest has a low IQ and a strong southern accent. It might not be something you ever thought about before, but this is an excellent example of language ideology. Further, accents and dialects of minority populations around the world are often looked at with scorn, and their speakers assumed to be of lesser intelligence. African American Vernacular English (AAVE), previously known as Ebonics, is another great example of a distinct dialect that has all kinds of culturally loaded negative ramifications, most of which are rooted in racial discrimination. The accent or dialect someone uses has little to do with the quality of their character or their level of intelligence, but language ideology often suggests otherwise.

Language ideology can be a powerful way to bring your fictional world to life. It provides an avenue of conflict and an assumption that’s realistic while simultaneously delivering a social commentary without a lot of boring exposition. It can be used as a kind of shorthand to illustrate how a culture sees some of its members or outsiders while adding a dash of realism to your world.

Linguistic Relativity or the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis

In 1929, Edward Sapir published an article titled “The Status of Linguistics as a Science”, positing something that would later be known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

In this article, Sapir said, “Language is a guide to social reality... It powerfully conditions all of our thinking about social problems and processes. Human beings do not live in an objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of a particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.”

He argues that our language influences our thinking and that ultimately, we cannot think about things outside the language we are indoctrinated in during our formative years. Further, and more famously, he says: “The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group... The world in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.”

It boils down to the idea that a different language equates to a different reality altogether. After Sapir died in 1940, his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf, took this idea and created what we now call the “hard version” of Sapir-Whorf, which says you cannot escape the boundaries of your perception as they are created by your first and primary language.

This was, and is, a controversial statement for obvious reasons. If your language leaves you stuck in one perception, what about bilingual people who are raised with multiple languages simultaneously? In order to accommodate these issues, the “soft version” of Sapir-Whorf was introduced. As its name implies, it’s less cut and dried, theorizing that our language impacts our perception. This remains controversial because it still suggests that language itself places significant limits on us as humans.

Famously, the 2016 sci-fi film Arrival, based on the short story, “The Story of your Life” by Ted Chiang, plays with the relationship between the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the perceptions of time and space. We won’t spoil the ending, but let’s just say perception and language are a central theme in the story and the film.

At its core, Sapir-Whorf stems from the idea that different cultures naturally develop different priorities as well as concepts that don’t translate well into other languages. What kind of conflict or misunderstanding could you use this to create in your fictional world?

Idioms

Idioms are a great example of how cultural bodies of knowledge differ across groups and just how obscure language can be to an outsider. An idiom is a phrase or saying, the meaning of which can’t be deduced from a literal translation. In order to “get it” you have to understand the cultural background of the phrase.

Examples of Idioms in English:

Phrase: Kill two birds with one stone | Meaning: Able to do two things with one effort
Break a leg | Good luck!
Back to the drawing board | A need to start over
Missed the boat | It’s too late
Pull someone’s leg | To joke with someone
Speak of the devil | The person you were just speaking of appeared
A perfect storm | The worst possible situation
Bite off more than you can chew | Starting something you don’t have the time to finish
Don’t count your chickens before they hatch | Don’t count on something until it’s happened
Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater | Don’t get rid of everything

Some idioms have taken on different meanings over time. “Blood is thicker than water” and “Jack of all trades” are two examples. At this point in history, we think that “blood is thicker than water” refers to the idea that family is more important than any other relationship. However, that understanding is based on an abbreviation. The full phrase is “the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb”. Clearly, that means something different; in fact, the opposite of the current meaning.

It’s the same with the phrase, “Jack of all trades and master of none,” which seems to suggest that being a person with a little knowledge of many things is worse than being an expert in one. Again, it’s a partial phrase. “Jack of all trades, master of none, but better than a master of one.” Again, the current meaning is the opposite of the original as that more closely reflects the cultural perception and values of today. Language is like this. You can’t stop it from changing, and you can’t force speakers to change their language (at least not easily). Language, like culture, is a living thing that, at least on some level, structures the way we think about, encounter, and move through the world.

Want to check out some idioms from other cultures? What does it mean when a German speaker tells you, “you have tomatoes on your eyes? How about if a Polish speaker asks, “did you fall from a Christmas tree?” Or how about when a Thai speaker says, “One afternoon in your next reincarnation”?

What About Language in Fictional Worlds?

If your world is far removed from the present and the culture you were raised in, you should at least consider using a few unique terms and ideas. You may also consider how gestures have changed or how jargon and technology will impact your characters’ perceptions.

In the sci-fi series The Chronicles of the Great Migration, the names of some of the major cities are altered because the book takes place far in the future. The island of Manhattan is the giant walking city of Manhatsten. Los Angeles is Langeles and London is Lundon. These changes are meant to reflect the natural changes a language goes through over time. Small changes, mixed with the vocabulary of some of your world's unique goods or items, can not only help your readers immerse themselves in your world, but can also help you craft a different perception of the world through your characters.

It’s important to consider that our world doesn’t have just one language; it has somewhere around 6,000, plus thousands of dialects. It would be unreasonable for a fictional world to have only one language, unless you had a very specific reason (like social commentary). Remember, culture is holistic. If your fictional world has only one language, there will be implications across the entire cultural sphere.

All great stories are about conflict. Language and perception are excellent places to consider how people are different and why they might come into conflict.

Things to consider in your fictional world:

What things does your culture prioritize in terms of language and perception? (Remember it should relate to their physical and social environment)

What body language is different?

Is their written language? If so, how is it different from spoken language?

What language/accent are considered neutral, the thing from which all others are compared to?

How does paralanguage tie in to your fictional culture?

What new kinds of language had to be invented for your fictional world and what weight do they have in the cultural body of knowledge? Technology? Magic? Other planets? Creatures?

What idioms exist in your fictional world?

Chapter 9

The Things We Make and the Things We Leave Behind

Every culture makes things. We make things to shelter us, to help us, to amuse us. Although cultures will follow overall patterns (like cultures that live near water will invent tools for fishing), the specific items we make are unique to our cultural time and place. Because our objects are products of our context, looking at the objects themselves can be a great way to understand how a culture works. For living cultures, we can always just ask people what an object is and what its significance is. For vanished cultures, however, this won’t work. In these cases, we have to turn to archaeology.

Most people are confused about what archaeology is. They’ve seen Indiana Jones or The Mummy and have visions of swashbuckling treasure hunters gallivanting around the world collecting magic tokens. That image is actually not so far off from early archaeology, when museums would send (largely untrained) people off into the world to loot whatever trinkets they could find to lure paying customers into their museum. Giovanni Belzoni, considered one of the pioneers of early archaeology, seems to have been ripped straight from the pages of a pulp novel. Born in Padua, he worked in a number of professions before fleeing to England to avoid prison. Once there, he worked as a circus strongman, then knocked around Egypt for a while. He once tried to sell an irrigation machine of his own design to Muhammed Ali of Egypt and the Sudan, and finally ended up working for the British consul where his first job was to dismantle and ship the great bust of Ramesses II to England. He did it, using an army of men to move the 7-ton monument, which is still on display at the British Museum.

This began a long and storied career for Belzoni and shaped the way archaeology would be practiced for decades. While the lives of these early archaeologists, Belzoni in particular, make for amazing reading, they should in no way be considered models for how to do archaeology. Belzoni and archaeologists of his ilk looted uncountable treasures from around the world. They blasted through doors, knocked down walls, stole, sold, and generally rampaged around the world, taking everything they thought would fetch a price. They were much more akin to pirates than what we would recognize as archaeologists.

The fundamental difference between early and modern archaeology is the goal. Early archaeologists were after artifacts. They were essentially treasure hunters. Modern archaeologists are after information; we use artifacts to help us get it. Knowledge is the key, not the price a thing can fetch us. One of our archeology colleagues has a saying, “it’s not what you find, but what you find out.” This reflects the heart of modern archeology.

Modern archaeology is essentially the study of past cultures. The goal is not fundamentally dissimilar to cultural anthropology, although the methods are necessarily altered. We want to know how people lived, what they thought, what they ate, how they dressed... basically, everything about them. Instead of gaining this knowledge through interviews, we seek to build a picture of people who are long gone by examining the things they left behind.

The difference between archaeology and historiography is in the material we use. Historians use documents; any accounts written by people about the world in which they lived. History actually only covers the bits of the human past encompassed by the written word. Archaeologists use objects; all the material evidence left behind. Historians and archaeologists often work together, building upon and corroborating one another’s evidence to help build a complete picture of the human past. An example of this collaboration exists in the subfield of garbage archaeology. Garbage archaeologists are what we call historical archeologists. They study sites of more recent vintage than typical archeologists, including landfills, which they drill into using ice core technology to see what the different layers are made of. They take 100- or 200-year-old materials they find and compare them with the historical record we already have, thus verifying or altering the history of that time as we know it.

Start With the Basics

Before we really jump in, we should clarify a few things. First, this is not intended as a handbook on archaeology. The technical details of excavation and fieldwork won’t be covered here. Instead, our intention is to help you understand the archaeological record and how it relates to modern behaviors and modern life.

Second, you need to know that the archaeological record is incomplete. It will never be complete. We are searching for clues across a vast gulf of time and the whole surface of the globe. And what we find is not everything there is. There are gaps in the record caused by decomposition, damage done by those early archaeologists, and by the fact that there is still more to find. We must also remember that volume does not equal importance. Objects that we make and discard the most frequently are not necessarily the most culturally important. Imagine how many BIC lighters and plastic tampon applicators archaeologists in the future will find. It might be easy to assume they hold some great cultural significance because we produced so many of them, but in reality, they held very little importance beyond their immediate usefulness.

Third, we need to clarify how we talk about the past. The dates we assign to objects can often be confusing, so let’s begin there. There are a number of ways to discuss how old an object is. First, we can say how many years old it is. This means the actual number of years backward from the current moment to the moment it was made. That one is easy. If an object is 2000 years old, it was made 2000 years ago.

If we say the object is from a calendrical date, say 2000 BCE, we are placing it on a timeline. You’ve probably heard of “BC” and “AD”. “BC” means “Before Christ” and “AD” means “Anno domini'' or “the year of our lord.” These dates, obviously, reflect the most important date in the historical Christian calendar. Over time, the way these dates are discussed has changed. We haven’t changed the dates themselves, but we have renamed them. BC has become “BCE '' or “Before Common Era” and AD has become “CE,” or “Common Era”. We count up in CE and down in BCE, so the last year of BCE is year one, as is the first year of CE. I know it’s a bit confusing, but we do it because the past extends almost infinitely back (at present, we think about 4.4 billion years) and the future extends infinitely forward. So, if something is dated to 2000 BCE, and we are presently in the year 20-something CE, that means the object is slightly more than 4,000 years old.

The other slightly confusing date scale is years “Before Present” or “BP”. You might naturally assume that “present” means the current moment, but it doesn’t. It actually means 1950, the year radiographic dating was invented (see Chapter 6 for more information on radiographic dating). So, if an object is dated at 1,000 years BP you need to add the number of years since 1950 in order to know how many years old the object really is.

Reconstructing Material Culture

Objects are an essential part of any culture. From tools to clothes to sacred objects, things help shape and interact with the world around us. Material culture is built up of everything we create, alter, or interact with. In archaeology, anything made or modified by humans is an artifact. Differentiating between an artifact and something natural can sometimes be difficult. Beavers, for instance, gnaw through wood in ways that can look similar to stone axes. Stones broken by natural processes can look similar to the debitage left behind by stone tool production. Experimentation is often required to determine the differences between these natural and human forces. A careful analysis of the marks, or kerfs, left behind by various tools on materials can help us to determine if they are manmade or natural.

Once we have determined that something is, in fact, an artifact, we must determine what it was used for. There are myriad ways we can do this. Often, it can be a simple matter. Tools, being designed for a specific purpose, often follow a specific form. There are only so many ways you can design a hammer, for instance. Tools found at Neandertal sites in France are nearly identical to modern leather working tools. Tools for fibrework or weaving look similar no matter where in the world you find them. Archaeologists will often seek out modern craftspeople to help identify tools found at archaeological sites.

If this doesn’t illuminate matters, trace element analysis can be done. Stone tools have been found to have microscopic bits of plant or animal tissue clinging to them; remnants of the last thing they were used to cut. Microwear patterns, just like those done on fossil teeth, can also reveal what a tool was used for. Digging sticks will have different wear patterns than wooden spears which have stabbed through muscle or hit bone.

Ethnography is vital to understand the use and manufacture of ancient tools. Cultures create tools to manipulate the world around them. Cultures living in similar environments or with similar production strategies will naturally produce similar tools. Looking at modern groups in similar circumstances can enlighten us as to what a tool might have been used for. Groups that are descended from ancient peoples may even still use similar ceremonial and practical objects, or have lore that discusses such objects. Archaeologists ignore ethnography at their own peril and sometimes embarrassment. It’s important to ask cultures for their interpretations of materials as they may provide valuable insight or clues to understand the object or features.

The Creation of Our Material Culture

Usually, the things we use to craft our material culture come from the surrounding environment. They include materials we can raise, mine, or scavenge. While the basic forms of the tools may be similar, the materials used will be different depending on the environment. We often think of arrowheads as being made of flint. This idea is so prevalent that we even call the process of making stone tools “flintknapping,” regardless of the actual material being used. The reason we think this, and why the process is named after flint, is because it is the best and most widely available stone for tools in much of Europe, specifically Great Britain. The British anthropologists and antiquarians who first studied such points named the technique after the material they saw most. In Colorado and much of the southwestern United States, however, flint is rare. There, arrowheads are often made of quartz or even petrified wood, both of which are abundant near the Four Corners region, and flake easily. Other areas use chert, obsidian, or jasper.

Wood is an abundant material in much of the world. It’s easy to work with and shape, so humans tend to use it frequently. It can be used to make axe blades and hammer handles, a technique that we still see in many areas of the world. The problem with wood, from an archaeological perspective, is that it decomposes much more rapidly than stone or other inorganic materials.

Fiber is a vital element in creating things like clothing, fishing lines, cords, and all sorts of other things. It can be made from animals or plants. Fibrous plants are often dried and pounded until they are soft and pliable enough to be worked into either cords or cloths. Papyrus is a famous, although now extinct, example. It was stripped and pounded flat to create paper. Flax (used to make linen), cotton, hemp, and jute are some of the most common plants used to create fibers, although jute is less desirable for cloth as it is extremely tough and abrasive. Bamboo has become an extremely popular material for making cloth.

Animals can be utilized to make fiber as well. Many animals, like sheep, alpacas, and even rabbits (angora), have wool coats that can be harvested and spun into fiber for cloth or cord. Wool has the added benefit of being water resistant and insulative, something most plant fibers cannot offer. The hides and tendons of animals are also suitable for making cords and clothes, although the tough nature of tendon makes it most suitable for sewing leather or making fishing lines. In some cases, insects can even be used. Humans have used the material silkworms create to form their cocoons for centuries to make cloth. Naturally, the materials used depend on the materials native to, or brought to, the area in question.

Humans have extracted inorganic material from the earth for millennia. Many of the stones used for small tools, like arrow- or spear-heads, can be collected from the ground, but any larger stones, metals, or the clay used to make pottery must be mined to a greater or lesser degree. The world’s oldest known mine dates to approximately 42,000 years ago. Found in Swaziland, it was used to mine hematite and red ochre (a pigment used in art and personal decoration). Large rocks for construction are often quarried and brought to building sites, rather than the structures being built where the materials are located. Metal ores are mined and then smelted to separate the metal, which is what we use, from the slag, which is a stony waste byproduct of smelting. The fact that Stone Age people had thriving mines and quarries often baffles people in the modern world, who cannot imagine mining without the industrial drills and machinery of today. In fact, stone tools are more effective than most non-alloyed metals at mining and stone carving, as they are much harder. Hard, rough hammerstones are used to grind and chip away softer stone. This is the technique used on the vast majority of ancient stone monuments worldwide and can be used to create lines so exact, they often seem unreal. The stones at many Inca sites in Peru and Bolivia, for example, fit together so precisely that it’s impossible to slip a credit card between the massive blocks. No mortar was used; the stones were just worked with hammerstones to fit together perfectly.

If we find artifacts made from materials that do not occur in the surrounding environment, we know that trade must have occurred. Trade in the ancient world occurred much as it does now. Materials were traded by sea and overland, often along extremely well-used trade routes. While most trade occurred within a fairly small area, transcontinental trade took place in both hemispheres, with North and South America trading widely with one another while all the continents of the Eastern hemisphere traded with each other. Early archaeologists often discounted the idea of seafaring trade, believing that ancient peoples would have been afraid to get out of sight of the coastline. This has been disproven, as trade routes over open ocean have been found worldwide.

The Making of an Archaeological Site

The manufacture, use, and disposal of artifacts by humans is the basis of archaeological sites. Everything we create or alter has the potential to become a part of the archaeological record. Humans, obviously, have to make something before it can become archaeological, but our interaction with an object often affects how long it lasts and how well it is preserved.

We alter things so they will last during our lifetimes: we waterproof roofs and clothes: we fire clay to make it durable: we alloy metals to make them stronger. Even weaving wool into cloth makes it denser and less likely to decompose. We deliberately bury objects and remains. We create weatherproof shelters to house ourselves and our things, and we dry things to preserve them. These processes are fundamental to the creation of what will eventually become the archaeological record.

It’s often difficult, however, to picture the transition from creation to discovery. Sitting in your house or school reading this text, it might be hard to imagine that everything around you will someday be part of the archaeological record. So, how do we go from a living place to an archaeological site? What will survive and what won’t?

All the answers begin with abandonment. Humans abandon things for a variety of reasons. Consider how many things you abandon as a matter of course. Perhaps a mine stops producing and the settlement around it is abandoned. Perhaps a religion changes and the old houses of worship are abandoned in favor of new ones. Perhaps a house burns down and the family relocates instead of rebuilding. A cellar floods and is just boarded up instead of being cleaned. Even the act of throwing away trash is a form of abandonment. The object has been discarded and is now left to the elements. Everything that happens to an object (even a dead human or animal) after it has been deposited by humans is part of a process called taphonomy.

Once something is abandoned, the forces of the natural world begin to act on it. The level of destruction that occurs over time depends greatly on what the material is and what manner of environment it is left in. Organic materials, particularly animal material (humans are included in this category), are broken down by bacteria and other organisms such as scavengers, insects, and fungi. All these things eat the dead tissues; they even eat the bones if given long enough. Plant materials such as wood and fiber have similar fates, although often slightly different decomposers are at work. Bone and wood have the potential to survive well, since there are fewer decomposers that actively eat them, although sun, wind, and freezing/thawing can break them down quickly.

Inorganic material like metal, pottery, stone, and glass has the potential to survive an extremely long time if protected from certain forces. They are broken down by mechanical forces such as being stepped on, falling, or the mechanical wearing of wind or water. If you’ve ever seen beach glass, you know just how powerful water can be on even so durable a material. Stones, even very large stones, are susceptible to wind and water wearing them down over time.

Whole structures are prey to these forces, even if left completely alone by humans. Shifting in the ground can cause walls to crack and topple, the growth of plants in gaps between stones can force them apart, and the breakdown of wooden beams can cause walls and roofs to collapse.

Metals are most often broken down by chemical processes. Most metals will oxidize if given enough time. Oxidizing is the process by which metals are pulled apart on the molecular level by exposure to oxygen. Rust is an example, as is the tarnish on silver dishes, or the bright blue-green color found on copper.

Every material has an environment in which it survives particularly well. Most metals, for instance, survive well in water, which is why we can recover metal coins and statues from very ancient shipwrecks and why the metal frame of the Titanic is still intact. Organic material survives well in dry, cold, or airless environments, which slow or prohibit the growth of the bacteria and insects that would normally break them down. Deserts, mountains, and caves are all excellent places to find mummies, usually with their organic clothing intact.

Obviously, the event which caused the abandonment of a site will have an impact on what survives. A fire sweeping through a structure will destroy all or most flammable objects, but leave stone and other inorganic material relatively untouched. Flooding tends to scatter objects and bury them in mud, which, while it can break them apart, tends to preserve objects. In rare cases, a site can be preserved instantaneously, like the cases of the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, where a catastrophic volcanic eruption buried them in a matter of hours. With both mud and ash, impressions can be left behind even after an object has decomposed, allowing archaeologists to make a cast of the negative space and thus recreate the objects. You can see this technique clearly with the bodies left behind at Pompeii.

The Human Effect

Humans almost always find interacting with archaeological sites irresistible. While there are cases of abandoned cities lost to the jungle or the desert, most archaeological sites tend to be near human cities. This makes sense because there are patterns to human occupation that have been followed since the dawn of agriculture. Humans tend to settle along rivers or lakes for access to fresh water, along coasts for the food and mobility they provide, and in valleys which offer rich soil for agriculture. Only in cases of a dramatic environmental change, like a river changing course or a fertile area becoming a desert, do humans abandon settlements wholesale. And even then, the nearby humans will continue to interact with the site. Perhaps stealing stones and timbers from abandoned castles to help build new houses, or borrowing a wall or a cellar to save the time and effort it would take to build a new one. Often, humans knock something down to build something new in its place. In this way, most long-standing human settlements become vertical maps of their own pasts.

In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, he is fond of saying that Ankh-Morpork, the largest city on the Disc, is “built on Ankh-Morpork.” His characters frequently go on long, subterranean adventures through cellars and walled-up rooms. To North Americans, this is almost incomprehensible, as the vast majority of our settlements are new and were intentionally built in areas free from previous inhabitation. People living along the East Coast may have the closest understanding, since those towns have existed in their current form for longer, but they don’t compare to cities that have stood for millennia. Cities like Cusco, Damascus, London, and Beijing have had people living and building on top of old sites for thousands of years. You can travel down through cellars in Damascus that will take you back to the dawn of the written word. Edinburgh, Scotland, was fond of using its existing buildings as supports for whole new streets. You can still tour Mary King’s Close, an entire block that was roofed over and eventually walled up to create a foundation for the Edinburgh City Chambers in 1879. Other closes (alleys) remain open in places but have houses built across them.

Humans can also preserve or reconstruct sites. Reconstruction is a controversial topic, as it involves the alteration of the site as it is, and the results may not be historically accurate. During the Victorian era, Britons, mostly the English, launched a campaign to restore Scottish castles. However, instead of following historical records, they created based on their ideas of how castles should look, turning the hulking defensive strongholds into graceful fairytale structures. Look at the castle in Brave vs Hogwarts and you’ll get the idea.

Often, site preservation is done without reconstruction. This involves the shoring of walls, building of protective structures, and establishment of security to keep unwise tourists and looters away. The idea behind this kind of preservation is that it honors the complete history of the site, taphonomy included, and does not seek to improve, restore, or erase anything.

The Importance of Archaeology

Archaeology is important because our past has meaning and it impacts us in numerous ways. There is obviously benefit to knowing world history, as it helps us put our own lives and culture in perspective, but it also has a deeply personal significance to the descendants of ancient peoples. Cultural heritage and indigenous archaeology have become buzzwords of late, but their importance cannot be overstated. Early archaeology, like so many structures that persist in the modern world, was an extension of colonialism. It sought to loot and whitewash world history, drawing conclusions like "the pyramids were built by aliens" or that a "vanished race" of Europeans built the mounds at Cahokia, because it couldn't fathom anyone but Europeans having a monumental history.

Indigenous archaeology seeks to return history to its original owners. It gives people a stake in their own past and a say in what happens to their own cultural resources. It also allows for a more intimate (and accurate) interpretation of the facts. Outsiders who come from different cultural and historical contexts are bound to misconstrue evidence or interpret it through their own cultural lens. People from a more similar cultural and ideological background are far less likely to do so.

The push to decolonize archaeology also seeks to return items and remains to the people from which they were stolen. This has been a problem in archaeology for generations, with notable human specimens stolen and kept for “research” or as curiosities and artifacts looted for profit. Legislation in the US and elsewhere has sought to rectify some of these misdeeds, but they will continue to happen as long as archaeologists maintain a mindset like that of Giovanni Belzoni. Many archaeological organizations, universities, and museums flatly refuse to acknowledge the fact that any of their artifacts were stolen, thus continuing to deny the rights of the people from whom they were taken.

The only real solution is to ensure that indigenous populations have a real say in archaeological proceedings. This will ensure not only the fair treatment of people's heritage, but lead to a more accurate, complete, and holistic archaeological record. This can only benefit mankind as a whole.

Things to consider for your fictional world:

What are the local resources available for production of material goods?

How might your culture interpret (or misinterpret) ancient artifacts from a culture that came before and how might this contribute to their imagined past?

What kinds of objects and materials are considered sacred? Forbidden? Why?

What kinds of things will be left behind if your culture disappears (a lot of plastics in our world for example) and what might future cultures think about them?

Chapter 10

Bring Out Your Dead! Disease, Populations, and Medicine

Health, medicine, and disease are fundamental parts of our human experience. We often don’t think about them unless something goes wrong; until our own health takes a turn for the worse or an epidemic threatens us. Health and disease were brought to the forefront of the minds of much of the world population during the COVID-19 pandemic in a way that many had not experienced before. Most people take their healthcare systems for granted and think of disease, contagious or otherwise, as a sort of aberration. The truth, however, is that humanity is always coping with disease and we have been since the dawn of time. We are locked in a constant war with it and we wage counterattacks and defensive campaigns that are both cultural and biological. It’s a battle waged on all fronts, physiological, psychological, and spiritual. Ill health can come from any quarter, including our own DNA.

We often don’t even realize how much of our lives and cultures are constructed around healthcare. While healthcare does include the massive hospitals and pharmaceutical super infrastructures associated with biomedicine (the system of medicine concerned with the application of scientific principles of biology and biochemistry), it also includes daily practices like cleaning, prayer, and diet. According to the World Health Organization, health is “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. This makes it not only a broader concept than most people tend to think, but also complicated to attain. “Health” takes mental and social factors into account as well as physical ones. Because of this broad range, health, as well as the study of it, is best approached holistically. Thankfully, anthropology is good at holism.

At this point we have to distinguish between disease and illness. A disease is a discrete, biological entity that is causing a disorder within the body. Something along the lines of a virus, bacteria, or even tumors. An illness is a person’s or peoples’ experience of ill health. It is the psychological and cultural construction of symptoms. Illness, then, can include things like spirit possession, soul loss, or witchcraft as well as things like flu, arthritis, and cancer.

The concepts of disease and illness do not have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, we need to look at both of them to get a holistic understanding of healthcare patterns. A person experiencing demonic possession, an illness, is also experiencing symptoms of both disease, generally severe anxiety or psychosis.

Anthropologists break down healthcare into three broad categories, epidemiology, meaning, and critical access, in order to gain a complete understanding of cultural wellness.

Epidemiology and Cultural Ecology

Epidemiology is the study of the spread of disease. When we talk about epidemiology, most people think of the spread of physical disease; how the common cold spreads through an elementary school or how malaria spikes after flooding. Conditions that are not traditionally contagious, like depression or malnutrition, can also be studied epidemiologically. The effect that cultures have on disease and illness is also of critical importance in understanding how they spread.

The study of this cultural environment is known as cultural ecology, and it can have a dramatic effect on disease. Let’s start with some easier case studies first. The transmission and course of a viral infection is relatively easy to track and predict, at least in a perfect system. Viruses are a discrete physical entity, in this case a little package of DNA or RNA, with distinct carriers, modes of transmission, and predictable effects on the human body. This makes them a good candidate for an epidemiological discussion.

The Ebola outbreak in 2014 is a now classic example of cultural ecology affecting epidemiology. Ebola is a virus that spreads through contact with blood, bodily fluids, and the meat of infected animals. This should theoretically make it easy to combat, compared to viruses like coronavirus and rhinovirus, which can be spread through the air on droplets from the lungs. However, once it began spreading through West Africa in 2014, Ebola reached epidemic proportions in a frighteningly short amount of time. After a single patient contracted the disease in December of 2013, it began spreading, and officially reached outbreak levels in January of 2014. It then spread like wildfire throughout Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. When the epidemic was officially declared over in 2016, more than 11,000 people had died; that’s around seven times more people than had been recorded dying of Ebola ever.

Why this terrible spread? Why didn’t it reach epidemic levels in Europe and North America even after it made its way there? The answer lies in the culture of the area most heavily affected. First, many people in that area live in small homes with many family members. When one family member is sick, others care for them, exposing themselves to the virus. Women were particularly vulnerable to the virus because they were expected to care for the sick.

Second, many cultures in West Africa share similar funeral traditions. When a person dies, their body is washed and dressed for the funeral by their mourning family. The funeral itself can act as a super spreader event. The body is laid out for viewing and mourners will lay hands on the body, rest their heads on it, and even kiss the deceased person’s head and face. This provides an opening for the virus to jump to a new host, since it remains contagious after death. This made the disease spread rapidly through families and communities, picking up steam as the death tolls initially climbed.

There were other factors complicating the spread of this particular epidemic that had been absent in previous Ebola outbreaks. Travel between the three countries, as well as between their crowded capitals and their more rural districts, is easier and more frequent than it has been in the past. Commuters, mourners, and tradesmen were carrying the virus to new populations faster than responders could track their movements.

The sale and distribution of bushmeat has also grown in recent decades. Bushmeat is the meat of African wild animals, including primates. Our nearest relatives can also contract the virus, and eating their infected meat exposes the diner to Ebola. So, what should have been an isolated, if tragic, event became an international epidemic owing to this combination of old traditions and modern commerce.

Now think of North America and Europe. The virus was carried to these places by responders heading home, which caused secondary infections, but it didn’t spread in the same way. Think of the process of sickness and death in these places. A person who is violently ill is most often hospitalized; certainly, the people affected by Ebola were. The only people likely to come in contact with their bodily fluids were people sharing the same home, assuming they were sufficiently intimate, and their caretakers at the hospital, who were using approved methods to prevent the spread of any biohazards. After death, the body would either be cremated or embalmed. Even in places where touching of the body is likely to happen at the funeral, the embalming process dramatically reduces the likelihood of transmission. The potential pool of victims was reduced at every step of the disease process.

The spread of the novel coronavirus in 2020 provides another great example of how culture and social structure can affect the transmission of disease. Once it was determined how the virus spread, in this case through the spread of droplets from the lungs of infected people, precautions could be put in place. These generally included wearing masks or facial coverings, putting physical distance between people, and avoiding large gatherings. Some countries did this admirably. New Zealand, which was aided by the fact it is an island and can easily control the movements of populations, implemented strict quarantines early in the outbreak. Wages were still paid to people who could not work remotely (bolstered by government subsidies) and public life effectively ceased for seven weeks. The country was able to come out of lockdown one hundred and three days after the first identified case and remained one of the least affected countries throughout 2020, with less than fifty cases in the whole month of December.

The United States, on the other hand, was the worst affected country during the pandemic. No country-wide lockdown was issued, leaving states, counties, and cities to implement their own measures. While airline travel dipped initially during the early parts of the outbreak, it surged again as regional lockdowns were lifted. Regional lockdowns themselves were limited by a lack of financial support for displaced workers, forcing restaurants and businesses to remain open for the duration. There was also no country-wide mask mandate, and people were left to choose whether or not they wanted to wear masks. Vast numbers of people decided against wearing them, as many Americans did not feel comfortable wearing facial coverings. This focus on individual choice over public good, something that can be found throughout American culture, created a hotbed for the virus. The total number of cases for the country in 2020 was over seventeen million, with 1.4 million cases in the first week of December alone.

Ecology and Evolution

We think of evolution as being a long, slow process. In animals like us, which have generations spanning about 15 to 30 years, this is absolutely true. But in microbes, which can produce hundreds of thousands of copies of themselves in a matter of days, this timeline doesn’t apply. They can adapt and evolve in the course of months or years. Evolutionary biologist Richard Lenskey has shown this in bacteria with his study of E. coli. His experiment began in 1988 and continued until the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 when he put his specimens in storage. In that time, Lensky documented 73,500 generations of bacteria, some of which mutated and adapted in significant ways, including developing the ability to consume citrus (something that usually kills E. coli).

Human behavior is always tweaking the evolutionary course of our diseases, which are super adaptive to begin with. Consider the flu. Usually, the flu is under evolutionary pressure to be a little less virulent; if it’s not very severe, people will let their fear of shots keep them from getting the flu vaccine and soldier on to work when they do catch it. This keeps the environment for the virus large, with plenty of new hosts as each person brings it into the office or to family dinner. If it gets too severe, people stay home or are hospitalized. The more severe strain of the virus is isolated and dies in the host without spreading very far.

In 1918, this selection pressure reversed. Picture the world environment at the time: the first World War has pulled millions of young people from their homes and stranded most of them in trenches in Europe. Those that weren’t stuck below ground level were moving consistently, getting supplies, personnel, and intelligence all over the world. Now, enter influenza. We don’t actually know where it started, but we know that it was a mutated strain of swine flu. It was common at the time for military installations to be either set up on commandeered farms or to have small farms on their premises, and a good majority of those farms had pigs. Historians believe it started somewhere behind allied lines, either in western Europe or North America.

It spread so fast because of the mass transit of personnel, jumping borders faster than it ever had. The more virulent strains actually had an advantage over their weaker counterparts. Whereas soldiers and civilians that were just a little sick would be left in place, surrounded by a fairly static population for the virus to infect, those who were dangerously ill were evacuated to hospitals. The hospitals of the time did not look like those today. Instead of a closed room, people sick with the flu were placed in huge, open wards with dozens or hundreds of other patients, rapidly infecting huge numbers. Many patients were then further dispersed on hospital ships or trains to be sent home, bringing the virus with them.

These circumstances allowed this particularly dangerous flu to decimate the populations in and around the military and grow more deadly as it did so. People moving through these hospitals and military hubs then picked up this hyper-deadly strain and carried it all over the world. Civilians interacting with them caught it and brought it into towns far from the battlefield. By the end of the pandemic, it is estimated that 50 million people had died.

Illness and Culture Bound Syndromes

But what about the epidemiology of illness? Can you still track something with no physical cause? You can, and the results can often tell you more about a culture than a physical disease could. Sometimes we find an illness that has no connection to any known contagious disease and is purely based in a culture’s ideas and traditions. When this happens, we call it a culture bound syndrome.

An example of a culture bound syndrome is spirit possession in Malaysia. As a broad category, spirit possession is found all over the world, but who is affected and how varies between cultures. This is where the cultural binding comes in. Malaysia is a hotspot for possession. They will occasionally have epidemics of it like other places have epidemics of the flu. In 2016, a school in Kota Bharu had to shut down while religious experts were called in to investigate a rash of spirit sightings and possession among the students. There was a particularly bad string of outbreaks between 1973 and 1978, affecting all-girls boarding schools and factories in particular.

Biomedical experts at the time diagnosed those afflicted with psychosis, exhaustion, or even laziness, and prescribed heavy sedatives and isolation for patients, just as they might for any sudden bout of violent psychosis. And that’s about what the possession looked like. Women would start screaming and become violent, breaking anything they could reach, and threatening to kill their supervisors and co-workers. They would have seizures and enter trance states. It got so bad that factories had to close for extended periods of time for fear of losing their remaining workers to the illness.

A number of anthropologists came to study the phenomenon in the 1970s. Using a holistic approach, they started accounting for factors that the biomedical experts overlooked. They investigated the villages the women came from and their traditional cultural beliefs rather than just focusing on the hours they were working. Instead of chalking it up to hysteria, they talked to the women about the spirits they feared. Spirits in rural Malaysia are thought to be particularly dangerous to young women who violate the strict moral and behavioral codes of their culture. Unmarried women are supposed to be demure, chaste, and devoted to their parents. The hundreds of young women moving from their small hometowns into factory dormitories far away were out of their element. Far from their families and constantly surrounded by male supervisors, the women became worried about angry spirits haunting the buildings that they lived and worked in.

Another complicating factor was that the women had to use public toilets. Bodily waste, specifically menstrual blood, is seen as contaminating and something that can attract and anger spirits, so it must be disposed of in a discrete way. The toilets were constructed American-style, with lots of sitting-toilets packed closely together and large gaps below stall walls and doors. To the Malaysian women, who were used to isolated and, above all, private outhouses, these semi-public spaces with little to no privacy were shocking. Women hated to use them even without the threat of spiritual attack. As a result, they would try to move in and out as quickly as possible, leaving the restrooms dirty and ill-maintained.

On top of this, many spirits in Malaysia tend to hide in standing bodies of water when they are planning to attack. The tanks of water standing by each of the sitting-toilets were a perfect hiding spot for them. As a result, most of the hauntings and possessions began in the bathroom. Women, already nervous about the bathrooms and far from their comfort zones, would begin to see spirits lurking around the toilets. Soon afterwards, possession would break out.

Viewed from a strictly etic perspective, the women were overworked. Their nerves were frayed by long hours and hard work, with no support systems or relaxation time. The prescriptions of rest, quiet, and anti-anxiety medications, however, which should have cured normal nervous exhaustion, were useless without the aid of religious purification. While exhaustion may have been the disease, the illness was spiritual and purely Malaysian.

Meaning in the Healthcare System

When understanding the health of a culture, it is vital to assess the systems of meaning associated with healthcare. Essentially, a system of meaning is how cultures view healthcare; what do they expect, want, and need from this system? Many people assume that these systems of meaning exclude biomedicine, with its focus on science and empirical testing. Patient experience seems to be of little consequence compared to the system itself.

What people overlook is that this is also a system of meaning. Any medical intervention designed for those who have grown up with the biomedical system must include these features or they will not view it as a valid medical treatment. In Malaysia, as discussed above, this direct, chemical intervention isn’t effective. They expect a religious component to treat a spiritual disease. In much of the world, healthcare is a collaborative effort. When a person becomes ill, or even before the point of actual illness, the family and town are expected to intervene. They are expected to care for and help the ill person until their symptoms abate, forming a support network to ensure the person recovers. Direct medical intervention is often done through a spiritual intermediary like a shaman.

Another place that proponents of biomedicine tend to misstep is in the assumption that shamans are quacks. Shamans often provide real medical solutions; they just do it within a spiritual framework. That framework is important for healing. As any doctor who has studied the placebo effect will tell you, a patient’s mindset is nearly as important as the medicine administered. While a shaman’s patients may expect a darkened room with an herbal fire smoking heavily, biomedical patients just as strongly expect lab coats, scrubs, and linoleum floors smelling of disinfectant. The presence of this culturally acceptable framework also gets people into the doctor for treatment, which is the first step.

Systems of meaning also include the emic definition of health, whatever that looks like for a specific culture. Health is not a universal concept. In countries ravaged by war, health looks very different than in peaceful countries. You literally can’t be fully healthy if you fear bombardment or genocide, but this is a daily reality for a significant portion of the world. So the day-to-day calculation of “health” in these areas has to look a little different.

Systems of meaning in healthcare also include what patients require to be healthy. Is it an alleviation of pain? A complete cure? A way to cope mentally with a chronic disease? Is an aggressive treatment acceptable? Most followers of biomedicine are willing to accept aggressive treatments. Treatments such as radical surgeries and chemotherapy are painful and destructive to the host as well as the disease. To the biomedical mind, this is regrettable but acceptable if the disease can be conquered. To a more fatalistic culture, this is barbaric. If your fate is to die of a disease, then there is no escaping it. Putting a patient through so much suffering as a way of defying fate is monstrous. In places like this, the alleviation of pain through the course of the disease is preferable.

Access To Health and Wellness

Access to healthcare is an absolutely vital component of health. It’s so vital that we call this area of study “critical medical anthropology”. If you can’t access healthcare, your chances of being healthy are slim. Access follows a number of interlocking patterns. Some of these are universal: poor people will have less access than rich, rural communities have less access than urban ones, war zones will have almost no access. But these are not the only factors. Discrimination, gender, race, sexuality, and age can all contribute to poor access.

Obviously, money and status lead to better access. Some places have worked to smooth this disparity by implementing socialized medicine, but the majority of the world must still pay to be healthy. This divide appears in many guises; paying a fee to see the doctor being the most apparent. The United States is rife with this sort of inequality. Healthcare costs in the US are higher than any other nation in the world. Most procedures and even medications are beyond reach except by people with health insurance, and health insurance itself is too expensive for many Americans to afford.

This creates a divide where disease and illness become dramatically more common in the lower classes than the upper ones. Most Americans won’t even go to a doctor unless the need is dire. This means that healthcare costs, both for individuals and health insurance companies, actually go up. If people went for regular, and cheaper, preventative care, costly interventions would become less necessary. But when a preventative visit costs upwards of $100, as it can without insurance, the vast majority of people will choose to avoid it.

Systemic racism is also a barrier to access. Those affected by these factors vary based on the culture being studied, but the overall patterns are always the same. Oppressed groups face a network of obstacles on the road to health. In most societies, these oppressed groups have a lower income than the accepted majority groups due to an imposed system of structural violence. In addition to this, many groups may be outright denied access to health care facilities, or treated poorly when they get there. In the United States, Black and Hispanic populations have a much greater chance of dying of heart disease, stroke, and breast cancer than white populations because of poor intervention by healthcare facilities and workers. There is still a significant portion of the US health care community that incorrectly believes that Black individuals feel pain differently than white individuals and will consistently under-manage pain in these patients.

Gender has always been a problem in the medical community. The entire biomedical system was based on the male body, and to this day there is a distinct lack of study of female bodies and their health problems. Women’s health problems are often ignored and undiagnosed, or treated with ineffective solutions. Women still die at a higher rate than men of heart attacks, and many of those deaths are because the symptoms differ between men and women. While practitioners are trained to watch out for the symptoms in men, they often miss them in women. Women also frequently have poorer nutrition than men. Many societies require women to let men eat first, meaning that they get less food. Malnourishment can lead to a battery of health problems over time.

Members of the LGBTQ+ community frequently face discrimination by the healthcare system, even in areas where their existence is not legally discriminated against. Transgender individuals worldwide have difficulty accessing proper healthcare. Many medical practitioners are either unprepared to cope with specific medical issues that transgender individuals face, or else they refuse to help. Throughout much of the world, it is perfectly legal for a person to be denied medical treatment if they are transgender. The same lack of protection applies to people in same-sex relationships.

LGBTQ+ people often face a host of dangerous medical problems because queer sex safety is overlooked in medical training and school programs. A large part of the reason HIV spread so rapidly through the gay community in the 1980s was because condoms were only discussed as form of birth control and not as a way to prevent sexually transmitted infections. Access to knowledge of health is absolutely as vital as access to healthcare itself.

What Does All That Mean?

It is the interplay of all these factors that define cultural health. Like any human experience, it is holistic and tremendously complicated. It means that spirits can alter international commerce and that cultural ideologies can alter the course of pandemics. It means that your health is not only determined by your DNA and the pathogens around you, but by your social position and identity.

Things to consider in your fictional world:

How disease and illness relate to your world’s wider concepts of purity and holiness?

How would your culture handle a crisis in health or disease?

What spiritual and/or secular methods would your culture employ to deal with illness?

Are there some groups in our society that are more susceptible to disease? Why?

What barriers to access to health care exist in your world?

What cultural practices and/or biological factors have fostered or changed disease and illness in your world?

Chapter 11

Gender vs Sex

If you’re creating a fictional world that includes any intelligent species, including human, gender and sex is something you will want to seriously consider. In humans, gender is a byproduct of our complex culture; a way to divide work and provide a framework for behavior. Gender itself is not biological, but is frequently aligned with biological concepts like sex and childbirth.

There is a great deal of confusion about sex and gender. One major reason for this among English speakers is the language itself. As we discussed in the Chapter 9 on language, some languages are better prepared and adapted to deal with certain concepts, but lack the ability to describe others. Currently, the English language is not equipped for dealing the complexities of sex and gender. First of all, the word “sex” is pulling way more than its fair weight. We use it to mean the state of being male/female/intersex, the physical act of copulation, and as a description of attraction in the word “sexuality.” This triple-duty as a physical state, an act, and a feeling makes sex a word many people don’t feel comfortable using around children, so they substitute “gender.” This shyness in adults leads to most people confusing the terms “sex” and “gender” from the cradle.

Secondly, the English language, especially in regard to words for sex and gender, is constructed in binaries. Masculine vs feminine, she vs he, girl vs boy. There is no really good set of rules for categories outside of or between these two states. While “they” works as a gender-neutral pronoun, it’s also doing double duty as a plural pronoun. There have been attempts to create novel neutral pronouns such as “xe” and “xem,” but none of these have gained widespread usage. We have plenty of terms for individuals of any age in either the masculine or feminine gender groups, but very few terms for people in other categories. In fact, many languages have this problem. For example, Latin- and Germanic-based languages all have this fundamental flaw, with the only gender-neutral terms, like “it” in English, applying primarily to non-human objects. The common vernacular is constantly inventing, altering, and combining words to cope with this dearth of terms, but since our understandings and identities can change so rapidly, it can be difficult for language to keep up. So, as you read this chapter, bear in mind these linguistic shortfalls and remember the relationship between language and perception we discussed in Chapter 9. We will try to utilize terms that are as correct as possible, but remember we’re working from a deficit.

Let’s start with some terms that have clear and accepted definitions that will help us as we go along:

Gender Identity: The way each individual thinks about, feels about, and constructs their own gender. There can be a performative element to gender identity, but not always.

Gender: A socio-cultural construct encompassing the expected tasks, roles, and behaviors of people in that group.

Sex: The biological state of being male, female, or intersex. Sex consists of genes, chromosomes, genitalia, sex organs, and hormones.

Sexual dimorphism: Meaning “two forms”, sexual dimorphism is the visible, physical difference between males and females. In humans, sexual dimorphism is far less pronounced than in many other species.

Cisgender (or cis): A person whose gender identity aligns with the one they were assigned at birth.

Transgender (or trans): An umbrella term encompassing people whose gender identity is different from the one they were assigned at birth.

Gender stratification: A state where one gender is valued more highly than others.

Gender discrimination: A state where policies, customs, and prejudices lead to the unfair treatment of certain groups based on their gender.

Gender Identity

Gender identity is far more complex than social gender. Humans are vastly complex creatures. Gender identity is how individuals construct and feel about their own gender. Gender identity can correspond to the gender assigned at birth, a different traditional gender, any combination of societal genders, or no gender at all. We won’t go into much detail about this here, simply because gender identity is a personal, rather than a social construction. There are many resources available if you’re looking to explore this subject further. Organizations like the Trevor Project are great places to start.

Learning Gender

In this section, we are going to look at gender as a function of society. Gender is very much a human invention. Other animals don’t have it, and, much like everything else a culture invents, gender is constructed to serve a purpose within society. Before we go too far, we have to clear up something most people don’t know: gender is not biological. There is no gender gene. The behaviors, likes, dislikes, styles of dress, patterns of speech, and aspirations humans associate specifically with gender are all socially constructed. People are told from birth how a member of their assigned gender should behave. These behaviors are reinforced constantly throughout our lives by the actions of teachers, parents, peers, and even advertisements. Everything from the scents you prefer to the way you sit on a bus is determined by this lifelong social conditioning. This does not, in any way, invalidate the things you like or dislike, it just means that you like these things because you were taught to, not because something in your DNA prescribed that you do so.

One strong piece of evidence for gender not being coded into the DNA is that gender differs across cultures and can even change in the same culture over time. In America, men are expected to be boisterous, unemotional, promiscuous, messy, and physically active. Watch any commercial, read any internet post about “real men,” watch any sitcom: the men will almost invariably fall into those patterns. It’s very tempting to assume this has something to do with biology, but it doesn’t. In Scandinavia, men are expected to be neat, taciturn, polite, unobtrusive, and helpful, so they are. This is a vastly different image from the portrayal of the American man. Biologically, there is no difference between these groups of men; the only change is culture.

Even things that seem directly tied into biology are not. Most people, at least in the West, will tell you that a woman’s “nurturing instinct” is purely biological. It is not. Think of every woman you know. Surely some fall into the “nurturing” and “motherly” category, but do they all? Is every single one of them head-over-heels as soon as she sees a baby? Do they all adore children? Do they all long to have children? Even culturally, this idea of the caring and devoted mother was not widespread until relatively recently. During the Industrial Revolution, when both parents were required to work gruelingly long hours, children were almost an afterthought. Something you had by accident and then had to feed. The upper classes rarely saw their children, putting them in the exclusive care of nurses and nannies until they were old enough to be sent to boarding school. Mothers were supposed to be fond of their children, but one who actually cared deeply for and regularly interacted with her children was considered almost an anomaly. It wasn’t until the rise of the housewife in Western culture that we saw the beginning of the concept of the nurturing and devoted mother in the cultural consciousness.

This enculturation into gender groups starts immediately. This is what is known as gender assignment. Gender is assigned by the child’s community and/or parents at birth, or even before birth in areas where prenatal ultrasounds are commonplace. The gender chosen for a child is most often based on their external genitalia, as this is the most obvious indicator of sex. From that point on, nearly everything in a child’s life is designed to train them to be a member of their gender group.

If you’ve ever been to a gender reveal party or looked at the baby section at the store you know exactly how this happens. Everything is color-coded pink for girls and blue for boys; there are specific conventions as to what each gender’s clothes should look like, and what types of cute little cartoons should appear on them. Boys’ clothes have robots, dinosaurs, and footballs on them, while girls’ clothes have demure-looking animals and glittery unicorns. As children grow, they are given toys and tasks that reinforce the tasks and behaviors they are expected to perform as adults. Boys receive toy guns and sporting equipment to encourage physicality, while girls receive dolls and tea sets to enforce nurturing and domestic behaviors.

The Construction of Gender

Examining the construction of gender in traditional societies (and throughout history) reveals that gender essentially serves as a job description. Gender is traditionally constructed around tasks that must be performed. Basing these patterns around the biological sexes, at least the two we see most commonly, makes sense. Most females, if they are sexually active with males and have no access to birth control, are eventually going to become pregnant. Once the baby is born, the mother must feed it. So, having females perform primarily domestic tasks, or at least tasks that are close to camp, makes sense for the survival of the next generation. Males often perform tasks that take them far away from camp or home. This also makes evolutionary sense, as, on a basic biological level, the group can withstand the loss of a male far more easily than it can a female.

So, females were assigned domestic tasks and males were assigned tasks that took them away from the homestead. Over time, these tasks became the building blocks of gender. You can see them even today in the toys we give our children and in the activities each gender is supposed to enjoy. It was a good way to make sure everyone in a group was doing the tasks that needed to be done, and assigning a gender to everyone in the group assured that no one was at a loss for how to be useful.

This basic breakdown of domestic tasks vs non-domestic tasks is why cultures almost always have two genders and why they correspond with the two most common sexes. It is not always possible, however, to neatly fit all the tasks that need to be done into these two groupings. Often, cultures will create additional genders to cover these swing tasks. Spirituality is a common motivator for the creation of a third gender category. Since the realms of magic and shamanism are outside of daily life, it makes sense to have a separate category to handle that realm. Gender categories like two-spirit (some North American First Nations groups) and bissu (Bugis culture, Indonesia) are spiritual in nature, and the individuals belonging to these categories are considered able to commune with the spirit world. These genders occupy a space between masculinity and femininity as well as a space between the earthly and spiritual realms. They can also act as mediators between other genders or political rivals, as they are considered to have the knowledge and spirit of multiple genders within them.

Sometimes, additional genders are created not to fit outside the existing labor system, but to ensure an equal division of labor. Traditionally, in Samoa, families with too many boys and too few girls would not be able to balance labor correctly, as tasks were strictly divided into masculine and feminine categories. Parents or grandparents who notice that a boy has affinity for feminine tasks may raise the child as Fa'afafine. Fa'afafine perform feminine tasks and wear feminine clothes. They often help to raise children and care for elders in their families. Even though Fa'afafine perform primarily feminine tasks, they are a distinct third gender, clearly distinguished from women. Although they have been marginalized to a degree since the island’s conversion to Christianity, the gender has been a part of Samoan culture since before records were kept. Similar gender categories are widespread across the Pacific Islands and New Zealand.

Gender in the Discworld

Most Westerners are fixated on the idea that there must be two genders that correspond to the most common biological sexes. Indeed, in most human societies, two is the base number, and any additional genders are added beyond them. This does not actually have to be the case, however, especially in fiction. The dwarves in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld traditionally only have one gender: male.

There is no sexual dimorphism in this group, so males and females both have thick beards and similar stature. Clothing is all the same: leather pants, chainmail, helmets, and enormous battle axes. There is no feminine terminology in Dwarfish; everyone is a man, there are only masculine pronouns, and all names are masculine names.

Courtship and sexuality are handled “discreetly,” with courting dwarves usually having a private conversation with one another when they get to the stage where knowing the other’s sex may become important. As a very private culture, the sexes of the partners are never discussed outside of the pairing. Marriage ceremonies and the titles of participants within a marriage are not gendered in any way.

The intimate details of early child-rearing are not discussed, but once children are old enough to walk, they tend to join both parents in the family trade, which is usually mining. There is absolutely no gendered division of labor (there can’t be, with only one option) and as such, there is a complete absence of the domestic-public dichotomy. While some professions are considered more prestigious than others (like the “knockermen” who risk their lives to rid mines of poisonous gas), there is no correlation between profession and sex; a dwarf is just a dwarf.

When dwarves began moving en masse to the big city, in this case Ankh-Morpork, they started a gender revolution, with some dwarves becoming openly female. Officer Cheery Littlebottom of the City Watch is the first openly female dwarf and the first to adopt female pronouns, even introducing female pronouns into the Dwarfish language. She was initially widely denounced for this by the dwarf community.

This new gender presentation blended traditional Dwarfish style and the feminine trends in the city, so female dwarves adopted leather and chainmail skirts and high-heeled boots, and began wearing makeup above their beards. Fashion designers even began creating chainmail stockings and lingerie.

Extremely taboo, this new gender performance was initially treated as deviant, even dangerous, and was widely looked down upon. As the series progresses, acceptance grows as more and more dwarves come out as female. By the end of the series, while feminine dwarves are still in the minority and there is still pushback from more traditional dwarves, they are slowly becoming accepted as part of the fabric of the culture. There is even talk of opening a lingerie shop in the Dwarfish capitol.

Variation in Gender

A great many cultures also allow for human flexibility across gender categories. The Bugis culture, in addition to having bissu, cisgender men (oronaé), and cisgender women (makkunrai), has calalai and calabai individuals. Calalai are assigned female at birth, but adopt the roles, clothing, and performance of men, while calabai are assigned male at birth but adopt many of the roles, clothing, and performance of women. It is important to note that calalai are not men and calabai are not women; they inhabit completely separate gender categories. The transition to these gender categories is personally, rather than culturally, mandated. Calabai and calalai are not assigned their gender by parents, elders, or spirits; they assign it themselves. The traditional tasks performed by members of these genders roughly fall into masculine and feminine categories, but the individuals themselves have greater freedom to mix and match these different roles.

You might also be surprised to learn that even in European and Christian-based cultures, there have long been more than two genders. Eunuchs are even mentioned by Jesus in the New Testament. In Matthew 19:12, he mentions three varieties of eunuchs in a positive light. The second variety he mentions, the “created eunuch,” was part of the justification for the creation of the castrati, a group of young boys who had such lovely voices that members of the Catholic Church had them castrated before puberty so their voice wouldn’t change. Though not specifically described that way, eunuchs are a third gender category that has been around for thousands of years and are referenced across many different texts in the ancient world.

In fact, there are hundreds of traditional genders that exist outside the feminine/masculine binary, and we definitely don’t have time to cover them all here.

New Constructions of Gender

In industrial and post-industrial societies, gender roles are not as strictly defined as they are in traditional societies, or as they were prior to the development of mass industry. This is due to the nature and variety of new tasks created that don’t fit into any traditional framework. It’s difficult to assign a “tradition” to a field that is less than a few generations old. Take, for instance, computer engineering. Historically, “computing” meant calculating sums or equations. When women took over the secretarial field in the early 20th century, the job fell to them, and remained a primarily feminine task until the invention of the device we now call a computer. The job of running these new computing machines fell to no one in particular for a while, until it became an offshoot of finance and business in the 1980s and men began to take over the work. These gender preferences in the job had little to do with tradition and more to do with proximity to extant careers.

As well as more and more of these new, non-gendered tasks appearing throughout the 20th century, family planning, women’s suffrage, and increased infant survival in the modern era have been steadily breaking down the domestic/public arrangement of labor. Women are no longer inevitably going to have children, and even if they do, bottled breast milk and infant formula remove the necessity of them being constantly near to the child to nurse. This allows men to successfully raise infants while the permissibility of women in public workspaces allows them to tackle tasks outside the home. In societies with these changes, we see gender performance becoming less traditional and more self-motivated. We have also seen the emergence of new, identity-based gender categories rather than strictly societally defined ones. Categories like agender, bigender, gender nonconforming and genderqueer are reflections of individuals’ relationship to their own gender rather than clearly defined, socially constructed pigeonholes.

Gender Stratification and Discrimination

In anthropology, we find that gender stratification is based on the relative value placed on the tasks each gender performs. These tasks, as discussed above, tend to be broken down into domestic tasks, or those near to the home, and public tasks, or those away from the home. In foraging societies, equal weight tends to be placed on domestic and public tasks. Groups are very small and survival is often a matter of thin margins, so everyone has an equal weight to pull to keep the group alive. If the men don’t go out hunting, the group will starve. If the women don’t prepare the food, the group will starve. In foraging societies, then, there are generally very low levels of stratification. The genders are clearly defined and separate, but there is little difference in the way they are valued. Horticultural societies also tend towards low stratification, as the vast majority of necessary work falls into the domestic sphere.

As societies grow larger, however, the domestic and public spheres tend to drift further apart. In all cultures with this domestic-public gulf, the public work is considered of higher value. Anthropologists call this the domestic-public dichotomy. Remember, until very recently in human history, the feminine genders were almost exclusively in charge of the domestic sphere and the masculine genders were almost exclusively in charge of the public sphere. This has led to devaluation of, and often discrimination against, femininity and its associated genders.

The Biological Sexes

Humans, along with most multicellular organisms, reproduce sexually; offspring are created by combining the genetic material of two parents, one half from each parent. There are many reasons that this is evolutionarily advantageous, including that it provides a nearly endless amount of genetic combinations, which allows for a huge amount of variation. It also provides a greater chance for mutation, which has the potential to be greatly beneficial. Mutation, after all, is the basis of adaptation.

While different species developed different ways of handling sexual reproduction, mammals developed the Y chromosome somewhere around the Cretaceous period. The X and Y chromosomes alone are responsible for the differentiation between the sexes. Females have two copies of X, and males have an X and a Y. The Y chromosome, an altered form of the X chromosome, has, among other genes, the one that causes the ovaries to convert to testes. Part of this alteration causes the newly-formed testes to descend from their place in the lower abdomen through the body wall and into the scrotum. This helps with the production of sperm later in life.

The differences between the sexes all boil down to reproduction. The female gametes (sex cells), eggs, are produced in the ovaries. Each egg contains one-half of the female’s genetic material, as well as all the cellular machinery required to create a fetus. The ovaries constitute the primary sex organs in females. The primary sex organs in males are the testes. The testes create sperm (the male gamete). Sperm are equipped with half the male’s genetic material and a long, flailing tail that allows it to propel itself along the lining of the vagina towards the egg for fertilization.

The ovaries and testes, along with other glands throughout the body, also produce sex hormones. While there is a great variety of hormones that create sexual differences between humans, the two major ones are estrogen and testosterone. Females have a great deal more estrogen than males, and males have a great deal more testosterone than females. The increased production of these sex hormones during puberty leads to the development of the secondary sexual characteristics that form much of the sexual dimorphism we see in humans. Female hormones lead to the development of breasts, widening of the pelvis, and begin monthly ovulation and menses. Male hormones lead to the growth of facial hair, the enlargement of the penis and testes, and the production of sperm.

Sex in Star Trek

At the end of the second season of Star Trek: Enterprise, in an episode titled “Cogenitor”, the crew encounters a species called the Vissians. Their species requires three different biological sexes for reproduction. The episode surrounds a conflict for how the third sex is treated and asks a deeply uncomfortable question about cultural relativism and interference in other cultures. But this episodes highlights something important: there is no reason that physical sex has to follow any kind of human norms at all. Just because life in our world developed a binary method of sexual reproduction doesn’t mean life elsewhere had to. Whatever you choose to do, The only thing you have to keep in mind is holism.

Human Sex: Beyond the Binary

Because there are only two chromosomes that create all of these differences, we tend to think of human sex as binary. In reality, however, human sex exists on a spectrum between these two points. One way we can see sex as a spectrum is to consider the broad range of conditions that can cause a person to fall under the umbrella of intersex. The old term for intersex is “hermaprhoditism,” but scientists and activists have long since dropped this term as inaccurate and archaic. Intersex conditions are any of a variety of syndromes which cause a person to have a combination of male and female characteristics. This overlap can occur at any point in the differentiation between male and female.

Many intersex people are operated on in infancy to assign them a sex. Which sex is usually decided on by the doctor based on the external appearance of the existing genitalia. Groups around the world are trying to outlaw these surgeries, however, as the vast majority of them fall under the category of forced sterilization, which is a human rights violation.

Intersex conditions occur in about 1.7% of people, approximately the same percentage of the population with red hair. However, the classification and inclusion of them is largely lacking in cultural understanding. Many of these conditions are undetectable without the aid of modern medical technology and so were completely undescribed until fairly recently. Very few traditional cultures officially recognize intersex individuals and even modern discourse often overlooks them.

There are populations, however, where intersex individuals are far more common than others. In the Dominican Republic, for example, as many as 1 in 90 males are güevedoces. Güevedoces, which translates literally to “penis as twelve” have reduced steroid 5α-reductase activity in utero, causing the testes to remain internal and the penis to be unformed at birth. The result is that they look female at birth and are consequently assigned feminine identities. They are raised female, but at puberty their testes descend, and what appeared to be their clitoris grows into a penis. At this point, they are allowed to choose their gender expression; they may either live as men or may choose to have surgery to remain female and keep their feminine identities. Either choice is supported by the society at large.

The reason for a high rate of a trait in one population that is nearly non-existent in the rest of the world is called the “founder effect”. Founder effect, as discussed in Chapter 6, is very common on islands, as intermingling with members of other populations is not as easy as it is for groups living on the larger and more geographically accessible mainland.

It is important to note that, in most cases, there is no culturally mandated guideline for which gender group intersex individuals are assigned. The majority of cultures leave it to the parents (and less frequently, the child themselves) to assign a gender as they see fit. Occasionally, however, being born intersex does assume a tie to an alternate gender. In addition to the bissu already discussed, a classic example of this is the hijra gender in India. Hijra, a gender group that has its origins deep within the mythology of both Hinduism and Islam, is composed of transgender individuals, eunuchs, and, occasionally, intersex individuals. It is common for visibly intersex infants (remember that many intersex conditions are not externally visible) to be given to hijra people to raise, as being born intersex is seen as a sign from the gods that the child is hijra. This practice persists into the modern day.

The variation found in human sex and gender is emense, and is changing all the time. Remember that as you build your world, there are no limits to the diversity you can create.

Things to consider in your fictional world:

In the culture of your protagonist, how many biological sexes are there?

How many genders are there? What are the culture’s stereotypical limitations of each and their normal roles?

How does gender stratification work in your society?

How does gender relate to your mythology? (Think of the biblical example of eunuchs)

Which gender is considered more important? (Remember to think about who has more power)

How does gender tie into the rest of your world? (Remember holism)

Are all species in your world sexually dimorphic or are they like the dwarves of the Discworld?

Chapter 12

Race in History and Imagination

Much of the following chapter will examine the history of the concept of race and its implications. In fictional worlds, the concept of race often takes the forms of distinct other humanoids like elves, dwarfs, or aliens. However, race is deeply problematic to use on humans, let alone creatures from an entirely different species in fiction. In our world, the concept of race has been profoundly troubling and painful to many people.

Contrary to popular belief, the concept of race has not existed forever. Tribalism and prejudice have indeed existed since humans have been, well, human, but race as a concept is relatively new. People tend to think that race is a category, marked by skin color. As this chapter will demonstrate, the concept of race has nothing to do with skin color or physical features and is, in fact, a technology of control and power. As such, race reflects a structural position in society.

In a fictional world, some of the best examples of a concept like race as a structural position is the treatment of elves in the video game series Dragon Age. Elves live in squalor and poverty. They are regarded as pariahs, regardless of their skills or abilities, and even experience a degree of segregation and Jim Crow-like laws. The elves in Dragon Age provide an example of how race is a structural position of society, rather than just a category. But why create such a category? What possible purpose could that have?

We’re going to look at race through the lens of its formation in the United States. A tremendous number of cultures have an extremely similar concept of race, and many post-colonial societies developed it in extremely similar circumstances and for similar reasons. In the United States, race goes right back to the founding of the colony. In the beginning, there was colonial Jamestown.

Bacon’s Rebellion and the Origin of the Concept of Race in the United States

In the books The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and Birth of a White Nation by Jacqueline Battalora, each author examines the role of Bacon’s rebellion on our modern understanding of race. The first African slaves arrived in the United States in 1619, but not all Africans in the early colonies were slaves. In fact, many were indentured servants. It is important to note at this point that indentured servitude, while an ugly and abusive practice in its own right, is not slavery. Many claims on the internet equate Irish indentured servitude with slavery. This is a false and problematic assumption, usually used by individuals to downplay the horrors of slavery. Indentured servants had a limited term of contract, and were paid in advance (travel expenses, stipends, and other means), as well as given a land grant and/or pay upon completion of their term. It is different than slavery on numerous levels; however, the debt bondage experienced by many indentured servants was still a terrible position within society.

Before Bacon’s rebellion, African indentured servants and black freedmen could own property, inherit, vote, hold office, and testify in court. There was no segregation based on skin color. All indentured servants and those who met their debt obligations lived and worked together. Intermarriage was common practice between different ethnic groups. Distinctions were made based on national origin and religion. There was certainly prejudice against some groups, but skin color and the concept of ‘whiteness’ as a major category did not exist until after Bacon’s rebellion and several analogous events that followed.

Nathanial Bacon was no champion of the poor. Rather, he was another member of the elite class who saw the strife and struggle of the indentured servants and slaves, and used their anger and frustration with the other political elites to try and put himself in power. Bacon found frustration when he couldn’t convince the rest of the elites in Jamestown to kill and conquer the surrounding First Nations tribes. Bacon surveyed the community for ways to overthrow the established government and grant himself more power. Many indentured servants lived in significant poverty. Because of an economic crisis and the bordering Native American tribes, the elites were unwilling and sometimes unable to fulfill the terms of the indentured contracts. Instead, they set up a system where petty crimes extended the length of indentured servitude. Noticing this, Bacon rallied together with the indentured servants. He then approached the slaves and offered emancipation if they sided with him. After that, he reached out to both the free poor whites and the black freedmen, both of whom struggled constantly with the planter elites, a group much like the 1% top earners we think of today.

In 1676, Bacon successfully rallied a multi-ethnic coalition to take Jamestown and burn it to the ground. His forces chased many of the elites from the colony, forcing them to head north to wait for reinforcements. At the same time, Bacon rallied these forces to attack local Native American tribes. Similar revolts sprung up in other parts of the colonies and the elites faced a significant challenge to their power. Not long after Jamestown burned, Bacon died, and he never benefited from the uprising. Soon after, British troops arrived to reassert the dominance of the planter elite. The planter elite realized quickly that they had a serious problem, and that, improperly managed, they would have further uprisings and lose control of their colonies. So, the elite established something Michelle Alexander calls a “racial bribe”. At the same time, as Battalora points out, they establish the concepts of “whiteness” and “blackness” in their legal code. Previously, the only law that referenced skin color was an anti-miscegenation law of 1664 that put limits on who a woman could marry because there was a significant shortage of women in the colony.

Before Bacon’s rebellion, the law was rarely enforced. This was, in part, because mixed marriages were economically advantageous to the planter elites. These women, partnered with slaves, would produce additional slaves. After Bacon’s rebellion, however, this law became a model for the racial categories that the planter elite used to divide and conquer the poor. Over several years, the legal codex changed to increasingly disenfranchise the newly categorized “black” indentured servants and freedmen, pushing them into slavery, and gave some privilege or preference to poor “whites”. The elites did not elevate the status of poor whites so much as convince them that they were on the same team. They did so by enacting laws that prevented those classified as Black from testifying in court against a white person, from owning property, and from voting. They segregated the groups into separate areas and gradually used the law to ensure that all blacks were slaves and all whites were free. This model spread throughout the American colonies and then into other parts of the world. The modern American concept of race was born.

Why Are Bacon’s Rebellion and Events Like It Important To Consider for Your Fictional World?

Bacon’s rebellion demonstrates how those in power will create categories and ideas to divide and conquer those who seek their power. It also demonstrates how the imagined past, (i.e. the concept of race has been around forever) can significantly alter the way we interact with groups outside of our own, simply because we believe something to be inevitable. Any sizable fictional culture needs to deal with how those in power manage that power, and divide and conquer their subjects to ensure lasting rule; that is, unless you are writing about a utopia. Even utopian fiction is not without its divisions. Despite its central themes of peace and unity, even the Star Trek universe had rebels and uprisings, such as the Maquis, who, after a Federation treaty with the Cardassians, lost their homes and land, and rebelled as a result.

The Rise of Scientific Racism

It is of vital importance to emphasize that there is no biological basis for the concept of race. Despite this fact, many people throughout history, and persisting to present-day, try to make false accusations for the biology of the race concept. They might make erroneous claims that only certain groups are capable of experiencing a certain kind of disease, like sickle cell anemia.

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, there were many scientists and scholars who contributed to the concept of race. Foremost among them was the Swedish naturalist, Carolus Linnaeus. Known for changing biological science forever with his establishment of the first taxonomic system, Linnaeus spent his time between 1735 and 1759 classifying animals into biological categories that would ultimately help to make the study more uniform and measurable. He gave us the terms Kingdom, Class, Order, Genus, Species, which were later expanded by other scholars. At the same time, Linnaeus classified humans into four distinct categories.

In the first edition of his book Systema Naturae, published in 1735, he listed the following categories and definitions:

Homo Americanus: red, choleric, righteous, black, straight, thick hair, stubborn, zealous, free; painting himself with red lines, and regulated by customs.

Homo Europaeus: white, sanguine, browny; with abundant long hair; blue eyes; gentle, acute, inventive; covered with closed vestments; governed by laws.

Homo Asiaticus: yellow, melancholic, stiff; black hair, dark eyes; severe, haughty, greedy; covered with loose clothing; and ruled by opinions.

Homo Afer: black, phlegmatic, relaxed; black, frizzled hair; silky skin, flat nose, tumid lips; females without shame; mammary glands give milk abundantly; crafty, sly, lazy, cunning, lustful, careless; anoints himself with grease; governed by caprice.

To say the least, these categories are highly problematic. The implication was that humans were at least four distinct species with Europeans at the pinnacle of evolution and culture. In the 1767 edition of his book, Linnaeus added two additional categories, Homo Monstrous (for what he says are ‘more exotic’ types of humans) and Homo Ferus (the wild man). These added categories included disabled people, and related to creatures of myth and legend, and were only supported by hearsay from traders or sailors and not on any actual data.

Over the course of the 19th century, a large portion of literature attempted to support the created category of race, primarily to justify the structure of society. Philosophers, psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and other fields that studied the human experience were all complicit in these problematic claims. Herbert Spencer coined the term “Survival of the Fittest” in 1859, which, to future writers, became another justification for what became known as social Darwinism, a concept loosely based on the work of Charles Darwin, that posited a scientific version of manifest destiny. At that time, white European Christians were considered the fittest and they justified their conquest of many other cultures through both “science” and religion. Anthropologist Paul Broca published in 1859 that the key difference in humans had to do with brain size and shape. This contributed to the pseudoscience of craniometry, which posited that skull size and shape related to character and race. Later came the cephalic index: a list that was supposedly able to point out tendencies toward criminal behavior and mental health issues based on the shapes and sizes of heads in different ethnicities. Spoiler alert: since Europeans were the ones writing the index their cranial structure was the ideal and other ethnicities all tended towards criminality and insanity.

Of course, for all the scientists who were encouraging the concept of race as something biological and inevitable, other scientists pushed back against these ideas. Franz Boas, often known as the father of modern American anthropology, organized a study of 18,000 people between 1908 and 1920. Keep in mind that a sample size that large was almost unheard of in the early 20th century. His study challenged the validity of craniometry and demonstrated that there was greater variation within groups than across them. He also showed that every head size and shape existed not only in every population, but also changed radically with even a single generation, thus debunking craniometry and the cephalic index.

Then came eugenics, the pseudoscience that sought to perfect human biology through controlled breeding. The term comes from Sir Francis Galtang's writing in 1883, but the idea was most certainly around before that date. Many monarchs, even as far back as ancient Egypt, considered the purity of bloodlines, ironically leading to many cases of birth defects and disabilities throughout much of modern human history (the “Hapsburg Jaw” and the prevalence of haemophilia in European royal families are famous examples of this). In fact, in his document, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), Thomas Jefferson said, “The circumstance of superior beauty is thought worthy of attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man?” Jefferson's statements were parroted throughout the 18th and 19th, and even 20th centuries.

By 1920, the United States had more than thirty two states with official eugenics records boards, where people would register their human pedigrees. Even worse, between the 19th and 20th century, hundreds of thousands of men and women (mostly women) were forcibly sterilized in the name of the pseudoscience of eugenics and for the ‘advancement of the white race.’ This history is important because of CRISPR, a gene-editing program that could impact our society and culture in ways that are eerily similar to eugenics. It is vital to understand the history of eugenics in order to prevent the use of CRISPR in ways that would further disenfranchise members of our society. CRISPR is a powerful tool that could be used to help a lot of people, but the implications of what can be done with that tool are deeply complicated.

Eugenics was popular throughout the early 20th century until Adolf Hitler came on the scene and the second world war erupted. The ideology of the enemy surrounded eugenics and the master race. Nazis not only favored eugenics but actualized them in monstrous ways. Eugenics and other similar philosophies, like white supremacy, brought about a holocaust of more than six million people, and it became clear to most countries by the end of the war that eugenics was a horrific pseudoscience.

In addition to scientific discoveries such as DNA, by the 1950s, eugenics was largely out of favor, though the conversations surrounding this practice with new science and technology has resumed. An example of a sci-fi film that asks serious questions about genetic manipulation, eugenics, and the rights of humans is the 1997 film Gattaca starring Ethan Hawke and Jude Law, which puts a man who was born ‘natural’ (no genetic manipulation) in the middle of a society where everybody who’s anybody had their genes altered at birth, and examines how hard life is for him.

Even as science changed over time to disprove the concept of biological race, that didn’t stop the notorious biological anthropologist Carelton S. Coon from attempting to revive racial categorization in his 1962 book, the Origin of the Races. Coon helped craft pro-segregation pamphlets with Carl Putnam, a known white supremacist. Coon was a part of the school of thought (now disproved by genetics and fossil evidence) that humans evolved separately on five different occasions from our ancestors in different parts of the world. In response to his book, numerous anthropologists and geneticists, like Theodosius Dobzhansky, actively presented evidence against Coon’s claims. Coon was ultimately disgraced and largely disappeared into obscurity, but his book prompted numerous disciplines to take an official stand on the problematic pseudoscience surrounding the concept of race.

To be clear, this debate isn’t over. In 2014, a journalist by the name of Nicholas Wade attempted to resurrect some of these ideas in his book, A Troublesome Inheritance. In the second half of his book he argues that genetics play a major role in the limitations of ‘certain’ populations. The response? One hundred and thirty-nine top experts in the field of genetics (many of which Wade cited in his book) wrote an open letter criticizing Wade for his clear lack of understanding in their research and debunked many of his major claims. Wade’s work, like Coon and Linnaeus, were all used to fuel the justification for poor treatment of non-European populations.

This all leads to a wider discussion about the idea of race. As history marched on, the concept of race morphed and changed to ensure that power was maintained and expanded.

Race as a Technique of Power

In a chapter of the 2004 book A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics titled Race Technologies, Thomas Biolsi explores the concept of race as a tool of power in the United States. He looks at historical documents, supreme court cases, and federal policy surrounding two different groups: Native Americans and African Americans. In the chapter, he examines how the concept of race disenfranchised their groups to directly empower Euro-Americans. His examination reveals that race is used in four distinct technologies: stating, mixing, classifying, and spacing.

Stating

Stating is the creation of the concept of race; that it exists as a category. Bacon’s rebellion is a classic example of stating. In order for race to be used as a tool, the concept must exist.

Classifying

To determine who fits in the category of race, you need to figure out how to classify individuals. In the Supreme Court case, Plessy v. Ferguson, a conflict over whether a man who was 1/8th African American should be allowed to sit in a white-only, first-class section of a train, the Supreme Court determined that “just one drop” of African blood was enough to classify you as Black in the eyes of the law. This 1896 landmark case upheld many Jim Crow laws across the country. These same laws weren’t overturned until a decision in the 1954 Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education. This ruling instituted what became known as the “one-drop rule.”

Initially, Native Americans were treated in a similar way. But throughout American history, Native American's status changed from one of segregation (as seen with the 1830 Indian Removal Act that led directly to the Trail of Tears), to one of forcibly intermixing and assimilating the indigenous people of North America into Euro-American society. The question is, why the different treatment? Biolsi points to two elements. The first is the Establishment of the Dawes Act of 1887, a policy that attempted to “civilize the savage” by giving them individual land grants on their reservations in 160-acre plots. However, in order to gain access to that land grant and to maintain their indigenous identity, the Federal government determined that Native American tribes must meet certain legal minimum requirements to be considered Native American. Thus, the US government created a two-part test. First was a legally mandated minimum of 1/4 Native American blood, also called blood quantum, second was a clear connection with the culture. Native Americans were unique in that they were the only American group to be forced to carry a racial identity card (registered tribal enrollment) to receive their full rights, including access to land grants.

The Dawes Act wasn’t about preserving rights of Native Americans. Instead, it was about allocating small fragments of large reservations and then, when all allotments were accounted for, selling the land off to white settlers or allocating it to a federal agency. The Dawes Act and the blood quantum system were both clever ways to steal approximately 90 million acres of Native American land between 1887 and 1934, when allotment officially ended. Hence, the concept of race changed to suit those looking to assimilate Native Americans and remove them from the land much coveted by Euro-Americans.

Mixing

The concept of “mixing" comes from Euro-American ideas of racial purity. Mixing was not only mixing whites with other groups, but also included a hierarchy of which whites were allowed to mix. Poor whites were often considered to have bad blood and thus not be fit for mixing with middle class or wealthy whites. For more on the experience of poor whites, consider Nancy Isenberg's book, White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America.

Returning to Biolsi, the concept of mixing relates to the classifying category above: that Native Americans and whites were encouraged to mix because of assimilation policies and the Dawes Act, while it was considered ‘pollution’ for African Americans and Euro-Americans to mix, because of the anti-miscegenation laws post-Bacon’s rebellion.

Further, there were gender distinctions when it came to mixing. If a Black man had sex with a white woman, regardless of consent, it was considered rape. But cases of actual rape, where a slave owner forced his slaves to have sex with him, were perfectly legal and even quietly encouraged because the owner could make more slaves. This was especially true after the transatlantic slave trade was shut down in 1807.

Why the difference? Before there were paternity tests, a child took on the same status as its mother. If a white woman gave birth to a dark-skinned child, it would throw the system into chaos because that child should be a slave by law, owing to its skin color. That same child would also take on the status of its white mother and should be legally free. It presented a legal contradiction and so mixing between white women and Black men became classified as rape with the penalty of death for the man.

Spacing

Spacing refers to whether different groups were either allowed to or forbidden to coexist. A key example of spacing is Jim Crow laws, which kept white and Black Americans strictly separate. Native American reservations, legally established by President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, which stole land from tribes east of the Mississippi and forced them onto land farther west, was a large-scale, legal, ethnic cleansing campaign. Ethnic cleansing itself, and the forced relocation of a specific population from a particular area, is another example of spacing.

Taken together, these four different tools formed the concept of race and provided the flexibility and power needed to establish a system that continually disenfranchises minority populations in the United States. One of the clearest ways to see this technology in action is to watch the documentary film 13th, on Netflix, which demonstrates the relationship between the 13th Amendment and the African American experience in the drug war and the modern American justice system.

Privilege and Purity

So often we hear the term privilege, but what does that concept mean? The concept of privilege exists in every large-scale human society. If we think about the concepts introduced in Chapter 8 on purity, we see that every society also has a status quo with accepted norms. Many of these norms are created through imagined past and language. Privilege isn’t just about race or gender. Just about every category of identity you can think of is tied to a concept of purity in the cultural body of knowledge.

The way to tell if an identity marker is a privilege is to look at two things. First, what identity markers do the majority of powerful people have in your culture? Second, is it considered neutral? In other words, when the term “ethnic food” is used in the United States, it’s usually not to refer to a hamburger, even though a hamburger is ethnic food. “Ethnic food” is considered the different category. To have privilege is to have elements of your identity as the default on which everything else is compared to. This is true across many, many cultures and languages throughout the world.

Privilege Exercise:

Consider the different types of privilege below. In your fictional world, what is considered the ideal? Remember, every culture will have its own categories, winners, and losers. This chart will help you to think about the various ways in which your world expresses power and privilege. You do not have to follow these identity markers but can use your own. However, all fictional worlds must grapple with winners and losers, the privilege and the disenfranchised, to not have these elements will make your world far less realistic. Even the borg have a queen with more power and privilege than the rest of the drones.

Identity Marker | Status Quo (Privileged Group) | Your Character’s Identity Marker
Gender |  |
Skin Color |  |
Religion |  |
Education |  |
Physical Capabilities |  |
Language |  |
Accent |  |
Class Status |  |
Sexuality |  |
Kinship Pattern |  |
Body Type |  |

Intersectionality

The concept of intersectionality is widely misunderstood on social media, but very useful for creating fictional worlds. At the center is you and your identity, but every single identity marker has different degrees of privilege which impacts your experience and perception. The color of your skin, your religious background, your gender, your country of origin, your language, your class status, and so on, all impact portions of who you are and intersect with your personal experiences and culture. As discussed in chapter 4, the lived experience of individuals is based on context and conditions.

Racism and the Binary Problem: Explicit vs Implicit

In many European-based cultures (and others around the world) there is a tendency toward binary classification. Things are divided into this or that, black or white, right or wrong, believer or non-believer. This is a problematic system of classification because things are rarely so clear-cut. The same logic is applied to racism. In her book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Race, Robin DiAngelo says that in fact, most racism isn’t the obvious KKK, Nazi, hate group behavior. Rather, it is the subconscious assumptions built over the course of history about the roles and structural positions of society. Racism is buried deep within our language, our laws, our imagined past, and our ideas of purity, as well as our context and conditions. Most racism isn’t explicit, it’s implicit.

Explicit is the obvious kind of racism that most of us think of when we conjure up images of racists. We picture Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust or the genocide of the Uyghurs. We picture KKK rallies, cross burnings, and lynching. It would be much simpler to grasp if this were the full extent of racism. But remember, racism has a structural position in society. When something is structural, there are many elements that are difficult to notice from just the surface.

Numerous studies have been done on implicit racism. You may have heard of the famous resume study, wherein employers were sent identical resumes for the same jobs across the country, and the only difference were names. On one resume was a commonly white name, on the other, a more commonly Black name. The result was striking. White-sounding names received 50% more callbacks for the exact same resume as those with Black-sounding names. This study has been replicated many times with different categories, including implicit gender bias in STEM jobs.

The resume test is just one example of hundreds of research studies done on the implicit assumptions we make on a daily basis. These assumptions are directly related to privilege, and if we don’t address these issues, we inadvertently continue the cycle of systemic racism. An organization called Project Implicit based out of Harvard allows people to take the Implicit Association Test online. The test was originally designed to measure racial bias, but now provides numerous categories for you to test your bias. We all have some degree of bias when it comes to identity markers. Bias does not inherently make you a bad person, but it is of vital importance that we all examine our biases. Left unchecked, our biases can put us in some uncomfortable situations, and lead to cringingly one-dimensional fictional worlds.

What About White Trash?

In relation to the discussion of privilege, there is one category that people either overlook or point to on a regular basis: white trash. In Odd Tribes: Toward A Cultural Analysis of White People, John Hartigan explores this concept in great detail. He begins with an analysis of the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which shows Mr. Hyde as the avatar of the poor; a disgusting person who represents all the biases that wealthy people in society believe about the poor. Hartigan also explores films like Deliverance, that portray poor whites as dangerous hillbilly rapists, incapable of living a moral life. This cultural portrayal of the poor as morally and genetically inferior is far from unique to American culture.

Using the lens of anthropology, Hartigan determines that epithet of white trash is just another concept of cultural purity, marking the behaviors and ideals of whiteness and creating clear in and out groups of who are the “good whites,” and who are the “bad whites.” It operates as a scapegoat for institutional racism. Instead of addressing the systematic and oppressive nature of the concept of race and how it operates in legal codes, justice system, and implicit bias, white trash is an easy way to point to a group of poor people and blame them for being racist and bigoted and the cause of “real racism.” This allows the history of race and racism to remain hidden, and further masks the problematic nature of the false racial binaries to which many often deeply subscribe.

Why Is All of This Important To Building More Authentic Fictional Worlds?

Understanding the structural positions of your characters within their societies, and their underlying biases, makes your culture more realistic and authentic. Understanding your own biases can help you, as an artist, to sidestep some of the pitfalls of your assumptions. Creating more authentic and diverse worlds allows us to ask better questions about the nature of humanity and helps us to better ourselves as a species. By understanding the history of the concept of race, and seeing how we have moved from the arena of debunking explicit racism to discussions on implicit racism, helps us to have better conversations and create better art about the problems and progress we have made as a species.

Races Done Wrong in Speculative Fiction

One difficulty you may encounter when using other races in your fictional world is forgetting that race is only one identity marker in a host of different elements. Often, bad fantasy or science fiction treats all members of another race or species as homogeneous. Even Tolkien was guilty of this with orcs, as we mentioned in earlier chapters. Always remember: no culture is homogeneous.

Should You Just Avoid Diversity?

In creating fictional worlds, the only reason to restrict diversity is if you are trying to do so for social commentary. There have been many debates over representation in fiction. The danger you, as a creator, face when writing diversity is making assumptions and recycling old stereotypes. Returning to the Tolkien example, you should avoid the idea that an orc is an orc is an orc. When writing about groups outside of your own experience, you should certainly do your research on the history of that culture. You should also recognize how globalization, migration, and other changes will impact cultures and individuals, and how each individual in a given culture will accept and reject elements of the ideologies that surround them. If you have the means, you may also consider employing a sensitivity reader (someone who reads for issues surrounding diversity), since there are always things outside the realm of your own experience. No doubt you have heard of actors performing a job to research a role they will play in a film, or a writer moving to a location that is the subject of their next book. Good writing will include plenty of diverse perspectives and unique ways of knowing from a wide variety of sources. If we are to write well, we must write diverse and complex characters, not stereotypes or caricatures of what we think we know about another culture or experience.

Things to consider in your fictional world:

What are the dominant groups in your society? What is the history of this system?

How does this impact the lives of non-dominant groups in both conscious and unconscious ways?

What technologies do those in power employ to maintain control (more on this topic in the chapter on political systems)

What kind of privilege do your characters have or lack? How does this impact their ability to move through their world and cause conflict?

What justifications do those in power use to keep their power?

Chapter 13

Economics: More Than Money and Markets

The fundamental problem of every civilization and species is energy. This might seem like a grand statement, but think about the biological factors that drive us. At the end of the day, all things need energy to function. Economics is simultaneously as simple and as complex as that. All cultures, all worlds, must be built around the question of: how do we obtain enough energy to persist? With species that are self-aware, this problem becomes increasingly complex as we produce, manufacture, and supply goods and services.

Economy is a system created by a culture in order to adapt to the conditions of their environment. This can be as simple as foraging or as complex as globalization and markets. The mistake often made about economics is that many people have a tendency to think that it’s only about money and markets. The reality is that money and markets are around for one reason: so we, as a species, persist. If we don’t do things to gain required goods, if we starve, or don’t have one or more of our basic needs met, there is no opportunity to cultivate culture at all because we are, well, dead.

As you read ahead, there is something to keep in mind as you consider your fictional world. Everything has a cost. Not necessarily in terms of money, but no matter what kind of system you employ, there are always winners and losers. For much of our established fictional worlds, this is obvious. In the fictional world of the novel Dune, we see a war for the control of the planet Arrakis. The conflict centers around the key economic ingredient that makes all of their futuristic civilization and interstellar travel possible: the spice known as melange. What are the costs to those who control the spice? Those who harvest it? Those who must suddenly go without if there is a shortage? Herein lies the central conflict of the entire Dune series. This is one of many examples across fiction of the cost of a resource or its production cycle that causes conflict.

But what about the real world? Where are the costs and conflicts surrounding economic systems and globalization in our own world? Who wins or loses? How are economics used as a weapon for waging wars? What impact does currency have? We are going to try and do our best to unpack these core ideas so that you can consider them in your worldbuilding project.

Three Elements of Every Economic System

In his book, Europe and the People Without History, anthropologist Eric Wolf wrote that in order to understand the fundamentals of subsistence, one must understand three key components: production, distribution, and consumption. These components exist in all economic systems in varying levels of complexity.

Production: The transformation of raw materials into goods for human use.

Examples:

A group goes hunting and kills a deer, then return to their village and cook it

Foragers dig up tubers and pick berries

A rancher milks a cow

People plant and harvest their crops

Workers create microchips at a manufacturing plant

Production is the act of creation or transformation in the economic cycle. An anthropologist can learn a lot about a culture simply by examining the things people harvest or make and where they do so. In a fictional world, it is important to consider what different kinds of jobs exist in the production cycle. You may want to consider some of the power dynamics around these production cycles. Who is in charge? How physically or emotionally intense is the work? What do people think of those who work these jobs? Are the workers there for a paycheck, or will they consume their own product?

Modes of the Production Cycle

Within the production cycle, there are five modes or methods that cultures employ:

Foraging

Pastoralism

Horticulturalism

Intensive Agriculture

Industrialism

Foraging

Foraging is the “go out and see what you can find'' strategy of production, such as mushroom hunting or berry picking. Hunting, fishing, or recovering items from dead monsters in RPG’s is another example. Foraging is anything you can go out and find. Even sifting through a trash bin would count, although this is not recommended. However, just because you collect something doesn’t mean that the production cycle ends there. A blacksmith’s work isn’t done just because they got raw steel. They still have to shape and pound that sword before production is complete. Most cultures don’t eat raw meat, either; they spend time cooking it and adding herbs and spices.

The limitations of foraging are twofold. First, being confined to a certain area limits the amount of resources available in that area. Second, a dramatic increase in population will overuse the local resources, forcing people to move further away as local resources dwindle. If you grew up playing video games like StarCraft or World of Warcraft, you might have an idea of how annoying it is to have to set up a new resource base because you overtaxed your resources.

Because foraging only provides enough resources to support a small number of people, cultures that practice it tend to live in small groups. The smaller groups are also more mobile, which is key. Most foraging groups practice monogamy as a way to keep families small and more easily nomadic. There also tends to be a low level of gender stratification in foraging societies. Remember that stratification is based on the relative prestige of each gender’s tasks. In the case of foraging societies, men and women tend to have very strictly defined roles, although there is little difference in the prestige attached to them. This means that while the genders’ tasks are kept separate from one another, neither is valued considerably more than the other.

Pastoralism

Rustle up some cows, chickens, or chocobos (no, these aren’t the three C’s of production). Pastoralism is all about animal husbandry as your primary method for putting food on a plate. Cultures that utilize large-scale pastoralism often have special relationships with their animals. For example, in India, cattle are considered sacred. The ancient Israelites, in the Torah, considered the slaughtering of certain animals an act of great sacrifice. Some cultures even have prohibitions on eating the animals they tend, as seen in India, Ancient China, and Ancient Japan.

Pastoralists also use a number of products from animals to fulfill their needs beyond simply eating them. For example, cultures like the Mundari tribe of South Sudan use cattle urine to dye their hair and take advantage of the antibacterial properties of the urine to fight infection.

If you consider pastoralism in your fictional world, remember that some animals need large swaths of land to subsist. What are the costs and benefits of raising those animals? Pastoralism also requires knowledge of the animals’ anatomy for when they get sick. In the Bible, shepherds would sleep outside with their flock during the springtime to help with the animal birthing process. Remember that pastoralists not only make things from their animals, but also for those animals. Have you ever tried to ride a camel without a saddle? Don’t.

Pastoral cultures tend to practice polygyny (multiple women married to one man), because this provides more help with animals and food production. Animals need a tremendous amount of care, and having multiple wives (and, consequently, many children) means a great many people to provide that care. Gender stratification is often very high in pastoral societies because a distinction is drawn between who owns the animals and who cares for them. Far greater weight is placed on ownership, which is the purview of the men, than care, which is women’s and children’s work.

Horticulturalism

Horticulturalism is essentially farming, although it is not quite the same as agriculture. The difference between horticulture and agriculture is one thing: tools. Things like a plow and draft animal, tractors, fertilizer, or irrigation, are all included in agriculture, but not in horticulture. Horticulture is like a backyard garden, not the sprawling farms of the American Midwest. Horticultural fields tend to be mixed-use, meaning that many different plants are all grown together. The plots are processed by hand or with very small tools like digging sticks or hoes.

What are the costs of horticulturalism? Well, if your crop goes bad, you’re probably in trouble. Though, horticulturists almost always incorporate some degree of foraging and/or pastoralism in their economic systems. Horticulturists also have to protect their territory from raiders or wild animals. This is a key concern of agriculture as well.

Intensive Agriculture

Get out your tools and farm. Another key element of intensive agriculture is the additional surplus, making it easier to manage much larger populations. Intensive agriculture is the central driver of all large-scale civilizations. After all, how can you feed thousands or millions of people in a relatively small area without a great deal of agricultural production? Agriculture is what makes large cities and great monuments possible. The pyramids weren’t possible without agriculture. The Aztecs focused on corn, the Egyptians on grain, the Chinese on rice, and the Incas on potatoes. They grew other things of course, but these staples allowed for larger populations and much more complex societies to thrive.

This might all sound great, and you might ask why everyone wouldn’t naturally endeavor to create intensive agriculture. That’s an answer we will get to in the political systems chapter, as the price of large civilization is much higher than we are used to considering. In fact, as a preview to one of those costs, we are writing this during the outbreak of COVID-19. Plague is one of the major costs of large-scale civilization that isn’t present in small-scale societies. Plague results from high concentrations of people in close quarters. As we know with coronaviruses, some plagues are the result of close proximities of humans and domesticated animals. Disease didn’t exist on the same scale before the invention of agriculture.

Industrialism

Once food is no longer a scarcity, focus can shift to the production of other items. Industrialism is the process by which we make goods outside of subsistence and move into manufacturing. A key element of industrialism is that it is machine driven, so it’s not just a blacksmith making swords, it’s a factory with machines making the device (or book) you're reading this on now. Industrialization began in the 19th century and continues to the present day. There are some key shifts from a subsistence-based economy to an economy based on manufacture. In the systems previously discussed, people set the pace, but once industrialism takes hold, things like automation and machination change the pace of production, and the pace is then led by machines. This creates many implications for the social and cultural life of the people who experience this shift, as well as a compounding of technological development.

The Luddites Were Misunderstood

The word Luddite is often used to describe someone who is afraid of technology or resistant to technological change. Originally, the Luddites were a group of disgruntled textile workers that fought the implementation of new machinery between 1811-1816 in England. They called for the systematic destruction of the machinery, and did their best to carry it out. They are often portrayed as fearful of technology; of standing in the way of progress. But the reality of their world was much more complicated than that. In fact, factory owners were using machines to get around local labor laws and putting these individuals out of work. As the conditions on the ground changed, and automation took hold, it destroyed the economic life of these workers. In fact, one could say, their hatred for the machines that were destroying their lives was perfectly rational. Kurt Vonnegut, in his book, Player Piano, takes on the question of automation from a sardonic and satirical approach. Considering the Luddites, you might ask yourself, what kind of conflicts could happen in your fictional world with the adoption of new technologies? Remember, those who are already in power are more likely able to access and wield new technology and further widen the gap between rich and poor. Consider the accessibility issues people experienced when suddenly forced into learning and working remotely from home during a pandemic.

Industrialism creates new sectors of society and increases the differentiation between wealth and poverty, and has the potential for much greater inequality as a whole. It increases the diversity of the class system and creates heightened specialization. If you are writing about a world that is in the middle of the transition to industrialization, or has a well-established manufacturing system, there are a lot more cultural and economic factors for you to consider in your culture. We will revisit this topic again when we talk about political systems and the formation of states, as the integration of oversight and government intervention is much more complex in industrialism than in the previous economic systems.

Distribution: the movement of human-created goods across the population to the people who will ultimately consume them.

Examples:

Sitting around a campfire and passing out the meat from the day’s hunt

Sharing your crop during a harvest festival with your friends and neighbors

Trucks traversing highways, moving goods from production sites to grocery stores

Distribution has three major modes:

Reciprocity

Redistribution

Market Exchange

Reciprocity

This is the original quid pro quo. Reciprocity is when you share something with someone with the expectation that, in the future, they may return the favor. So, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. That return creates a social tie or obligation; a kind of social debt cycle. When you take your friend out and buy drinks, you create a debt obligation so that hopefully one day in the future they will do something to help you out. This may sound cynical, but in reality, friendship is mired by debt obligation, and friendships and other relationships can rupture when actions are one-sided. Reciprocity usually only happens with people who are of similar status or background, though favors can be traded for a variety of other reasons as well.

Imagine you’re playing an RPG as a magic user and find an item that’s more useful to a warrior class. If your party-member can use this item more effectively than you, it’s beneficial to both of you if you hand it over. In return, your companion may hand over items that are useful for you as a magic user during the course of your relationship. If that exchange breaks down, you no longer have social obligations to one another and ultimately, you may get irritated and stop playing the game together.

A key feature of reciprocity is that it is decentralized. No one person controls all of these resources; instead, people are knit together in a complex web of social obligations and a part of social status arises from the ability to maintain these social ties.

Reciprocity in Action: The Kula Ring

The Kula Ring is a system of symbolic reciprocal exchange practiced around the Trobriand islands. The system hinges on the exchange of mwali and soulava. Mwali are shell armbands, and soulava are necklaces decorated with red shells, both elaborately decorated with beads. The items do not remain in any one place for long. Those who possess them enjoy the prestige of owning a very valuable item, but are also burdened with the responsibility of caring for and eventually passing that item on. Many Kula items have been circulating around the Trobriand islands for generations and have names and illustrious histories.

Twice a year, traders set out to travel to other islands to visit their Kula partners. When a Kula partner arrives, they are welcomed as honored guests with feasts and gifts. They will only come away with a Kula item if they have proven in the past to be both trustworthy partners and generous hosts on their home turf.

The purpose of this exchange is to keep trust and communication open between the islands. Kula partners are treated like family. Not only does this provide the loyalty and faith required for participation in a reciprocal economy, it also means that if anyone is in need, their partners are expected to come to their aid.

In the modern world, Kula is fading. The introduction of a cash economy means that many young people aren’t interested in learning the trade. Art dealers will often pay large sums for Kula items, tempting people to sell them off, even though this means expulsion from the Ring and a mark of shame in the eyes of the other traders. Some anthropologists are working to help bring Kula into the modern world and are helping to buy back items that have been sold.

Redistribution

Redistribution is the act of disseminating resources throughout the community. Taxes are a great example of redistribution in our modern world. A society puts what they produce in a central pot (even if it’s just part of a paycheck) and then the system of governance uses those resources to maintain the society. Without taxes, it is difficult to provide law enforcement, infrastructure, or other means of maintaining a healthy society. A key feature of redistribution is centralized authority. There is often a figure or a group that manages the distribution effort. In our modern world, this is usually the state itself. In small-scale indigenous societies we often find a figure, like the “big men” of Melanesia who manages the redistribution of the resources. There are, of course, many ways that a person can become a big man and many ways a person might find themselves in charge of the redistribution. Cultures vary wildly with how they redistribute resources.

Market Exchange

Most people have visited a market at least once in their life. Whether it was a supermarket chain in the United States, the old Islamic market in Cairo, Egypt, or perhaps a street market in the middle of Monterrey, Mexico. Markets are places where people bring their goods in order to exchange them. It’s most likely that markets sprang up around the same time as intensive agriculture. People working in fields and producing crops ended up with large surpluses and ultimately needed some place to peddle their wares. Thus, markets began.

Markets these days include things like trading on the New York Stock Exchange, commodity speculation, and even flea markets, where you can score some of the sweetest deals on vintage video games.

Barter Societies Never Existed

Famous economist, Adam Smith, once posited that money was a naturally occurring phenomenon that rose up in direct response, at least in part, to the cumbersome practice of barter. The idea was that barter is an inefficient form of social exchange, and that ultimately people settled on money to solve the problem because barter societies were ripe with conflict over trade. The problem with Smith’s theory is that barter societies never actually existed.

Anthropologist Caroline Humphrey and later, David Graeber both examined the myth of barter societies, and a review of thousands of cultures across the planet revealed no evidence of any barter-based societies whatsoever, nor any direct relationship to money. Instead, the cornerstone of economic life seems to have been debt and credit, or rather, the strong social ties formed through daily economic life via reciprocity and redistribution. So, if your fictional world includes a barter society, you may want to think again. Does barter happen? Absolutely, but it appears that barter was used only for enemies or in societies that already had well-established monetary systems. Barter as it turns out, is more necessary in capitalism and markets than other societies.

Consumption

Consumption is the use of the goods created by human production. After the goods arrive in your possession, you use them. That’s a simple definition, and what exactly do we mean by “use?” Words like “consumer” and “consumption” are often thrown around in political and economic discourse. Questions about consumption in a society from an anthropological perspective are more complicated than the simple definition you have probably heard. Who gets to use these objects? What context do they use them in? Are there restrictions about times, places, and people that get to engage in the consumption practice? There are a lot of power dynamics embedded in access to economic life. Gender, race, religion, class, and many more factors all play a part in what someone can and can’t consume on both formal (legal) levels and informal ones. Think about religious prohibitions on food like pork and shellfish: certain cultures choose what they do and do not consume as part of their longstanding identity.

Symbolic Capital

A person’s reputation, prestige, and ability to access certain sectors of society based on credibility is symbolic capital. Think of it this way, you, right now, are reading this book about anthropology and world building because you are either earning a degree (which is a form of symbolic capital to demonstrate your work ethic and level of intelligence) or you are trying to create a more authentic fictional world, and thus demonstrate your skill as a writer, which is also symbolic capital. The English language is rife with idioms like “dress for success” or “dress for the job you want.” Symbolic capital is about credibility, but it’s also about embodying the norms and standards of society. There are people who can break social conventions, but they must have some sort of symbolic capital that allows them that option. Charismatic people and trend setters are examples of those who are able to redefine symbolic capital and turn it to their advantage.

When building a fictional world, you might ask yourself, what are prestigious qualities or objects to have in your society? Researchers have demonstrated on numerous occasions that people who are considered attractive have greater access to many sectors of society. Every society has certain qualities that they think are ideal, and allow those who possess them to get ahead. A question you may want to consider is: what does that look like in your fictional world?

Social Mobility

Social Mobility is the ability in a society to move up. In some cultures, like the traditional Hindu caste system, social mobility was virtually impossible. You were stuck in the station you were born into. In American culture, children grow up hearing about the American dream and the narrative that people should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. These phrases would suggest that social mobility in the United States is exceptional as opposed to other parts of the world, and that Americans are more capable of social mobility than those elsewhere. Unfortunately, Harvard economist Raj Chetty, who specializes in research surrounding social mobility, has demonstrated that not only is the American dream not unique, but actually some countries, like Canada, have near double the social mobility rates that Americans do.

What does this have to do with fictional worlds? Well, it says something, culturally speaking, about a society that social mobility isn’t as prevalent as Americans think it is, yet they still subscribe to those ideas. In part, it has to do with class dynamics between the wealthy and the poor and the narratives about the poor in society. Regardless of the culture, there are always outcasts or those that live on the margins of society. In small-scale communities, these tend to be only a handful of people, but in large states or cities, there tends to be an entire class of people considered to be less worthy of attention or respect.

This is cultural purity at work again. The perceptions of the poor or working class are directly related to concepts of purity surrounding wealth and money. If there is a general belief that wealth comes as a result of simple hard work, then those who have little money or symbolic capital related to money will be considered lazy and unworthy of wealth. This is often why those in poor areas sometimes buy prestige objects that they may not really be able to afford. We might think that those individuals are irrational or spending their money unwisely, but when we consider symbolic capital, is their behavior really all that irrational? These individuals are attempting to “dress for success” by owning objects that appear beyond their means, in order to increase their social status and possibly help them make it out of their situation. At the very least, it makes them feel that they have more power over their present circumstance than they actually do. Remember the three C’s? Well, if we understand the context of the social norms in society, we can begin to understand why those who live in poverty make choices that appear (at least on the outside) to deepen their poverty. A closer look might reveal that their behavior is perfectly rational given social norms. In your fictional world, what behavior of those in poverty appears irrational to those on the top of the ladder?

Trade

We are going to spend a brief moment here on the origins and purpose of trade. Further examination of trade, including foodways and human migration will be discussed in the globalization chapter. We begin here because trade is an important economic activity and is also the root of our modern globalized world.

Trade has been a feature of many cultures throughout human history. Long-distance trade has existed for as long as human civilization. Ancient cultures in Mesoamerica had extensive trade routes that expanded all the way through modern Central America and into what is now the United States for over a thousand years between 350 CE and 1350 CE. Even older, in Asia there was the formal creation of the Silk Road during the Han dynasty of China around 130 BCE, and that is just when China officially opened trade to the west. The route itself is far older than that and was used continuously until 1453 CE. The Silk Road was not a single road, but a number of trade routes and trading centers that fostered trade between Europe and Asia. The world was deeply interconnected long before Europe rose to power, and one of the primary reasons for this was the expansive trade networks that existed around the globe.

What Does Trade Do?

Trade allows greater access to unique goods that a culture may not be able to make or develop on their own. At the height of empires, trade was, and still is, central to the development of new science, medicine, technology, and philosophies. People don’t only trade goods when they are out on their routes; they trade elements of their knowledge and culture with every interaction along the way.

Trade fosters significant cultural change. For example, in his book, In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire, Robert G. Hoyland shows that during the rise of the Islamic Empire, Muslims enjoyed tax-free status. For merchants who regularly traveled through the empire or dealt with Muslims, that tax-free status was appealing. So appealing, in fact, that huge numbers of merchants took on the faith to enjoy the benefits. Ironically, this caused huge problems in the empire because suddenly, seeing the advantages of conversion, (which went well beyond taxes and well into many arenas of social life) huge numbers of people converted, and taxes evaporated. Ultimately, the empire had to remove the tax-free status of Muslims. In many situations, trade fosters significant ideological changes in the experiences and social life of many people.

At its core, trade represents not only the exchange of goods, but of knowledge, ways of knowing, and unique possibilities and experiences. What would Europe be like if they had never discovered gunpowder through trade? Concepts like universities and hospitals were invented in the Islamic Empire and spread to Europe through trade and conflict. It was trade that brought the best minds of the 11th and 12th centuries to the Islamic Empire and fostered scientific and cultural revolutions, not just in that region, but as trade continued, around the entire globe. After all, Europeans still use the Hindu-Arabic numeral system because, well, Roman numerals are terrible for advanced mathematics. They don’t even contain the concept of zero.

When considering real cultures or fictional worlds, it’s important to remember that with trade, cultures come in contact with new ideas, goods, and technologies through the lens of their concepts of purity and imagined past.

Weigh the Costs: Globalization and Economics

As stated above, one of the most important things to consider when either looking out at the world or writing a fictional one is cost. Not simply how much things cost in terms of currency, but what kinds of systems are set up around economics. Fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation may have started to wonder about the central government of the Star Trek world: the Federation. The show touted amazing ideals about exploration and the human (and non-human) experience, but who builds those ships? Where do they get the minerals to build and fuel their faster-than-light warp drives? Are there miners? What is life like for the workers of the Federation? Star Trek is probably as close to a utopia in modern fiction as we get, but what is the cost of a utopia?

In his book, Victims of Progress, John Bodily looks at the various costs to the lives of indigenous people in the face of modern development. He demonstrates that modernization, economic development, and globalization all have a very high price tag for indigenous people. Cultural extinction is a real threat for many and has already happened to hundreds of cultures. The places we now call the “third world” didn’t start out in poverty. A long-standing system of extraction and colonial exploitation that began with European expansion changed the cultural and economic landscape in many places, leaving them without a functioning economy, often intentionally.

Development has a high cost for those whose resources are used for the process, and it’s something you should seriously consider when writing about a fictional world. For someone to win, someone else has to lose.

Things to consider in your fictional world:

What are the primary methods your society uses to acquire energy (remember everything boils down to a problem of energy, even food)?

What commodities are important in your fictional world? What conflict might they create?

How possible is social mobility in your world?

Who are the winners and losers in your economic system?

How does trade work in your world and how does it impact the change in your culture? In other words, what new ideas arrive with traders?

What goods are rare and valued?

What does symbolic capital look like in your world? What can people do to improve their status or hurt it?

Chapter 14

Kinship, Marriage, and Sexuality: How We Persist Across Time

In N.K Jeminson’s Broken Earth series, one of the central themes surrounds a shattered relationship between a mother and her daughter, and a long search to reunite her family in the face of overwhelming odds. Kinship and family can be a powerful avenue to understanding other cultures and other worlds, as well as a mirror on to our own. Unique kinship patterns are strewn across the sci-fi universe.

In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein introduces the concept of line marriage, the idea that throughout generations, a single marriage continues by adding additional spouses with the family's consent. The marriage effectively never ends, and those strong social ties that are established in the original marriage simply shift to the next generation. Divorce in this society is rare, as it requires the consent of all household members, and senior members teach junior members their traditions. In Heinlein’s story, the main character is a part of a line marriage that has lasted for centuries. The primary reason for this system is to maintain close family ties on the tough environment of the moon. Their kinship pattern allows them to persist despite harsh conditions and a lack of resources. The novel is largely about the resistance to Earth’s exploitation of the “loonies,” or those who live on the moon, and one of the strengths of the community is its unique kinship pattern.

It’s important to understand that there are often strong relationships between economic and environmental conditions and systems of kinship. Consider the practice of polyandry (one woman married to several men) present in the Himalayas. The practice acts first as a form of birth control. A woman, no matter how much she has sex, can only be pregnant so often. In a region where fertile land is scarce, and inheritance is an issue, it makes sense that the Sherpas of that region have a different kinship pattern to ensure that their land isn’t divided so much that no one can survive. In other words, their kinship pattern is part of a wider economic strategy to persist.

Conversely, if you are looking to increase your population quickly, you can use polygyny (one man, several women) to increase reproduction. A single man can father many children very quickly. Large families, in general, are often the product of a need to maintain crops or large herds of domesticated animals.

Kinship is the first unit of political life. It is how people organize and make decisions at the most basic level, and determine things like the allotment of rights and roles to the members of a society. This chapter will examine kinship, marriage, sexuality, and child rearing in an attempt to consider a wide variety of experiences and cultural choices in our world. This will not be an exhaustive account of these topics, but is meant to provide a brief introduction, so that as you write your fictional world, you can consider additional varieties of family structures and sexuality.

Descent

The purpose of descent is to ensure the long-term survival of a community. By establishing descent and clear lines of relationships, the community establishes a means to persist beyond the bounds of a single generation. It can also have a deep relationship to the economic activities of the group. There are four major types of descent: unilineal, bilateral, ambilineal, and clans.

Unilineal Descent

Unilineal descent is a system wherein descent is derived from only one side of the family and only through one sex. A famous example of unilineal descent is found in Judaism, which specifically practices matrilineal descent. In this system, Jewish descent is marked by the mother, and the family line is traced through the female side. Other groups that practice this are the Mosuo of China and the Kerala of India. Patrilineal descent, another version of unilineal descent, follows the line of the father, or male side. Cultures like the Hmong of China, Yanomamo of Brazil and Venezuela, and Tiv of Nigeria practice this form of descent.

Bilateral Descent

Bilateral descent is marked by descent from both sides of the family; from both male and female sexes. Many cultures around the world practice this form of descent, including the United States. In this system, both sides of the family are recognized as legitimate ancestors, rather than only those from either the mother’s or father’s side.

Ambilineal Descent

Similar to unilineal descent, ambilineal descent allows an individual to choose which side of the family they will relate to or draw on from their ancestors. This type of system, which lets the individual choose, often helps people to use their descent to strategize political alliances in a way that unilineal does not. Descent is often decided by which residence the individual chooses to live in. Examples of this descent practice can be found with the Maori of New Zealand, the Samoans, and Hawaiians.

Clans

Clans mark their descent not by blood relationships, but by an unknown ancestor, a spirit, or a mythological creature or figure. Groups all over Australia, Melanesia, and Native North America track their descent from a totem, which can be a plant, animal, or place. Groups in China and Scotland track their descent through historical figures who share the same last name. Even though the founder of the clan was a real person, the relationship to the clan members is symbolic and not genetic. In these cases, membership is determined by last name. Clans can also have lineages on both the male side (patriclans) or the female side (matriclans).

Fictive Kin

The category of fictive kin is a relation that isn’t formed either by either blood or marriage. An example of fictive kin in the real world is the House and Ball community, a subset of American LGBTQ+ culture. In this group, Houses are established with a Mother and her Children. There is no genetic relationship between the Mother and Children, but she fulfils a traditional parental role. In Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, the concept of ka-tet (individuals linked by destiny and a kind of supernatural family) is another example of fictive kin.

Why Is Descent Important?

Descent is vital for understanding the rules and obligations one has within a society. This may take the role of economic activities, political activities, or even spiritual ones. Descent systems decide who inherits, who has power, and who can have romantic or sexual relationships with whom. Descent is often one of those things that we all engage in but never think much about.

Marriage

Westerners tend to think of marriage as a byproduct of romance; something you do when you are so in love with a person that you want to make a formal commitment to them. Traditionally, marriage is a much less romantic prospect. Even in the West, it was only very recently that the two ideas became intrinsically tied together. This does not mean that the ideas of love and marriage are foreign to one another, but they do not need to coexist for a marriage to be successful.

Specific definitions of marriage tend to fall short of covering the diversity of the practice cross-culturally. The broadest, and perhaps best, definition is that marriage is a socially recognized contract between individuals that establishes a familial and economic tie. The number of individuals, the presence of law or religion, the gender of the individuals, and many other considerations are more or less arbitrary. Marriage, traditionally and even into the modern world, is usually a business-like prospect, handled with contracts, negotiations, and compromise on all sides.

Why Get Married?

So why do we marry? Obviously, love can be a part of this. In the industrial and post-industrial worlds, marriage often is undertaken for love. Throughout history and in many cultures, however, marriage is undertaken for far more practical reasons. People marry to:

Establish lineage and track the paternity of children

Establish a recognized tie between families

Ensure the distribution of wealth, land, or property between members of the marriage

Ensure social and legal status for members of the marriage

Marriage and the descent of children was especially important before the capability of paternity testing. Many cultures across the world, including, historically, the Vikings, counted a child as being part of the husband’s descent line, regardless of the actual parentage of the child. In cases like this, the marriage contract is clearly not connected to sex or the actual production of children, merely the allotment of them in the family tree. Many cultures actually encourage spouses to have lovers outside of the marriage bond as a way to increase personal fulfillment and relieve tension.

Since marriage forges alliances and political affiliations, the marriage bond may even be more important than the individuals involved in it. Many cultures, such as the Tiv of Nigeria, practice sororate and levirate marriages: the marriage of a sibling of the same gender to replace a spouse who has died. In this way, the marriage bond is kept intact and the participants remain largely unchanged. This can prove useful when property and inheritance require significant negotiation during marriage ties. By keeping things in the family, political and economic alliances do not need to be reforged. Replacing one sister with another or one brother with another keeps familial ties and lineage intact. Some cultures even allow marriage to “ghosts”.

Found primarily in China, ghost or posthumous marriages occur when one partner (or even occasionally both partners) dies before the marriage is performed. These marriages have often been arranged long before the participants are of marrying age, and sometimes even before they are born. A contract that many years in the making cannot be easily broken. The deceased spouse is represented by a dummy or stand-in at the marriage ceremony. In this way, the marriage is completed and both families can fulfill their contractual obligations.

Also found in China is something called walking marriage. The Mosuo, located surrounding Lugu Lake, near the border of Tibet, consists of about 50,000 people, and is often known as “the women’s kingdom.” This society is considered to be one of the last true matriarchies on the planet. Not only are the women in charge of just about everything, but in their marriage practices, they choose a man, and keep him around only as long as they want him. After they feel they no longer have a connection, the marriage dissolves.

Finding a Spouse

In the West, finding a spouse is usually up to the person proposing to get married, while in the rest of the world it is more of a familial affair. Regardless of who is doing the selection, there are cultural patterns that must be followed.

Taboos (social or religious prohibitions) play a large part in who may be selected as a potential spouse. To one degree or another, incest, or the marrying of close family members, is a universal taboo. What counts as incest and who has to adhere to the taboo tend to vary across cultures and even within cultures, usually based on social status. High ranking members of society are frequently immune to the prohibition, as marriage within a royal family keeps wealth and power concentrated. The ancient Egyptians are a classic example of this. Pharaohs were required to marry a sibling to keep power, and in this case godliness, in the family, but common people did not practice this. The royal families of Europe are famous for intermarriage, to the point where genetic abnormalities are rife in the royals and their descendants.

Marriages between cousins are fairly common around the world. Some states in the US prohibit marriage to first cousins, but this legal prohibition is extremely rare. Cultures who trace descent along one sex line or the other often make a distinction between cross cousins and parallel cousins for purposes of spouse selection. A cross cousin is the child of a parent’s opposite sex sibling (i.e. a mother’s brother’s child) and is not considered close enough kin to fall under the incest taboo. Parallel cousins are the children of a parent’s same sex sibling (i.e. a mother’s sister’s child) are considered too close and are excluded from marriage.

Endogamy is the practice of marrying within a group, usually a religion or class. It can be codified or a matter of convenience. When endogamy is codified, it is practiced to keep a group pure. Many religions do not allow marriage outside of said religion, and historically, Indian caste members and US races were not allowed to marry outside of their groups. While both caste and race exogamy have been legally allowed in the modern day, they are still infrequent as a matter of custom.

When we say that endogamy can be a matter of convenience, we are applying it primarily to love matches. People tend to date and fall in love largely within their own social spheres. Even if it is not expressly forbidden for someone to marry outside of their race, religion, or social class, the odds of meeting a compatible mate outside of these groups are still very low.

Exogamy is marriage outside a group. This is usually practiced with clans or chiefdoms, where the whole group is considered kin, and therefore falls loosely under the incest taboo. Exogamy can also be a way of increasing inter-group cooperation, and can ensure gene mixing. An interesting example of exogamy is linguistic exogamy. Practiced by the Tucano people along the Amazon in Colombia and Brazil, this practice states that it is considered incest to marry someone who speaks the same first language as you. To enter into a marriage, the spouse must have a different primary language. Keep in mind that in these cultures, almost everyone is a polyglot, so speaking numerous languages is not unusual.

Courtship or Arrangement?

Traditionally, in the majority of the world, marriages are arranged by older family members. Even in the West, this was the norm until the early 20th century. There are still vestiges of this practice in the custom of asking permission from a bride’s father before proposing. Arranged marriages remain the norm in much of the Pacific, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. It is important to note that an arranged marriage is distinct from a forced marriage. There are plenty of places in the world where forced marriages are still practiced, but this is not the typical pattern. A normal arranged marriage involves consent from all prospective spouses, but the primary brokers behind the marriage are usually parents, grandparents, and/or legal guardians.

Marriages are arranged by elders because young people are often considered too impetuous and inexperienced to decide on something so important as a spouse. Elders put a great deal of thought, planning, and research into their potential selections for spouses, then allow the prospective spouses to approve or veto their choices.

Arranged marriages have a much lower rate of divorce than courtship marriages, and often report greater feelings of companionship and contentment than love matches. In one sense, there is a chicken-and-egg question with the low divorce rates: Do societies with a lower opinion of divorce anyway tend to practice arranged marriages, or do arranged marriages naturally end in divorce less frequently? The answer is probably “yes” to both questions to one degree or another. Families arrange marriages because they view the union as too important to be left in the hands of the participants alone, while individuals in arranged marriages go into the union with an expectation of compromise. They understand that they will need to work to build a life of companionship and cooperation with the relative stranger with whom they betrothed, and this expectation eventually leads to a strong bond. Romance, love, and affection come later, but most often arrive in due time.

Love matches, or marriages that are brokered exclusively by the intended participants with no family direction, are relatively rare. They are becoming more common, however, as globalization and Western media spread.

Who’s Marrying Whom?

Much of the industrialized world thinks of marriage as being between two people. This form of marriage is called monogamy. Monogamy is primarily found in traditional foraging groups, as well as in industrial and post-industrial societies. In areas where this form of marriage is common, people will still frequently have more than one spouse in a lifetime. This practice is called serial monogamy and occurs usually after a divorce or a death. Polygyny, or a marriage between one man and multiple women, is common in pastoral and agricultural societies. This is still practiced in much of Africa and in the Middle East. Societies which practice polygyny are almost universally patriarchal and track descent through the male line. Polyandry, or a marriage between one woman and multiple men, is very rare. It is found primarily in the regions around the Himalayas, where farmable land is scarce. The husbands in polyandrous relationships are usually brothers (known as fraternal polyandry). Descent in these cultures can be traced either through the male or female lines (male if the husbands are brothers), and are sometimes matriarchal.

Bridewealth and Dowry

Bridewealth and dowry are the exchange of gifts from one family to another that accompanies a marriage. Bridewealth is common across Africa and consists of gifts and compensation from the groom’s family to the bride’s. This is seen as a way to compensate the bride’s family for the loss of a family member and as a way to ensure the groom can care for the bride and any future children.

Dowry is the payment of money or gifts from the bride’s family to the groom’s. It is common throughout India, even though compulsory dowry is illegal there. This remuneration can be either used to help the bride and groom establish a new home or to compensate the groom’s family for the addition of a family member to care for. Dowry was common in the US and Great Britain, particularly in the middle and upper classes, until fairly recently. Even today, US custom holds that the bride’s family should pay for the wedding; a holdover from the dowry tradition.

Sexuality

Sexuality is a controversial topic, simply because it’s often bound up in dogma and law. Views on sexuality in the West stem primarily from the codified discrimination against homosexual behavior, which made sodomy and cross-dressing illegal, and the research of Alfred Kinsey, who studied American sexuality in the 40s and 50s and created the famous Kinsey Scale. The Kinsey Scale described human sexuality as existing on a spectrum, although its primary focus was a contrast between two poles. These early lenses tended to give people a binary view of sexuality; a dichotomy between homosexual and heterosexual. A cross-cultural look at sexuality, coupled with a more modern look at queer theory, proves human sexuality and sexual behavior is much more complex than early American theory would lead you to believe.

Sexuality is an interesting topic, too, because for most of human history, it has been entirely decoupled from discussions of marriage. In fact, the topics of love and sexual preference (as it applies to sex) for purposes other than reproduction have also been separate from the topic of marriage until very recently. The idea that marriage can be a byproduct of love and sexual attraction fundamentally changes the conversation, and must necessarily include discussions of sexuality.

Cross-cultural, traditional ideas of sexuality vary enormously. Because of this decoupling from marriage and procreation, many early anthropologists failed to notice any homosexual behavior simply because it was rarely brought to their attention. When you consider that most homosexual behavior in the past occurred outside of marriage, you realize just how much of it must be absent from the cultural and historical record. It would be lost in the gray area of “things done behind closed doors” and never recorded at all. Not all homosexual behavior falls into this category, however.

Dozens, probably hundreds, of cultures have some culturally sanctioned form of same-sex behavior. In Suriname, despite strict post-colonial religious stricture that forbids same-sex behavior, unmarried girls, at least historically, frequently engaged in “mati work”. Mati work is a sort of partnership between women that involves emotional and domestic support in addition to a sexual and romantic relationship. The women in these partnerships are frequently also in relationships with men and most go on to marry men later in life. Several cultures across Africa had traditional marriages between women. A now-outlawed practice in New Guinea mandated that young boys should have sexual relations with adult men as a way to reach manhood, a practice that was also found in ancient Greece. In ancient Sparta, a new bride would often dress as a man for her husband. This was thought to increase sexual desire (as male Spartan soldiers regularly engaged in sex with one another in order to form deeper bonds) and produce stronger offspring. Humans have been engaging in non-heterosexual behavior for as long as we have been recording it and in every corner of the world. Remember our discussion of imagined past? Obviously, the way we think about “how things have always been” reflects the status quo in sexuality, just like every other aspect of culture.

Ideas of same-sex behavior and attraction have changed dramatically in the last century as Western ideas of sexuality have spread globally. Anti-homosexuality laws in Africa are the direct result of colonial rule, and much of the homophobia found on the continent is a legacy of American Evangelicalism. Gay rights movements in Asia, Europe, and Africa are also modelled after the gay rights movements in America and Britain.

But where do Americans and Western Europeans get their ideas of sexuality? Most of these concepts date back to the 18th and 19th centuries. Sodomy (anal or oral sex, most commonly used to describe sex specifically between men) was illegal and considered deviant, but florid displays of emotion and affection between same-sex friends was normal. Sex between two women was barely considered, and when it was, it was often thought of as just a natural expression of friendship and not really “sex”. In fact, we don’t see discussions of sexuality at all until the very end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.

It wasn’t until the creation of the word “homosexual” in its modern context in the 1880s that we see normal (non-pathological) sexual attraction being discussed. It is from this point that we begin to see the dichotomous nature of heterosexuality and homosexuality taking shape. Remember that culturally, there were only two genders in Western Europe and America at this time. Since these genders corresponded directly and immutably in the cultural mind with biological sexes, ideas of sexuality naturally formed into a binary state: you could be attracted to the same sex/gender, or the opposite. The term “bisexual” was not used in the context of sexuality until the 1880s. Kinsey’s research broadened the boundaries slightly, but he was still operating within the two-gender system.

The gay rights movement began in earnest after the Stonewall uprising in 1969. The increasing visibility of not only gay, but also bisexual and trans people in the media led to an expansion of people’s definitions of the queer community. The legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States in 2015 and the ongoing gender revolution has also altered the discourse. Differences in language have had an impact as well. Early on, everyone who was not cisgender or heterosexual was lumped into the “homosexual” category, regardless of their actual attractions. Stonewall gave us LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans). New and expanding terminology, as well as greater understanding of sex, gender, and attraction have now given us LGBTQI+ (queer, intersex, and more) and, increasingly, just “queer”, a former slur, has been reclaimed as a term of pride and as a descriptor for anyone outside of the cisgender and straight categories.

The numbers of people within the queer category has ballooned in recent generations. In a 2015 study, only 48% of respondents in Generation Z identified themselves as completely heterosexual. While gender and sexuality are not coupled in any way, the gender revolution adds diversity to the discussion of sexuality because it’s impossible to use strictly binary labels in a society with such a wide variety of genders. It is now also more widely understood that sexuality is fluid and not immutable.

Why this massive change then? There are myriad reasons. Legalization of queer behavior has allowed for far greater personal exploration, and a diversity of terms has given people the power to define themselves in more nuanced and accurate ways. Greater visibility has allowed people to understand that there is variation in sexuality and given them the ability to recognize it in themselves.

None of this happens in a vacuum, however. When we look at human behavior throughout history and across cultures, the most likely explanation for the proliferation of diverse sexual expression is that it’s simply a natural human trait that our culture is now allowing space for. People haven’t changed; their cultural environment has.

Things to consider in your fictional world:

How does your kinship structure relate to the environmental and economic conditions of your world?

How do your characters fit into these models?

What forms of marriage do you employ and how does this relate to the descent of your culture?

Who inherits what and why?

What forms of sexuality are practiced in your society? How does this relate to myth and norms?

Chapter 15

What Is Government Good for? Political Systems and Social Control

If you take a trip to any social media platform, it probably won’t be long until you see someone who talks about how terrible or oppressive government is. The idiom, “close enough for government work” is frequently used in fiction and sometimes in daily life. It’s a snide critique of the inefficiency of bureaucracy. You will also be privy to plenty of debates over the size of governments, and which arenas they should or shouldn’t be involved in.

In reality, though, many governments of the world do a lot of the things we take for granted daily. They maintain roads and infrastructure, they regulate and support education, they maintain parks and public spaces, and they help to maintain the infrastructure of our water, internet, and power. Governments come in all shapes and sizes, from small-scale informal political systems in bands to complex multi-level governments in states and countries. This chapter will explore the key elements of what governments must do for a functioning society. Further, it will examine the nature of social control and surveillance and their function across cultures and societies.

Political Integration and Organization

No society in human history is inherently peaceful. Every individual in a society has different skills, abilities, inclinations, and limitations. Each society puts more or less focus on those differences. No society is free of conflict or social strife. A key question to consider in building a fictional world is: How does your society deal with these things?

Part of the process of enculturation into a society is to help unify and create some semblance of basic rules for behavior and action. In other words, cultures spend a lot of time, in the formative years, teaching their children how to function in society. But what does functioning in society mean? How do you know what is acceptable? Who gets to decide? How do we deal with disputes? Distribute resources? Enforce laws? Political systems, both formal and informal, help integrate society and keep it functioning.

In the early 1960s, Elman Service introduced anthropology to a kind of typology of political organization. He examined types of leadership, systems of social integration and cohesion, the degree of formal control over individuals, and decision-making mechanisms. Through these examinations, Service determined that there four major types of political organization: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states.

Other anthropologists came up with similar models and alternative systems for analyzing political organization, but Service’s version, first published in his 1962 book, Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective, is the best remembered and the most widely used today. It’s important to note that this system isn’t always an easy fit. Think of these typologies as a spectrum rather than distinct and clear-cut organizations. These four typologies constitute a starting point for understanding a political system and how it organizes itself in both formal and informal ways.

Typically, the larger and more complex the society, the more deeply integrated the political structure need be. This means that having a small, informal government isn’t going to work very well for a city of a million people, but it might work very well for a village of a few hundred. When looking at political systems, anthropologists often ask, “how integrated is the political system with other aspects of society?” In constructing a fictional world, it’s important to do the same.

Before we describe each of these four categories, it is important to note that these do not represent an evolution in human organization. States are not the pinnacle of societies that all cultures seek to become a part of. In fact, in The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, James C. Scott argues that some bands and tribes, who were originally part of a state, broke off and left to form their own societies and practice what he calls “state avoidance,” meaning they have rejected the political organization of the state.

Each of these systems of political organization has costs and benefits, and are built to reflect the needs of a given society in their particular context. These different systems also clash and influence each other, as will be discussed in later chapters when we discuss violence, colonization, and globalization.

Band

Bands are the smallest and most informal political system, as well as the oldest. Bands center around foraging, and are often loosely organized by kinship structures. They have very little specialization and are mostly egalitarian. Most bands consist of numbers between 20 to 100 people. Leadership is often informal, usually consisting of elders, who gained prestige through life experiences, but bands are almost always ruled by consensus. In a band society, social control is usually maintained by shame, gossip, and avoidance. In extreme cases, punishment usually takes the form of death or exile.

Tribe

Still largely informal social organizations, tribes are more complex and larger than bands. Often, tribes form around elements like food production. Since tribes are larger, they can no longer simply forage and engage in practices like horticulture and pastoralism. As such, tribes often engage in redistribution and reciprocity to ensure that every member has what they need. It is important to note that tribes are decentralized in their organizational structure. No one leader rules over everyone in their society, but there may be elders in each aspect of the culture (such as war, fishing, animal husbandry, art, music, ritual, etc.) that provide some degree of leadership and the transmission of knowledge. In fact, one of the conflicts that Europeans found as they encountered tribal organizations was the lack of an overarching leadership for the entire society.

When enforcing rules and norms, tribes, like bands, still rely on the same informal mechanisms of control, but tribes, with their larger population and more complex societies, must have some formalized rules. Punishments in tribal societies are more varied than simply exile or death. With more people, there is naturally more enforcement of the law. Tribes also often utilize impartial mediators for conflicts that erupt between multiple parties to settle disputes.

Chiefdom

Often centralized and larger in population than a tribe, a chiefdom utilizes more formal political integration. Chiefdoms are likely the first societies in which centralized authority took hold. They can exert this power through economic, social, and religious institutions and may hold sway over several communities. Chiefdoms may still practice horticulture and pastoralism, but they most often utilize agriculture. The only recorded instance of a chiefdom primarily using foraging as their economic system was in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. This was because the Pacific Northwest was one of the richest areas in the world in terms of food, in no small part thanks to annual salmon runs.

With more people, centralized power, and organization, chiefdoms also have much more specialization and more social stratification. Different groups and professions have more or less value than others. Ranking can often be based on kinship patterns.

Chiefdoms were also the first to introduce taxes. These taxes weren’t always monetary, but were made up of the specializations of different groups in the community. At least a portion of these tributes was expected to go back out into the community to help maintain the society. Chiefdoms also first practiced and enforced more formalized laws and legal systems.

State

States are large and centralized entities that control many people and large amounts of territory. In a state, ranking is no longer based on kinship. Instead, states organize through various levels of bureaucracy. States often include many different cultures, ethnic groups, languages, and classes. Specialization of leadership is important in a state, as it helps the efficiency of organizing large groups of people and resources.

When you think of government, you probably think of democracy, monarchy, or oligarchy; all of these are examples of states. States organize in different ways, but they always contain a strong centralized authority.

It’s More Complex Than That...

Those four categories are good jumping-off points for understanding how humans organize themselves in political systems. The reality, however, is that most states also have functioning bands, tribes, or chiefdoms inside their borders and boundaries. In the United States, there have been numerous debates over the level of sovereignty for Native American tribes when both the state and the federal government are involved. The history of the relationship between Native American communities and the American government is full of wars, laws, legal ethnic cleansing, Supreme Court cases, and numerous important individuals advocating for each society. So, while Native Americans organize themselves in different political structures, they have, as of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, a democratically elected tribal government. It would be hard to look at each Native American culture and decide exactly where they fit under the four above categories of social organization, and Native Americans are not unique in this. Numerous indigenous cultures are in constant political and economic conflicts with the state in which they reside; a state that they almost never voluntarily joined. Groups like the Nuer or the Maasai who live in territory across multiple countries' borders, routinely face conflict to maintain their way of life under different territorial constraints.

When you are considering what type of political organization you want to use for your fictional world, consider the capabilities, limitations, and potential conflicts that might surround each one of them, especially when they begin vying for power against one another.

Case Study: Thinking About Poop

To understand the role and formation of political systems, one of the easiest examples to start with is sanitation.

Consider each of the four kinds of political organizations above. In a band society, when you need to poop, you simply find a spot a little outside your community, lean against a tree or dig a hole and go. In a state, however, you would have a very serious health crisis if everyone did that. This is why any city must include sanitation as one of their primary concerns. But sanitation goes far beyond just flushing a toilet or a few pipes. You need the materials to build the facilities, including things like porcelain, plastic, rubber, wood, steel and other goods. All of those things must be managed and organized to ensure the human rights of the people who make them. Next, you have to lay miles and miles of pipeline and set up a water treatment facility. Don’t forget, you need toilet paper, chemicals to clean that facility (or else risk disease), and of course people to do the work. Every moment of every day, thousands of people in each city maintain the infrastructure for sanitation, both directly and indirectly.

These are the kinds of things that governments in states must deal with daily. The more complex a system becomes, the easier for something to go wrong. States cannot have small governments and sustain themselves. Fire, police, infrastructure, housing, roads, power, telecommunications, and so on all have to be maintained and regulated, and many of those things aren’t very profitable endeavors that the private sector is willing to take on. People joke about the inefficiencies of bureaucracy, but the truth is, every one of these systems has a host of moving parts and a failure in one of these systems could cause other elements to fail. To contemplate these complex systems further, consider picking up a copy of the book Thinking in Systems: A Primer by the late Donella Meadows.

Agency

These are the kinds of things that governments in states must deal with daily. The more complex a system becomes, the easier for something to go wrong. States cannot have small governments and sustain themselves. Fire, police, infrastructure, housing, roads, power, telecommunications, and so on all have to be maintained and regulated, and many of those things aren’t very profitable endeavors that the private sector is willing to take on. People joke about the inefficiencies of bureaucracy, but the truth is, every one of these systems has a host of moving parts and a failure in one of these systems could cause other elements to fail. To contemplate these complex systems further, consider picking up a copy of the book Thinking in Systems: A Primer by the late Donella Meadows.

Social Control

Michel Foucault wrote in his book, Discipline and Punish, that every system of power has the same problem: that those in power must exercise that power at the lowest possible cost. This is true of societies of every scale. Every stable society must find ways to exercise power and maintain the status quo. Much of this is done by creating norms, creating imagined past, and concepts of purity. Different societies will use different methods for maintaining power.

Power and Resistance

For every system of power, there is always pushback. Consider a typical teenage experience in many cultures: The child coming to self-awareness pushes back against authority figures and ideas they are exposed to. It’s natural to push back against authority, test the borders and boundaries of that authority, and ask questions about social norms. People are not passive creatures, but rather active ones that are constantly taking ideas and remaking them in ways that make sense to their context, conditions, and choices.

Within a culture and various subcultures, there is the constant tension between preserving the old order and transforming society. This is amplified when new technologies, religions, ideologies, or goods are introduced to society. Think of the various apps that come out for your smartphone each year. Inevitably, a few of them stick around for the long term and change the way we relate to our technology and each other.

Dystopian fiction often deals with cases of power and resistance. The Hunger Games, 1984, Brave New World, The Maze Runner, all deal with the relationships of a corrupt system and the pushback against it. Much screen time and page space has been dedicated to asking questions about authority, rebellion, and the rights of individuals.

In our world, activism and civil rights movements around the world (not to mention full-blown rebellions) are part of a renegotiation of the status quo and the everyday norms we experience. Most of the battles you see on social media are between individuals who want things to stay the same or are remembering a glorious past, and those who are pushing back against those norms for a wide variety of reasons. Of course, it’s not so simple as old vs. new, as every individual within a culture will have different ideas of what is okay to change, and what isn’t. Much of the world's conflicts, and therefore much of our fiction, center around disputes of power and resistance.

Power is the complex and interchanging control and domination based on unequal and dynamic relationships. A key point here is: power must be constantly renegotiated. If a king decides to stop paying his guards and military, he won’t last very long. So, the status quo and the norms must be maintained, or else they change. We do this through various mechanisms such as gossip, rumors, shaming, surveillance, morality, law, and even our conscience. You may not have considered it before, but your conscience is culturally constructed by a lifetime within your culture, and the things that may make you feel guilty or ashamed aren’t necessarily universal.

Social control and power are often thought of as inherently negative things, but the truth is, they are tools for political integration. Without some degree of social control, society would collapse. But, like any tool, social control and power can be used for good or ill.

A Serious Game

The definition of power above may sound sinister, but we are constantly playing games of power in just about every avenue of our life. In an attempt to understand the constant transformations, forces, and formations of both daily social interactions and large-scale political organization, Sherry Ortner highlights a concept called “serious games” in her book, Anthropology and Social Theory. “Serious games” is the idea that we are all in games of power through much of our life.

To understand this, consider the power dynamics and the games you must play whenever you go on a first date. One of the reasons first dates are often so uncomfortable is because you aren’t sure where either party stands. Parties have to negotiate where and what you eat. How do you arrive at the destination, and who chooses it? Who will speak, and why, and of what topics? Where does each person stand on politics, religion, gender, etc., and of course, will there be physical intimacy? Numerous elements are going on here, but a good first date will find both people negotiating all of these power dynamics well, while a bad first date will have lots of conflict. This is how we function on many levels of society and in many scenarios. Consider some of these dynamics as you write your world and what each of those conflicts means for your characters. For example, if you have characters with very different backgrounds and experiences who suddenly find themselves allies, they should experience discomfort as they navigate this new relationship, as anyone would in that situation.

Media Systems and Political Power

Media is a complex system of power and resistance in its own right. Over the long term, media can significantly reinforce dominant stereotypes and cultural norms or change them. Most stereotypes about different populations come from repetitive portrayals of specific populations. Media systems can either cast a critical eye on those in power or reinforce norms. Again, this isn’t always an either/or situation; sometimes it’s both. Looking around the world, we can see a large difference between state-based media and independent or private journalism. Of course, there are many kinds of media, but for our purposes here, we are going to discuss the two kinds of media that most directly impact political power.

State-Based Media

Media that is controlled by the state is around for one primary purpose: to further the interests and aims of those in power and reinforce norms and the status quo. Much of state media requires approval, either overtly or covertly, from the state itself. State-based media twists facts and creates propaganda that supports the established system of power. Countries like North Korea, China, and other oppressive governments have regularly used state-based media to help consolidate and maintain their power.

Journalism

On the other end of the media spectrum is journalism. The core ethics of journalism include things like holding those in power accountable, making information accessible to as many as possible, translating different topics, and providing a balanced approach by including multiple sides of a story. The purpose of true journalism is to push back against systems of power, and a free press is essential to a democratic society. Of course, journalism is significantly impacted by capitalism, a fact that Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman discuss at length in their book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media. Journalists are also a product of their context and conditions, and despite the passions and desires of many journalists to tell the truth and expose those in power, they are embedded within a system that provides numerous restrictions on what they can share or report on.

Much of the American media system is a bit of a mix of both, with some news outlets and talk show hosts leaning one direction or another. Consider all the misinformation spread in the 2016 elections, including wild conspiracy theories on YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. How about all the misinformation surrounding COVID-19? The way to know which is leaning towards state media, and which leans towards journalism, is to determine which is critical to those in power, and which supports it.

Social Media: A Game Changer?

In the book Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet against Democracy, Robert W. McChesney explores the relationship between the political, economic, and social situations surrounding the internet. He covers the narratives surrounding both the positive and negative elements of the internet, as well as key conversations about net neutrality and the consolidation of power on this newer form of technology.

The internet, and social media in general, is a complex web of social negotiations, just like any other part of culture. On one hand, people use the internet to spread fake information or reassert cultural norms; on the other hand, it provides a new avenue for expression and conversations that were only previously possible in face-to-face community encounters. The internet itself is a complex interplay of cultural norms, attitudes, and attempts to control a wide variety of narratives (regardless of your beliefs or political inclinations), and it’s important to consider the fact that the internet, like any other system, is a reflection of the wider and holistic elements of society.

It’s clear that media is a component of political power and social control. Ideally, media is a place to question authority and uphold governmental values, but all too often, media becomes an arm of politics; a way of legitimizing state power and violence. How and what news spreads is something you should definitely consider when constructing your fictional culture; one that should reflect the kind of political and economic systems your culture engages in.

Things to consider in your fictional world:

What is the size of your society and how integrated is it? Does it fit into one of the four basic political systems?

What types of everyday power (think of the dating example) are employed in your world?

What economic strategies are employed by your world and how are they managed by the political authority?

How does media, gossip, or other mechanisms support or resist the power structure?

What kind of surveillance does your world employ? How does that impact daily life?

Who resists the established political authority? Why?

Chapter 16

Studying the Sacred: Religion and Mysticism

Religion may be the most difficult thing to approach in understanding diversity. Everyone, religious or not, has their own particular beliefs and thoughts about how the world is structured. Even atheists frame the world through science. This is not to say that science and religion are the same things; far from it, but the same kinds of mechanisms that structure the secular world also structure the religious one.

When asked about the number of the world’s religions, most people would give you a number that ranges from a handful to perhaps the upper limits of a few dozen. However, with a more focused look at societies around the globe, what we realize is that there are well over 6,000 distinct religious traditions. Keep in mind, this doesn’t include denominations of religions, as there are roughly 200 formalized denominations of Christianity in the United States and hundreds more less formal ones. When asked about the various kinds of religion, many people in the Western world revert to a Western framework, and look only at the major religions, known as “world religions”. World religions, however, are just one flavor of religion. In this chapter, we will explore a lot of the misconceptions about religions and some of the key elements that you should consider when building a fictional religion, or even including a real religion in your fictional world.

One key thing to understand about anthropologists’ exploration of religion: as a social science, we aren’t all that concerned with truth or fiction. In other words, our investigation doesn’t usually ask if something is real or not, but rather, what are the social implications of the practice or tradition? How do they structure norms in society? What happens when new technologies or experiences mix with the religion? What things do all religions do?

Moving Beyond Rationalism

It’s time again to repeat our mantra. It’s almost a spiritual thing, isn’t it? Remember, you don’t have to like it, but you should try to understand it. But here’s the thing; as Bruce Kapferer pointed out in his article, Outside All Reason: Magic, Sorcery, and Epistemology in Anthropology, if we limit ourselves to using only rationalistic arguments when trying to explain religious practices we don’t understand, we risk further misunderstanding. It’s easy to forget that things like logic, reason, and rationalism are also culturally constructed. That doesn’t mean that facts aren’t facts, but it does mean that if we want to understand another worldview, especially a spiritual one, then we can actually be constrained by reason. The best thing to do, as always, is to try to view things from the point of view of the culture itself. This is why, when we do field research in anthropology, we practice participant observation, and do all the things the culture does to the best of our ability. If you truly want to understand someone else’s spiritual practice, trying it out for a while is probably the best way to do that. That’s not possible for all of us, of course, so the next best thing is to try to understand the good old three C’s in relation to religion. Remember, a lot of the things we do come down to cultural identity, imagined past, tradition, and notions of purity, even if they don’t make any rational sense.

Religion and Environment

One key factor to consider when examining a religion or building a fictional one is the environment in which the religion emerges. For example, if you have a culture where their primary mechanism of subsistence is fishing, there may be spiritual elements within water and fishing. If you’re a desert dweller, your afterlife, like in Islam, may look like an oasis full of water. In many cultures in Central America, corn (maize) was considered sacred, and there was a great deal of spiritual practice in planting, harvesting, and even making tortillas.

In the fictional universe of Dune, even shedding a tear for the dead can be a profound and sacred act on the desert planet, Arrakis. The main character, Paul Atreides, discovers this when he, a man from a planet with many oceans, weeps over the dead. The fictional desert-based culture known as the Fremen are shocked because, on their planet, water is so important, they literally wear a suit that recycles sweat and even the moisture in your breath. The need for water is so dire that when someone dies, the body is put in a machine that drains the fluids and the water is recycled. So, when Paul, a man from a land of plenty, sheds tears for the dead, all are shocked and consider him to be a very generous and spiritual person.

Remember, culture is holistic, and religion will naturally integrate with other elements of culture. The opposite is true as well; elements of religion help to structure culture.

The Limitations of English and Western Culture

A huge part of the problem in understanding religion is that we forget that the very way we think about religion is both cultural and linguistic. Numerous terms and concepts in religions simply don’t translate to all languages or cultures. Further, in Western cultures, there is a common idea that things like higher powers/deities, faith, or belief are essential components to a religion. They aren’t. The reality is that belief in higher powers is actually in the minority of the world’s many religions. Faith is a component of a particular kind of religion, and the problem with belief is that it assumes that you have to have a religion that has a kind of subscription model in the first place. There are many religions that do not allow conversion, or at least, they have no concept of changing religions. For many indigenous religions, for example, spiritual life isn’t really something that is separate from the daily experience. That doesn’t mean they don’t have concepts of spiritual experiences vs. mundane experiences, but they don’t have the option to choose a different religion.

Often, in discussions about some of the Eastern religions like Buddhism, Confucianism, or Taoism, you may hear people say that they aren’t religions, but rather philosophies and practices of life. This is categorically untrue. The reason people make this claim is often because they feel like religions must meet the criteria handed to them by Western culture, disregarding the broader functions of what a religion does. In fact, in the same vein, secular-based societies provide the same functions as a religion, which is why we will include a brief discussion of atheism and antitheism in this chapter, as they also provide a framework for understanding the nature of the universe.

What Do Religions Do?

If you want to create a more authentic religion in a fictional world, you need to know what all religions do. The possible kinds of religion vary greatly, but in anthropology, we have noted several core functions of culture that religions facilitate. Some of these key features include granting agency, social control, legitimation, community/solidarity, and explanation. Each of these functions serve significant roles in society and, of course, integrate with other elements of the culture.

Explanation

Often, people think of religion and myth as a kind of “primitive” explanation of the world. Myths may explain why a rabbit has such a small tail, how humans came into being, or when we were granted the power of speech. But explanation goes beyond just the mythology; it also explains our morals and complex elements of our identity or kinship patterns. This can also be expressed through rituals and rites of passage. Mixed with mythology, ritual helps define clear roles in the culture.

Legitimation

Like explanation, legitimation is an explanation of the world, but more focused on the status quo. The divine right of kings used in European history, or the reincarnation cycle of the Buddhist Lama class is legitimized by religious elements. In other words, religion can work as a justification for the way we order our lives and how power dynamics are structured. After all, those spiritual forces that help to craft the world expect you to maintain their order.

Social Control

In many of the world religions, the deity or supernatural force is watching you, evaluating your every move, and weighing your actions and thoughts. God can be the ultimate panopticon. Along with legitimizing power, religion often acts as a mechanism for social control. The morals and values that are given by explanation create structures deemed as legitimate in society. In turn, these are then enforced with taboos and concepts of purity. For example, some versions of Christianity insist that gay marriage, and homosexuality in general, should be illegal. The Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda actively seeks out LGBTQI individuals and murders them in the name of God, justified by a few passages in the book of Leviticus. This is a more extreme example, but religious specialists, such as priests or shamans, often use spiritual authority to maintain social order or influence formal and informal rules and laws.

Granting Additional Agency

Religion provides a way for people to deal with situations beyond their control. By casting a spell, praying, saying mantras, or other methods of invoking spiritual beings (functionally speaking, these things are all the same thing) people gain a kind of supernatural agency to attempt to deal with things outside of their control.

A spiritual system can alleviate intense suffering. Possession, for example, can allow people to have their basic needs met. Now, you might think it’s all in their head, simply comforting them in a difficult time, but in the case of possession, sometimes the actions of the possessed person can have real lasting outcomes that address their needs. Casting a spell could cause someone to die of a heart attack, and there are many known cases of this. Placebo effect or not, this still has social and cultural ramifications, and changes the power dynamics within a culture. Many studies have shown that if a person knows a community of people is praying for them, they have a greater chance of recovery from a serious illness. Again, whether something is real or not isn’t what matters here, but consider what it does to identity and culture.

Community/Solidarity

Religion can be a unifying factor for those within a group. In a church, sangha, or tribe, there is variation in experience, but with similar spiritual inclinations, you find imagined community. Religion can provide for the social and emotional needs of the community, and it can help act as a form of catharsis for those going through difficult times. Some religions are more individualistic than others (especially New Age and Neo-Paganism) but that doesn’t mean that communities don’t form around beliefs. In the digital age, many of these communities are online as well as in person.

All of the above are some of the major functions of religion. How do these things manifest in your fictional world?

Different Kinds of Intelligence

One question we often take for granted about religion is: what kinds of intelligence are present in the universe? For some religions, such as the monotheistic religions that came out of the Middle East, there is essentially only one kind of creature (beyond the deity of course) that has any serious intelligence within the religion: humans. But with some spiritual traditions, there is a multiplicity of intelligences out in the universe. The rocks, the ocean, the sky, and a wide variety of creatures may have their own will and ability to act. Intelligence and self-awareness aren’t limited to human beings.

Systems that include different types of intelligence besides humans are going to interact with their world differently. If you sincerely believe that the ocean has its own intelligence, you may have a culture that is less likely to dump waste in the ocean for fear of reprisal. Of course, people are people everywhere you go, and just because your religion says not to do something, doesn’t mean you won’t do it anyway. The point here is to consider the different kinds of relationships people will have based on how many intelligences are present in their religion.

Types of Religion or Worldviews

There are numerous types of religions out there, but some of the major ones are worth noting. These different types of religion will naturally have different social organizations and experiences.

Animism - A spiritual tradition that grants agency and intelligence to elements of the natural world.

Totemism - Like animism, agency is present for non-humans, but totemism focuses on specific entities, and extends the idea of kinship to certain beings. In other words, the object of spiritual veneration is considered a kind of supernatural family.

Theism - Veneration of a deity. Monotheism is a single deity. Polytheism is multiple deities.

Pantheism - The belief that all beings are a part of the deity. A good metaphor is that all beings are cells in the body of the deity.

Deism - Spiritual traditions with a creator only. There is no interaction with the deity after the moment of creation.

Atheism - Lack of a belief in a deity or spiritual tradition.

Antitheism - Not only a lack of belief, but a sincere desire to end religion.

Ritual and Transformation

Ritual can be a powerful experience for an individual in a culture. When we think of mythology, we tend to think of reading interesting stories from the ancient past. The reality of these myths is that they were often performed as rituals, reenactments, or purity plays. By creating a ritual surrounding these mythological characters and experiences, much of the cultural knowledge is passed on to the next generations and reasserted within the culture. Rituals can be incredibly useful in marking specific times and transitions in life. Rite of passage rituals, such as a bar mitzvah in Judaism or a quinceanera in Latinx cultures both mark the passage from childhood into adulthood in different ways. Clear-cut rituals that mark these transitions allow for a strong sense of identity and inclusion within the culture. It was Clifford Geertz, in his article, Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example, who suggested that myths provide a framework for understanding the social realities of life. Cultures necessarily have to interact with major life events such as marriage, death, and the transition from childhood to adulthood. Rituals allow for a smoother transition and greater social support of these realities.

Rituals are more than just about individual transitions. In her article Synchronized Arousal Between Performers and Related Spectators in a Fire-Walking Ritual, Konvalinka showed that both spectators and performers in the ritual can have a kind of synchronized physiological arousal, thus deepening social ties and group dynamics.

Sacred Speech and Sacred Texts

Sacred symbols and texts often have significant restrictions around them. For example, it is common in some Native American cultures of the American Southwest to only tell their creation stories certain times of the year. Myth itself is a kind of sacred speech. Religious speech can be used to invoke deities, put oneself in a trance, attempt to alter the nature of reality, or provide a framework for understanding some of the esoteric knowledge available to a culture. Anthropologists can take a prayer and deconstruct it to understand some of the core ideas of that particular worldview. For example, the Lord's Prayer, used in several forms of Christianity, demonstrates some of the core tenets and ideas associated with the religion.

Sacred speech or symbols can mark important sites, provide context for religious practice, and/or convey knowledge to both the participants and the culture. Combined with mythology, sacred speech and texts can reinforce elements of imagined past and the cultural body of knowledge. They can provide guidance or a mental framework during difficult times or transitions. When thinking of religious symbols and speech, think of the relationship between connotative and denotative language we discussed in Chapter 8, as well as how perceptions of reality might be altered depending on the language used.

Religious Specialists

Like any other arena of culture, religion has specialists and experts who create form and structure to practices. In some cultures, like the Piraha of the Brazilian Amazon, or Christian Pentecostal churches, anyone can be a specialist when the moment strikes them. Such religions focus on more spontaneous inspiration and have less of a focus on hierarchy. But many of the world's religions have designated specialists like shamans, medicine people, priests, clerics, nuns, or monks. Victor Turner suggested a range of religious specialists; on one end was the shaman and on the other end was the priest.

It’s important to note that this is not a hierarchy in terms of quality, but in centralization and formality of power. The traditional shaman shouldn’t be underestimated in their knowledge base. Many spend many years training and learning a wide variety of subjects. Shamans sometimes know hundreds of plant and animal species and the various properties they contain for healing physical or spiritual ailments. The biggest difference between these two categories is the formalization of their education. A shaman can vary greatly even from one village to the next in their knowledge, but any Catholic priest receives a standardized education and has a requirement of certain things they absolutely must know in order to carry out their duties. When you think of religious specialists, think of how formalized your society is. If your story takes place in the center of an empire, then the religion is going to have a lot of structure and formality. If it takes place in small villages, then the knowledge the religious specialists will have will vary from location to location in sometimes very significant ways.

Local Religions vs World Religions

In his book, Introducing an Anthropology of Religion, Jack David Eller provides an analysis of the difference between a “local based religion” and a “world religion”. This distinction is important because most of us, when we think of religion, think simply of the world religion.

Just like social organizations surrounding economic and political systems, the scale of the religion, at least when it is unaltered by the process of colonization and conversion, is directly related to the size and scale of the society. Local religions are self-supporting and self-sustaining. In many indigenous societies, religion is not separate from the rest of culture. These small-scale religions often don’t have a concept for conversion and they certainly don’t seek converts. Why would they? For them, their religion is another expression of their wider cultural identity. This is something that Westerners, who are used to being able to choose the religion they want, struggle with and there is a great deal of cultural appropriation (especially for Native Americans) surrounding these spiritual traditions. New Age and self-help guru James Ray discovered the price of cultural appropriation in Native American traditions when, during a sweat lodge ceremony (conducted improperly, as he had no real knowledge of the practice) he killed three people and seriously injured more. He was convicted of negligent homicide and spent time in prison as a result.

No matter how hard you try, you can’t become a member of the Kayapo religion, or the Lakota one, if you aren’t part of those wider cultural traditions. You may get to participate in a lot of traditional practices, but because you aren’t a member of the wider culture, it would be difficult and often even impossible to join a local religion you weren’t born into because religion is deeply intertwined with the rest of the culture.

By contrast, a world religion is something you can convert to or join. According to Eller, a world religion requires the following:

A claim of universality or that anyone can take on the practice. It cannot be a world religion if it is not open to anyone to join.

No direct ties to a locality. In other words, you can’t worship a certain tree or rock and then spread across the globe. You might be thinking of the Kaaba in Islam, but though pilgrimage to it is considered important, it’s not required to consider yourself a Muslim.

It spreads through either diaspora or the process of missionization and conversion. Judaism is a great example of a world religion that focuses very little on conversion. It takes years of intense study to become a Jew if you weren’t born into it. Judaism is spread mainly through the diaspora.

Written texts to provide lasting structure and rules. If you’ve ever played the game of telephone as a kid, you know that word of mouth is a terrible way to provide a formal structure to just about anything.

With world religions, there is already a translation problem, because many concepts and ideas simply don’t translate. When a man named Bodhidharma tried to bring Buddhism to China in the sixth century CE, he discovered quickly that many of the Indian concepts he grew up with didn’t translate into Chinese culture. So, he studied Chinese Taoism and blended the concepts with Buddhism. This created a new version of Buddhism known as Chan, which eventually led to the creation of Japanese Zen. Written texts allow for agreement and structure. It keeps the core tenants of the religion alive and well and clears up confusion and prevents too much change. A world religion could not be successful without written texts.

One thing of note is that there were no world religions before there were empires. World religions are a direct reflection of the expansion of a civilization from a singular place on the globe to an empire ruling territories in a wide variety of places. World religions very likely are a kind of cultural adaptation for dealing with culture on the move in a centralized and organized way.

There is No Universal Religion

All of the world religions make claims to the idea that they are universal; that anyone can understand and convert to them for their spiritual benefit. That’s simply not true. Despite claims, no religion has been universally accepted by all cultures. In fact, many cultures outright reject world religions. The Piraha of the Amazon and the Bosavi of Papua New Guinea are two examples of groups that have actively and effectively rejected Christianity. In Daniel Everett’s book, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, he relays that after two centuries of missionaries spending time with the Piraha, there has not been a single convert. Everett, originally a Christian missionary himself, ultimately became an atheist after his contact with the culture.

A larger example is the nation of Japan. Since the end of the Second World War, many Christian missionaries have traveled to Japan to attempt conversion. But even after seventy years, less than 1% of the population is Christian. Most of the culture has rejected it. It’s true that the American occupation after the Second World War impacted much of Japanese culture, but the faith-based elements of Christianity certainly haven’t become dominant.

If any religion was truly universal, it would arise independently around the globe without the need of missionaries. Universal would indicate that there is something in our core biological makeup that would push us toward a particular kind of spiritual practice. There isn’t. This doesn’t detract from the valuable experiences gained by many practitioners of world religions, but it does indicate that concepts like deities, sin, heaven, hell, and others aren’t universal experiences, but examples of the range of possibilities in the human experience.

Conversion

Eller also demonstrates that even when people convert from a local religion to a world religion, they take elements of their spiritual life with them. For example, all of the Christian holidays connect to Pagan ones. In Catholicism, practices in Mexico, the Philippines, and Ethiopia vary widely. They all follow the tenants of the church, but each culture has different interpretations on how to engage with spiritual life. If conversion is an element in your story, it’s important to consider how the local traditions will integrate or change the growing world religion.

Sects and Political Strife in Religion

Unity in well-organized political systems of religion is not only rare, but short-lived. In fact, both Christianity and Islam had very short periods of unity. For Islam, there were the four rightly-guided caliphs who were the first four leaders of Islam. But conflict and civil war erupted on the fifth leader and split the community into Shia and Sunni. For Christianity, there was virtually no unity at all in the early days. We know this from the various non-canonical texts as well as the letters of Paul in the Bible itself. Then, upon adopting Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire, Constantine commissioned the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE to determine which version of Christianity was the correct one. It wasn’t long until Christendom split into eastern and western factions, and today there is the further Catholic vs. Protestant divide.

We too often forget that culture is holistic, and that if there is political or economic strife in a culture, there will also be religious strife. Because world religions are more formal and have centralized authority, they are also fertile ground for political disagreements and games of power.

Religion and Culture Change

Religious and cultural change generally comes from either innovation (internal changes) or diffusion (external changes). In Christianizing Language and the Dis-placement of Culture in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea, Bambi B. Schieffelin demonstrates the significant cultural and linguistic changes the Bosavi face when Christian missionaries come to town. Their relationship to the jungle, the sky, the kind of dwellings they live in, and even social relationships to each other change. These changes ultimately led most of the Bosavi to forgo the adoption of Christianity.

Another form of change in the spiritual life of a culture is something called religious syncretism. Syncretism is the process whereby, as religions interact, they change one another, sometimes even morphing into a new religion born from two or more separate traditions. A classic example of syncretism is the blend of Islam and Hinduism that created the religion of Sikhism. Drawing on tenants from both traditions, Sikhs have their own distinct religion born out of the blend of the two. When religions interact, even in situations where one is far more dominant, elements of the less dominant religion will inevitably have some impact, even if it’s small. Think of the American traditions of Christmas. Things like wreaths, Christmas trees, gift exchange, and so on, all come for non-Christian traditions and were absorbed by Christianity over time. While this isn’t full syncretism, it does demonstrate that as a religion spreads, it picks up other elements of spiritual practice.

The Ghost Dance: Religious Revitalization

What happens when the old rituals and old spiritual beliefs don’t seem to work anymore? One answer is something called Religious revitalization. A practice you might be familiar with is Christian revivalism. But another example, which was the focus of anthropologist Anthony Wallace, is the Native American Ghost Dance.

During a solar eclipse on January 1st, 1889, a spiritual leader by the name of Jack Wilson of the Northern Paiute Tribe (also known as Wovoka) had a vision. He was told that if he performed something called the Ghost Dance (a modified version of a round dance) then all of the Europeans would head back east, get in boats and sail back to their homes across the Atlantic. Then, the environmental degradation, including the destruction of the buffalo, would vanish, and all would be restored like it was before the Europeans ever discovered the “new world.”

This might sound crazy to an outsider, but to a people who experienced genocide and ethnic cleansing at the hands of Europeans, who lost their land and their connection to their animals and subsistence practices, whose lives were shattered as a result of European invasion, this was very appealing. The practice spread like wildfire across the country. At some point, someone added the idea that if a warrior performed the Ghost Dance before battle their clothing would become bulletproof. This concerned the American military enough that they appealed to Congress and had the practice outlawed.

Other notable revivalists in history include Moses, who, in the face of the oppression of the Egyptians worked to bring his people back to the holy land and restore their connection with their deity. The Buddha was a reformer in a time of a highly ordered caste system, and Jesus’s attempts to revitalize Judaism failed when a new religion was born from his influence. All three of these figures took the spiritual knowledge of the day and attempted to reform and revitalize the traditions because the spiritual life of the culture had fallen into stagnation and disorder as a result of changing circumstances.

Conspiracy, Saviors, and Sacred Land

There is more than one way of dealing with psychosocial stress and significant cultural change in spiritual life. Some groups turn to Messianism; the idea that a savior will come and liberate them from oppression or sin. During the period in which Jesus lived, there were a large number of individuals walking around claiming to be the messiah. Like Jesus, miracles were attributed to many of them and some of them died for their beliefs. In fact, Monty Python’s Life of Brian is about this very phenomenon and was widely protested when it was first released in the 1970s.

Millenarianism (i.e. doomsday groups) are also a phenomenon that happens during times of social upheaval and change. In fact, from an anthropological perspective, the people bemoaning the end of the world are at least partially correct. The world as a whole might not be ending, but their particular version of the world is ending. Culture is always undergoing the process of deculturation and culture loss (as well as gaining new knowledge and ideas), which is natural and inevitable. But, when faced with acculturation, a significant change in economic systems, or a surge in technology, the old practices and spiritual life begins to die, and that particular version of the culture’s worldview ends. This is reflected in the spiritual life of the culture and thus, people claim the world is ending.

Irredentism, the idea of sacred land and an attempt to reclaim that land, is another method of dealing with significant change, especially in cases of oppression. The Ghost Dance, as discussed above, is an example of Irredentism. The modern state of Israel and Zionism is another example.

Conspiracy theory is a kind of modern mythology and a critique of power. Typically, conspiracy theories arise in times of political uncertainty. They allow for a simplistic and easy to understand explanations in the face of the complex processes of history. Another thing that contributes to the rise of conspiracy theories is a poor education system or a lack of a basic understanding of what constitutes good evidence. We also know that many current conspiracy theories surround confirmation bias and are formed in part because it is easier to believe in a simple explanation than to recognize the complex inner workings of culture and power or to overcome your own biases. In the 2016 US election, the pizzagate conspiracy theory (the idea that Hilary Clinton oversaw a pedophilia ring in the basement of a pizza place) was easy for many to swallow because they already disliked Clinton and suspected her of wrongdoing during her time as the Secretary of State.

What About Cults?

How do you know the difference between a religion and a cult? It’s a good question. It’s often true that a new religion in town is accused of being a dangerous cult because it challenges the established order. While a new religion could exhibit cult-like behavior, it doesn’t necessarily make it a cult. In the early days of Christianity, the Romans accused Christians of cannibalism and incest. If you think about it for a moment, those accusations would make sense to an outsider. In early Christianity, people often referred to each other as brother or sister, even if they were in a romantic relationship. Christians talked about consuming the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. From an outsider perspective, both of these things could appear terrifying, and there were plenty of accusations that Christians were a dangerous cult until Constantine adopted the religion for his empire.

We won’t be discussing cults at length, but one of the features of a cult include exploitation by the leadership. This could include financial, physical, or sexual exploitation. It may be social isolation from society or family as well as worship or veneration of the leader. Cults can look a lot like new religious movements, but are often far more dangerous. Cults aren’t only in the domain of religion, but can include political or economic movements. In some cases, network marketing and multi-level marketing systems can manifest as cults.

Mystical Experiences and Culture

A mystical experience is the sensation of direct connection with a supernatural force. The form the mystical experience will take is entirely dependent on the cultural system of the individual experiencing it. A Christian would experience something Christian-related, a Hindu, Hindu-related, and so on. A key component of the experience, however, is that of oneness or loss of self. During one of these experiences, individual identity will significantly lessen, or sometimes cease to be altogether. Individuals who have these experiences often report that they lose track of the borders between themselves and the rest of the world. In other words, they can no longer sense the difference between themselves and others (including non-human things). These experiences often come with a sense of overwhelming joy or significant euphoria. Often, people experience a sense that they stopped thinking altogether, and report afterwards that the experience was lost once they started thinking again.

There is no way to guarantee you have one of these experiences through any actions you take, but some of the ways such experiences are induced are:

Significant physical stress

Starvation/fasting

Near-death experiences

Psychotropic substances

Long bouts of meditation or prayer

Long bouts of dancing or chanting

Extended experiences of pain and suffering

Obviously, all of these things can prove very dangerous and thus, we aren’t recommending you go out and try any of these things. But this is something your fictional characters could experience. These experiences can often bring about lasting transformation in people and change their perspective significantly.

No one knows exactly why humans have mystical experiences. Some speculate that it has something to do with the same processes required for language and abstract thinking, or that it is an evolutionary feature to provide a sense of unity among people. Regardless of the origin, they can create a powerful life-changing event and deep social and cultural bonds.

Are Mystical Experiences Real?

From an anthropological point of view, it doesn’t matter if mystical experiences are real or not. Our chief concern with mystical experience is what they do socially or, if someone claims a mystical experience, how does the culture interpret that?

Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg was among the first pioneers in the study of the impact of religion on the brain. His research demonstrates that even if religious experiences aren’t “real” in an objective sense, they are certainly real in the subjective experience of the person having them. He has documented a number of significant changes from people who engage in spiritual practices for extended periods. While some may scoff or call the experience a delusion, the individual may have a profound and life-changing experience. There is certainly a reason why, in much of the world's mythology and fiction, the hero of the story visits the underworld or has a significant spiritual revelation. These kinds of encounters cause a significant change in the individual, and can sometimes change entire cultures or the whole world. Individuals like Siddhartha Gautama (the historical Buddha) Jesus Christ, Mohammad, and others had mystical experiences. Less distant in history, Malcolm X, a devout Muslim, had a spiritual experience like this on his haj (pilgrimage) to Mecca and returned a very different man, turning toward non-violent protest before he was assassinated.

It’s important to keep in mind that while some cultures support mystical experiences, many, like the United States, do not. Some religions prefer to steer away from these types of experiences, fearing they will bring evil or chaos to their worldview. Other religions, like Hinduism, have a great deal of support and outlets for these experiences.

Mystery Schools

Mystery schools form around empires and are often an attempt to explore and understand esoteric knowledge and mystical experiences. Many of these schools are formed around world religions, but not all have to be tied directly to a religion. While Kabbalah may be a mystical form of Judaism, Freemasons were not directly tied to Christianity, and modern Freemasons only have the requirement that you believe in some sort of higher power. Alchemy (a precursor to chemistry) is present in most of the world religions, which might be related to the development of science and technology intermixed with spiritual experiences. These developments blend to form a relationship between early science and religion. In Islam, Sufism is a mystical expression and takes on many forms of practice; most famously, the whirling dervishes or the work of the famous poet Rumi. For Christians, the Rosicrucians (Order of the Rosy Cross) or Gnosticism suggest that Jesus wasn’t divine, but rather a path unto divinity. Taoist mystics often focus on the search for the “golden pill,” and seek to become a kind of mystical immortal through certain techniques of sexual repression, while Tibetan Buddhists use a wide variety of techniques to reach enlightenment, and the Shaolin Monks dedicate a lifetime to the study of meditation and martial arts.

In fiction, we have examples from Avatar: The Last Air Bender with the Order of The White Lotus. In The Chronicles of the Great Migration, there is the Order of the Eye. In Kung Fu Panda, warriors go to the Jade Palace to master martial arts and study the mysteries. The Bene Gesserit of the fictional Dune universe study all kinds of mystical elements and secretly practice a form of eugenics to bring about their messiah, the Kwisatz Haderach. Fiction is littered with mystery schools, esoteric knowledge, and cults.

Shamans

The term shaman is a catch-all term for locally-based spiritual specialists. The term comes from the Tungus reindeer herders of Siberia and came to prominence in anthropology during the 1950s with figures such as Mircea Eliade. The literal translation for the word shaman is “one who is excited or raised,” and endless studies from anthropologists like I.M Lewis, Bonnie Glass-Coffin, and Michael Horner have explored what a shaman is, and what role they provide in society. In Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Mircea Eliade wrote that “shamans use ecstatic trance, ascend to heaven (or other worlds) for various reasons. During his journey, he may fight with, steal from, or seek aid from the various gods and celestial beings for the benefit of man”.

Shamans provide a wide variety of roles in society, including officiating over important rituals or events, healing mental, physical, emotional, or spiritual ailments, restoring balance to the area in a time of environmental uncertainty, conveying or relaying messages from spiritual beings, or acting as a political authority.

While shamans are often considered only to do the work in the spiritual arena, they often function to maintain social and cultural norms and administer judgments in times of disputes. In Justice and the Dark Arts: Law and Shamanism in Amazonia, Harry Walker demonstrates that the relationship between religion and law are deeply intertwined and can often provide very similar functions in society. He relays the story of two feuding brothers in the middle of a major cultural transition. As their society goes through economic development, one brother chooses the traditional shamanism and spiritual attacks to try and resolve their conflict, while the other appeals to the new centralized legal system. Both have mixed results, but the point is that shamans are more than just spiritual experts but help to maintain cultural order.

Are Shamans Mentally Ill?

In the last chapter of the book Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession, I.M. Lewis reviews the debate over the state of shaman's mental fitness. Throughout history, many psychologists and anthropologists viewed shamans as mad and mentally unfit. But Lewis points out that these individuals, though eccentric, are the healers and not the patients. Shamans have to learn to master their own shortcomings to be of benefit to their community. He notes that shamans have to earn the trust and respect of a community like anyone else. The shaman is often one who has transcended his own issues in order to help others heal, as a kind of wounded healer. Lewis tells us that it is ethnocentric to assume that the healer is themself ill, when we do not use the same standard in Western psychiatry. He suggests that we look at the impacts a shaman has on their community and society before judging them through a Eurocentric lens.

Possession

Although we already briefly discussed this in earlier chapters, the practice of possession is worth noting again in the context of religion. All too often, when we think of possession, we think of the demonic possession present in Christian-based horror movies like The Exorcist. The reality is, though, it’s very likely that you, the reader, have experienced possession. Yes, you read that right. We have mistakenly exoticized possession in our society, largely because of the concepts that come out of the Abrahamic religions. For many cultures, possession is as simple as losing control of your emotions. You were “possessed” by them. Think about the kind of language we use when we talk about emotional outbursts. You might say something like, “I wasn’t myself,” or “I don’t know why I did that,” or “something came over me.” All of these same kinds of explanations could be interchanged with acts of possession. Further, as discussed earlier, not all possession is bad, some are, in fact, a result of oppression and structural violence, and are used to help alleviate the pain experienced in that situation. Different cultures will, of course, view possession in a multiplicity of ways.

Problematic Religion in Fiction

One of the biggest mistakes often seen in fictional religion is homogeneity. Usually, a species, be it alien or elf, will all follow the exact same religion. Not only is this lazy writing; it’s unrealistic. Think about the various debates even within Christianity or Islam. Think about how our world has roughly 6,000 distinct religions. The only reason to have a singular religion in your fictional world is if it is intentional and you can explain why the world looks like that. A species like the Borg, or a similar gestalt consciousness, would obviously share a singular belief (the Borg's spiritual beliefs around perfection are explored in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, albeit briefly) but beyond that, there should be a wide variety of religious beliefs and even within that religion, lots of disagreements about who is right and who is wrong. You should naturally have more orthodox/conservative viewpoints intermixed with more reform/progressive viewpoints. Remember that any religion you write should be dynamic and forced to evolve as the situation in your culture changes.

Advanced Technology and Religion

Sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke (famous for 2001: A Space Odyssey) once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In the film and TV series, Stargate, much of our galaxy is ruled by alien overlords known as Goa’uld, a snake-like parasitic species that possesses human bodies. With the help of incredibly advanced technology, the Goa’uld moved humans across many star systems over thousands of years, enslaved them, and deified themselves. Many take the names of ancient Egyptian, Aztec, or Mesopotamian deities and rule over humans. The central conflict of the Stargate universe is to fight against the oppression of the Goa’uld with all of their advanced technology and spaceships. Numerous books, shows, and films cover the idea that Clarke puts forth and is certainly worth considering if you are writing about multiple cultures with variable levels of technology.

What type of religion and intelligences does your fictional world employ?

What kind of spiritual beings are there? Gods? Spirits? Ancestors? Something else?

In what way does the spiritual dimension in your world employ symbols and sacred language?

How formalized is your religious structure? What are the institutions that surround it?

Is there a ‘universal/world’ religion or do your religions focus more on local knowledge?

In what ways do characters have access to supernatural agency? What methods might they employ to this end? Magic? Ritual? Prayer? Meditation? Possession?

Does your world have spiritual specialists or is spiritual practice individualistic?

What forms of mysticism does your world employ? How do they understand supernatural experiences?

How does wider cultural conditions influence change in the spiritual domain of your world? Are there revivalists? Cults? New Religions? Conspiracy theories?

Chapter 17

Violence, Worthy Victims, and War

Human beings are a contradictory species when it comes to violence. If we take a look around the world, it would be impossible to say that humans are entirely violent or entirely non-violent. There are no cultures that are entirely non-violent and there are no cultures that fail to practice some kind of compassion.

The work of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi is a perfect example of the contradictions of individuals and cultures surrounding violence. As a leader and representative of her people against an oppressive government, Aung San Suu Kyi was forced into house arrest for the better part of fifteen years. Yet, she persisted in her writing and efforts to free her people from a totalitarian regime. Finally, in 2010 she was released from house arrest. Her words and actions during her fifteen years of imprisonment inspired millions toward peace and diplomacy. But more recently, she has proved a more controversial figure.

In reality, we are both violent and non-violent beings. Are there cultures that have a greater tendency toward violence, or a greater tendency toward non-violence? Sure, but one only need look at Ashin Wirathu, the leader of the Buddhist terrorist organization known as the 969, (a nationalistic/Buddhist revivalist organization) and an advocate for genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to see that even cultures and societies that place non-violence and ending suffering at the peak of their aspirations, like Buddhism, are more than capable of violence.

Ashin Wirathu lives in the same country (Myanmar, formerly known as Burma) as Aung San Suu Kyi. At the same time Wirathu made his call for genocide and ethnic cleansing, Aung San Suu Kyi both stood by while violence happened against the Rohingya and helped to support the military against well-documented accusations of genocide. A woman who spoke of peace and won the Nobel Prize for it in 1991 was complicit to violence in another part of her life. Her case is telling about how humans interpret and understand violence.

In this chapter, we will explore the relationship between culture, violence, and war. We will examine far more than physical violence, but also something anthropologists call structural violence. Violence is conditional, meaning that the right circumstances can transform people who may not be violent into individuals capable of doing terrible things.

How Do We Understand Violence?

There is a tendency to believe that some ethnic groups, some religions, and even some genders have a natural inclination to violence, as if they are hard-wired to rape, maim, and murder. But an examination of history shows that there are virtually no truly peaceful people; that all people, especially once they begin gathering together in large groups, lack violence and conflict. That doesn’t mean that different cultures don’t have different relationships with violence. In the United States, people tend to look down on cultures that glorify violence. However, the United States has, by far, the largest military in the world and one of the highest rates of homicide in the world. It also has the highest number of guns per capita of any nation. So, before Americans judge cultures like the Yanomamo, a high-conflict society, it’s important to remember that the United States is also a high-conflict society.

How do we understand violence and what do we mean by violence? One thing to consider is what is acceptable and unacceptable in a given culture. For example, it may be completely legitimate to kill an enemy combatant in war. But what happens when you’re trying to maintain order in society? What level of violence can and can’t be used? We are writing this as of July 2020, when a serious discussion of the use of force in policing is much in the public sphere.

Consider this quote from the sci-fi show, Battlestar Galactica: “There’s a reason you separate the military and the police. When the military becomes both, then the enemy of the state tends to become the people.”

One way to understand violence is to look at the narratives of violence and what is deemed as acceptable vs. unacceptable, as well as who is a worthy vs. unworthy victim of violence.

Worthy vs Unworthy Victims

In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman demonstrate that, at least in terms of media, we create consistent narratives about who is a worthy and unworthy victim. A worthy victim is someone who is deemed to be deserving of violence. This individual challenges the state or the system of power in a meaningful way. This could be as simple as a crime or as complex as a war. Allies or subjects of the state are often considered unworthy victims of violence and are meant to be mourned, or if possible, relieved from their violence. Herman and Chomsky were using the media to look at discussions in American foreign policy, but we can also use this as a lens to discuss how we decide who is worthy and unworthy and what narratives get recycled.

Another important question is: Who is allowed to be violent, and in what context? We are perfectly fine with athletes using violence (to a point; we still have penalties for excessive violence) as well as violence in the arenas of entertainment (movies, video games, books). Here again, we see dialogues around worthy violence and unworthy violence. Violence is very much contextual and every culture has narratives about where violence is okay and where it’s not.

The article, #Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States by Bonilla and Rosa, examines the use of twitter hashtags and language online. This analysis uses Twitter to glean cultural information by following what’s trending. In it, the authors look at the complex relationship of worthy vs. unworthy victims in the events surrounding the tragic death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri at the hands of the police.

In particular, the hashtag “#noangel” circulated immediately following Michael Brown's death. The researchers highlight the various ways this hashtag was used to both defend Michael Brown and demonize him. Tweeters claimed that Michael Brown was #noangel because of prior offenses, and was thus a worthy victim of state violence. Others pointed out that petty theft was not an offense worthy of death. This highlights a larger issue: States always have a monopoly on violence, and when the state or one of its actors does something wrong, the justification is quick, often with elements like character assassination (like in the case of many of the victims of police brutality) or made-up claims of weapons of mass destruction like the 2003 war in Iraq (no such weapons were ever found). All states have a monopoly on violence.

A Monopoly on Violence

One important point made by Robert Elias in his article, A Culture of Violent Solutions, is that the act of using violence isn’t about problem-solving at all; it’s about maintaining power. Elias highlights how we use phrases like “a war on drugs,” “a war on terror,” or “a war on poverty” for any major problem. He suggests that people in the United States won't take something seriously unless there is language framed in violence to “attack” the issue at hand. Remember that language influences our perception. Elias also talks at length on the monopoly on violence.

When given a list of empires throughout history and instructed to label them as the most savage or destructive, Europeans and their descendants would very often choose either the Mongol Empire or the Islamic Empire (which was not one empire, but numerous different ones over centuries). But the reality is there are no innocent empires, and if we look at long-term and total impact, historically speaking, the British Empire is probably a front-runner for one of the most brutal.

The British Empire, at its height, controlled a quarter of the world's territory and a fifth of the world’s population. Despite the fact that we often think of the British as polite, tea drinking colonizers, history paints a different picture. In a recent book, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, Shashi Tharoor highlights some of the terrible atrocities and acts of genocide committed by the British. But what they did in India was only the beginning. The Irish, the Scottish, the Zulu Massacre, the Boer Wars, are all brutal examples of the violence the British Empire committed. Worse, the British destroyed thousands of documents on other atrocities they committed during their times as colonial administrators. The point is, all empires are brutal, not just the ones we don’t like.

It was Max Weber who first discussed the concept of states maintaining a monopoly on violence in Rationalism and Modern Society. The reality is that at the heart of all great civilizations is violence. You might think that this is a controversial statement, or that we are claiming the essential nature of humans is to be violent, but, without exception, all states are founded on the violence and conquest of small-scale societies.

There is an interesting conundrum, however. At the center of these empires, controlled by a monopoly of violence, we have the opportunity for greater levels of education, literacy, and conversations about peace. On one hand, the oppression faced at the edges of the empire is real and tangible. On the other hand, the interior of any empire generates the development of science and technology. In other words, large-scale state violence, for all its genocide, slavery, oppression, and environmental destruction, also has the component of progress. Of course, who benefits from state violence varies greatly. It is one thing to claim that state violence is useful to further the efforts and aims of peace and explore philosophy, science, and spirituality; it is quite another to be on the receiving end of state violence. John Bodily highlights some of the costs of expansion and empire in his book Victims of Progress, where he examines what development, colonialism, and globalization have cost indigenous people around the world. For many, those costs are their lives and cultures.

All that peace, all that science, all that education, has a cost. You may want to consider this interplay for your fictional world.

State Violence and Control in Fiction

In Phillip K. Dick’s book, Minority Report; Aldus Huxley’s book, Brave New World; and John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series, we see examples of a peaceful Earth, at least on the surface. But behind the scenes are powerful systems that keep social order in place. In Minority Report, people are arrested for pre-crime, or crimes that precognitives see happening in the future but haven’t happened yet. In Brave New World, the punishment for non-conformity into their peaceful society is exile or death, and society is controlled through excessive pleasure via drugs, orgies, and endless distractions. In Old Man’s War, Earth is kept in technological infancy (basically our current technology) while the Colonial Union (the space military) fights hundreds of alien species out in the galaxy so that Earth can be kept relatively peaceful at home. In all three examples, people are kept under a great deal of social control with both direct violence and structural violence to foster these relatively peaceable societies. In real life and in fiction, states use a combination of coercion (force or threat) and persuasion, to establish and maintain power. The question is not if, but how much.

Conditions for Violence

In Cruel Creeds, Virtuous Violence: Religious Violence Across Culture and History, Jack David Eller examines the relationship between religion and violence across many cultures and societies. Eller offers us six mechanisms (not dependent on religion but an analysis of violence itself) of violence: instinct or the individual, integration into groups, identity, institutions, interests, and ideologies. Each one of these elements creates conditions for the possibility of violence.

Instinct or the individual discusses all the ways that humans are different from animals. He explains that the loss of some of our instinct, coupled with the formation of individual identity (and all the various difficulties and frustrations that come with it), give us a greater possibility for violence. Integration into a group covers elements of violence surrounding mob mentality: in-groups and out-groups, the infamous “other”, and the threat to the identity of the group. In his explanation of identity, Eller discusses the topic of both imagined communities and imagined past. He explains that elements of our identity fostered by group identification may increase the likelihood of violence to defend both the individual and the group. In his examination of institutions, he discusses elements like inequality and structural violence and how institutions foster power dynamics that can lead to both internal and external violence.

The final two of Eller’s explanations on the conditions of violence, interest and ideologies, may provide some of the most fertile ground for understanding violence, especially when considering how to incorporate violence into your fictional world. As Eller states, it’s hard to imagine intentional violence without some kind of motivation or interest. If you stop for a moment and think about violence, even on a small scale, people committing violence have a reason or interest for their violence, whether or not you understand it. On a large scale, communities have many interests for both preservation and to expand or maintain power. Violence committed by an individual may be motivated by revenge, power, resources, or a host of other factors.

The last category, ideologies, provides a framework for justification and moral superiority required for violence. On a small scale, an individual robbing a bank may find justification in their own needs, in the idea that banks are insured, or believing they are corrupt. But if we take a larger, more global example, the fight for the preservation of capitalism was and still is an ideology used to wage numerous campaigns of violence.

Religion may also provide a justification, though you will find many non-religious interests for violence in acts that are considered religiously-inspired violence. Consider the destruction of many famous religious sites. On the surface, it may appear to be entirely about destroying heretics or infidels, but many of those sites and temples were filled with gold, silver, and precious gems, all of which would inspire any soldier that might come across them to looting, regardless of their ideological differences.

Taken together, interest and ideological factors are a powerful combination for the conditions surrounding violence. When considering your fictional world, it may be useful to ask: What are the interests of the parties committing violence, and what ideologies provide the justification for that violence? How does this vary with the different groups in your culture? If we look at the conflicts around the world, some of those most brutal and longstanding often have similar interests and justifications on both sides.

Resistance: Violent or Non-Violent

One measure of discussing worthy vs. unworthy violence is in the arena of protests and resistance. When protests erupt and looting and violence ensue, a lot of people will immediately claim that violence makes the protest, and thus the cause, illegitimate. When police use physically violent methods to remove protestors, there is far less of an outcry about the use of force. Why is that? This is likely because, once again, we are used to deferring violence to the state and the government that we live under. But remember, all states are founded and maintained on violence. In the book This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, Charles E. Cobb, Jr. highlights the lesser-known fact that civil rights would not have been possible without the armed defense of African American communities. Martin Luther King, Jr., who is frequently evoked when talking about how we are “supposed to protest” was also armed and ready to defend himself if necessary.

In discussing non-violence vs. violent rebellion, one important thing to note is that many attempts at successful change in social status and civil rights had a militant and violent component behind it. Even Gandhi had to work hard to keep the violence in India at bay, and several of his near-fatal fasting campaigns were an attempt to stop the militant groups from attacking the British or engaging in ethnic conflict. Interestingly, it was the fact that King offered more non-violent solutions that the American government decided to work with his coalition. They only did so because they were scared of community defense groups like the Black Panthers, which were vital in a time when lynchings and cross burnings when the KKK were common. In other words, without the militant resistance, the non-violent resistance wouldn’t have been as successful. This is yet another illustration of imagined past and how we, in all cultures, tend to ignore the complexities of history to reflect narratives that fit our ideals, rather than understanding the wider patterns of history.

The fact is, rebellion is always messy. In the film Rogue One: A Star War Story, we see the rebels for what they are, complicated individuals who do violence against bystanders and citizens of the state as well as against the Empire in order to topple a fascist regime. Violence in power and resistance is a long, bloody, and messy affair.

Structural Violence

The concept of structural violence was first coined by Johan Galtung in 1969, and describes a type of violence that is systemic and oppressive. Structural violence is also hidden or out of sight for most people. Arguably the most famous article written on the subject, An Anthropology of Structural Violence by Paul Farmer, highlights how a system of structural violence works, and some of the outcomes of these systems. Through an examination of Haiti’s health care system, both as a medical doctor and an anthropologist, Farmer looks at how the HIV crisis in Haiti and the lack of affordable health care are part of a long, historical system that sought to disenfranchise the people of Haiti. Through the control of historical narratives and the erasure of history, the French, British, and United States put large-scale economic sanctions and a trade embargo in place to prevent Haiti, a free nation as of 1804, from thriving as a society.

Haiti was one of the world's first large-scale successful slave rebellions. When the French lost the war, they placed a 120 million dollar fine on Haiti, claiming lost property; a claim that the former slaves owed their masters money for their own bodies. Haiti was purposely kept in poverty by these three powers, but specifically by the United States, because they feared that Haiti would be an example to inspire other slave rebellions. Since 1804, the United States has waged a long-standing campaign to interfere in Haiti's political and economic system and even blamed the American HIV crisis on the nation. As Farmer points out, the opposite was true. HIV came to Haiti via sex tourism from the United States, not the other way around. By distorting history or erasing key moments, the United States helped to foster and maintain a system of structural violence to intentionally keep those in Haiti poor and use countless narratives to justify their actions.

Structural Violence Against Immigrants and Refugees

Certainly, issues of structural violence aren’t limited to one culture or region in the world. In City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain, Andrew M. Gardner explores the Kafala (sponsorship) system in the country of Bahrain and how it contributes to the structural violence against guest workers. The Kafala system requires that every individual who enters the country pay a large fee (sometimes several thousand US dollars) and to find an individual or company to sponsor them to enter the country and work. Bahrain, a small, oil-rich country in the Middle East, off the coast of the Arabian Peninsula, had a desperate shortage of workers beginning in the 1980s. As such, they instituted the Kafala system to bring workers in to fill labor shortages.

The Kafala system is an example of structural violence for several reasons. First, despite the illegality of the practice, employers and individuals often revoke the passports of migrants, preventing them from leaving and giving them bargaining chips if workers try to fight for their rights. This is explicitly illegal in Bahrain but is seldom enforced. Those in power look the other way. Second, there are many cases where employers simply don’t pay the workers. If the workers try to go to another company or choose to stop working until they get paid, they become undocumented. Gardner points out that, in attempts to address this in court, judges often force the workers to go back to work to even hear their case. Thus, workers who file legal claims must continue to work without pay, knowing they may never actually receive payment. Keep in mind, these are poor workers who spent thousands just to go to Bahrain because they were desperately poor in the first place. Many spent their life savings or their family’s savings just to go to another country and work, in the hopes that they may make a better life. These workers often come from desperate poverty and find themselves betting on a maybe, in the hopes to make their lives, or their family's lives better. Poor migrants also face violence at the hands of the citizens of Bahrain and a lack of the ability to have their disputes handled in court.

Remember, notions of purity, the imagined past, and how we construct otherness are all vital to understanding structural violence.

The Anthropology of War

In the book, The Anthropology of War, by Keith F. Otterbein, the author reminds us that war, like anything else, is a social institution. He tells us that when considering how to understand war, we must understand the political organization of the society, their perspectives on violence, the reasons for going to war, the weapons employed, and whether this is a professional, standing army or a non-professional group of warriors. Non-professional organizations participate in raids, while a professional military goes on campaigns.

There are two major types of warfare: internal war and external war. Internal war includes things like civil war, where internal factions of a society go to war with one another, often over a fundamental structure of society. The American Civil War was fought over the institution of slavery, a cornerstone of the southern economy. After the war, numerous white supremacist groups did their best to get back to the previous system of power, despite the end of the institution of slavery, because, well, those in power do not want to give up that power. Just because there is a war over something internal doesn’t mean elements of that culture don’t linger; a fact that we can see clearly in the protests of 2020 surrounding the death of George Floyd.

The goals of internal warfare usually lend themselves to a reform of the ideological systems on which the internal structure of the society is based. Just because one side loses the war doesn’t mean the ideological conflict vanishes. Any ideological war can rear its ugly head at any time, unless there is significant reconciliation with all parties involved.

External warfare is facing an outside enemy or force. The goals of external warfare usually surround either an expansion of power or defense of identity and community. In either case, the goal of external war isn’t to remake society, but rather for it to persist or thrive by defending territory against outside aggressors or expanding the geopolitical power of the nation in question.

Different cultures and political systems will also have different goals in war. For decentralized groups like bands or tribes, war is often undertaken for defense, revenge, looting, or prestige. For centralized political systems like chiefdoms or states, the goals will tend to be about political control and resources. Less centralized societies are usually not capable of waging wars over hundreds or thousands of miles or do things like siege warfare. So, when you are writing fiction, you have to consider the size and scope of your society, its economic system, its views of violence, the weapons and tools it has, and how warfare will alter their social system. Remember that culture is holistic, and the longer the war, the more it will change the structure of society. One of the first things a system of power must do is convince their population that a war is just and noble. Endless streams of propaganda or symbols are used to persuade the populous to go to war, or to invoke patriotic fervor. The goal is to create a sense of unity against the other.

As war journalist Chris Hedges says in his book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, “In the beginning war looks and feels like love. But unlike love it gives nothing in return but an ever-deepening dependence, like all narcotics, on the road to self-destruction. It does not affirm but places upon us greater and greater demands. It destroys the outside world until it is hard to live outside war's grip. It takes a higher and higher dose to achieve any thrill. Finally, one ingests war only to remain numb.”

Other changes that ripple through society can have lasting impacts on norms. Consider how, during the Second World War, norms of gender were changed as women had to head to work to keep American industry running while millions of people were off at war. Consider the Bracero program, a deal between the Mexican and American governments in 1942 to bolster the workforce of the United States. The Bracero program had numerous social and economic implications and was a direct result of the war. If you visit the library of congress’s website, you will find a strong argument that the desegregation of American troops during the Second World War and the camaraderie that soldiers experienced despite their differences, contributed heavily to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s. War can create lasting social change, for better or for worse. And, like any major event, can force us to take a more critical look at the structure of society. Remember that one of the functions of culture is adaptation. Warfare and any disaster scenario will always expose some of the flaws in society and force the society to remake itself, either in the short term, or more often, in the long term.

On a much smaller scale, combat can also be important to consider on a cultural level. Every culture will have different combat styles, weapons, rules, and strategies that are unique to their own people. Think of the numerous kinds of martial arts available for study. Each system will have unique and distinct cultural elements. If you are interested in a great book on realistic combat, consider picking up Meditations on Violence: A Comparison on Martial Arts Training and Real World Violence by Sgt. Rory Miller.

Things to consider in your fictional world:

Who is a worthy victim of violence? What kinds of narratives are spun to make them that worthy?

What are the major interests and justifications of violence in your world and how does that reflect the rest of the culture?

How does your culture employ it’s monopoly on violence? Who is permitted to be violent and who is forbidden?

If there is war how does it work? Are there professional armies? Warrior classes? Informal Militia?

What structural violence exists in your world?

Chapter 18

Invasion and Expanding Empire: Understanding Colonization

Since the development of agriculture and the expansion of centralized power, there has been significant conflict between small scale, autonomous societies, and systems of centralized authority and empire. As populations grew and cities emerged, it became clear that these centralized systems were not sustainable and, in order to survive, these cultures had to expand outward and gather resources from elsewhere. The cost of expansion and empire, then, is all too often the conquest and oppression of entire cultures and individuals. This has been true regardless of what empire is at the helm of colonization. There is no such thing as peaceful expansion and empire.

Empires often choose to invade places that have lots of resources or are strategic to their goals. Frequently, they would choose areas and cultures that did not have the ability to defend themselves against a centralized state with professional armies and/or sustained military campaigns. This process of outward expansion and conquest for the purpose of resources is called colonization.

In Immanuel Wallerstein’s book World Systems Analysis: An Introduction, we can see this dynamic form between three different types of systems. The small sustainable systems, he calls “mini systems”. The empires that conquered them are termed “world empire”. Then, Wallerstein gives us an additional kind of social organization: world economies”. World economies transcend the borders of empires and seek to expand power beyond borders and boundaries. These world economies are the basis for our modern globalization.

However, as the entire world fell under European dominance beginning in the 16th century, it became clear that despite all beliefs to the contrary, the world didn’t become one homogenized world system, but rather a multifaceted network of cultural exchanges and global cultural flows. This chapter will take a brief look at the process of colonization and the following chapter will look at the modern processes of globalization so that as you craft your fictional world, you can understand the complex dynamics at play when conquest, expansion and global economies intersect with a variety of cultures and individuals.

The Rise of Europe

In European narratives were are often entirely too focused on the amazing things Europeans did, but the truth of the matter is that Europe’s rise to power had more to do with the fall of the Mongol Empire, the bubonic plague, mismanagement of resources that created a need to expand, and geography rather than anything particularly special about Europeans. As Eric Wolf says, Europe in 800 CE was a backwater, a place that was not worth giving a second thought. The world as a whole never had a dark age. But, since the world is still so centered on European dominance, we often think of these dark times as global. The truth is though, while Europe attempted to reorganize itself after the Roman political system fell apart, China, the Americas, and The Middle East hosted powerful and successful empires, all capable of advancing science and learning. It is these very same advancements that, once Europe began venturing out along trade routes again, helped them to take advantage of new ideas and technologies without the cost of developing them themselves. Many of the ideas that gave Europe its power were examples of cultural borrowing. The same of course is true with just about every empire in history. Empires gain their strength from the consolidation of a multiplicity of ideas, resources and people.

A primary example is the European number system. Roman numerals were/are a terrible system for math with a very hard limitation. It lacks the concept of zero, a concept instrumental to any advanced mathematics. Holding on to Roman numerals prevented any development in numerous areas of research and science. The book Liber Abaci by Leonardo Fibonacci introduces the concepts of Hindu/Arabic numerals (later simply known as Arabic numerals) to Europe, along with the concept of zero. It is not until the 15th century that this number system replaces roman numerals, a time when Europe began to climb it’s way to power.

The first university in the world was founded by a woman named Fatima bint Muhammad Al-Fihirya Al-Quarshiya in Morocco in 859 CE and not in Europe. The point here is that empires, at least internally, become centers for learning and science because they integrate ideas and cultures from many diverse areas. It is the cosmopolitan center of empires, with an emphasis on learning and acceptance that drive advancement.

In Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D: 1250 - 1350, Janet Abu-Lughod makes a strong case to counter Wallerstein’s argument of the rise of globalization in 1500 in Europe. Instead, she and Jack Weatherford (author of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World) make a compelling argument that the origins of globalization begin three hundred years before in both the near and far east. Without the contributions of the Islamic Empire and then, the Mongolian empire, coupled with the black plague that crippled those systems and left a power vacuum in the mid 1300s, Europe may have never risen to prominence.

All too often we center the world on Europe, because, well, Europe has been in power for five hundred years, and thus, we construct an imagined past of European greatness. But, the truth is, much like Rome and many other empires, ideas were borrowed from other places around the world. It is quite likely that there are no empires in history free of this particular path. Ultimately, the power of empire is the ability to take many ideas from many locations and bring them to centers of learning and further develop them. This is yet another testament to the strength of diversity much like how, in the fictional Star Trek Universe, the Federation is made up of many different species across a sizable expanse of space. It is the collaborations among many alien species that allow for a time of great advancement and learning. But, how do they get these ideas? How do they consolidate their power? How does something like globalization begin? The answer is colonialism and conquest.

Styles of Colonialism

There are numerous types of colonialism in history and each style was the result of both the dominant society and their relationship to the people they invaded, as well as the goals of all the cultures involved. Each style forages different kinds of relationships between the invading and indigenous groups. Keep in mind, colonization is exploitation. There are numerous benefits of colonialism to empires, but ultimately the goal is about expanding resources to benefit those at home at the cost of the people experiencing the encroachment. In much of the Western world, colonists are depicted as brave souls risking everything to find their fortune and freedom. The reality of colonialism is, however, that someone must lose for others to gain. Often, the loser is the culture with insufficient military might to successfully repel invasion. Colonialism may begin with innocent cultural exchange and trade but, as we will see shortly, it can become a terrifying conquest full of ethnic cleansing and genocide. This is not to say that all colonization is bad, but all too often people justify terrible violence in the name of expansion and empire.

Settler Colonialism is the move-in, set-up-shop, and take-over style of colonization. For the people being colonized, this is often like an invasion on a resource- and cultural-level. Settlers move in with the intent to stay. Often the goal is to gradually expand over the new territory and assimilate or remove populations. Throughout history there are numerous reactions to the indigenous populations of the newcomers and different relationships were formed around the world. All too often though, settler colonialism was an ugly affair. The United States, Canada, and Australia are prime examples of this kind of colonialism. If you’re writing in this style of fiction, it’s important to remember that the people who are invaded are not passive and will fight back. The same rhetoric used to describe much of the actions of the insurgents of the middle east today is eerily similar to the periodicals of 18th and 19th century America in regards to Native Americans. Settler colonialism is often a bloody affair.

Direct Rule is when a foreign power moves into the region and sets up an administrative branch of their government, ruling directly from that seat of power. The British Empire in India is an example of direct rule. They moved and began ruling the population by installing government bureaucracy in the local region directly. Their goal was not to displace the people who already lived there but rather to hold power over them. Direct rule is about power changing hands from the oppressed to the oppressor.

Indirect Rule is a model of colonialism which co-opts the authority of those already present in society to administer rule. This is what is sometimes known as a puppet government, wherein the invading country seizes control of the established elites and controls the society through local efforts. An example of this style of Colonialism is the Belgian presence in Rwanda, where authorities deposed the Hutu leadership and placed the Tutsi in charge of administration. Locals who take power in these situations are often considered collaborators of the oppressor. Collaborators are often considered traitors by those who want to return to their cultural roots and repel the invading force. When building a fictional world with Indirect rule, it’s important to consider the kinds of conflicts that would pop up with those who side with the ‘enemy’.

Exploitation Colonialism

The focus of exploitation colonialism is the resources themselves. While this is true to a degree with the other forms of colonialism, this form focuses primarily on resource extraction. Often this is the type of colonialism practiced by multinational corporations and various extraction processes. Slave trade is also an example of this. One of the more famous examples of this in history is the East Indian Tea Company, which took the possession of various different commodities around the world and traded them.

Those who practice this style of colonialism desire a stable government in order to extract their resources. Even today, some companies will sometimes hire mercenaries (several mining companies around the world employ this method to prevent the interruption of their extraction methods in the wake of indigenous resistance) or co-opt the present government’s military. This happened in the United States and was a contributing factor in the Ludlow Massacre, an event where the mining companies, mixed with the National guard opened fire, killing 21 people (including women and children) and injuring many more. Colonies of exploitation try to lessen the costs of occupation but can still result in some terrible circumstances as the conflict over resources and land use escalate.

Understanding the Colonial Process

The purposes and reasons for colonialism are many, but ultimately, colonialism is about the extraction of resources from one region to empower another. This process of extraction happens as states and empires expand. As mentioned above, because Empires are not sustainable, they must necessarily expand, consume, and remove any barriers that challenge their power.

Below is a model for a highly generalized process in colonization. This model is intended for you to understand some forms that colonialism systems may often take. Keep in mind, this is a generalization, and the processes of colonization, coupled with the styles and goals of the empire, will take numerous different forms. An empire may use any or all of these steps at various points, or it may decide simply to have a new trading partner and nothing more. The purpose here is to illuminate some of the things that colonial systems do to spread their base of power and acquire resources for extraction. This will also provide a starting point for you to think about the colonial impacts in your fictional culture and the real world. No matter what form it takes, colonization creates massive culture change. For more on this process and how dynamic it often is, consider the book Victims of Progress by John Bodley.

Step 1: Establish Trade

Establishing Trade is often the first step in a colonial process. The dominant group moves in, establishes a port or a point of contact, and then explores the region for various trading partners and resources. In the Native American experience, one of the most desired commodities for Europe to get hold of was fur. This is because fur was extraordinarily rare in Europe by this point; after Europe had mismanaged its resources for centuries there was virtually no wild game left. The thing was, the Europeans had little of value to offer Native Americans. North and South America were some of the most resource-rich regions in the world. Like a good marketer, Europe discovered quickly that it had to provide a new need and establish goods that Native Americans would have a strong desire to possess. In this example, guns and alcohol became a staple of trade. Addiction and better firepower were strong motivators.

Step 2: Build Settlements

After a trade outpost becomes well established, you will often find that settlements spring up around it. The newly arrived culture will build and expand as much as they can get away with. As they spread out and encounter different groups, they will naturally create conflict. Even the simple act of moving deeper into the new territory will cause conflict and mistrust as they encroach on land previously controlled by different groups. Claims like manifest destiny and, ‘they aren’t using it anyway’ often provide justifications for the encroachment on the already present culture. Thus as the settlements grow in size and create conflict, you reach the next stage in the colonial system.

Step 3: Military Supported Colonies

With conflict, it becomes clear that military support is required. In the United States, there are many towns and cities that begin with the word ‘fort’. These fort towns were entrenched positions to establish a military presence and hold colonies. The problem, of course, for the Europeans expanding into North America was that despite their powerful weapons, they were still thousands of miles away from reinforcements and outnumbered thousands to one. Even with military support, expansion was often halted. The key point of military supported colonies was that it allowed empires to gain a foothold and consolidate their power before moving on to the next region.

Step 4: The Wild Frontier

Unable to push past these territory limitations, we see many of these colonies opt into an idea called the frontier scenario. Now in the mythology of American and European cultures, the frontier is often peopled by brave heroes exploring new territory and planting flags in the name of their mother country. It’s a romantic notion, especially in the United States and was justified by manifest destiny, the idea that God gave Europeans power and the right to take what they wanted in order to spread Christianity and ‘civilization’, and, later, arguments about the ‘superior’ genes and evolution of the invaders.

The Frontier scenario was an attempt to destabilize the region in an effort to do things like divide and conquer the enemy by fracturing cultural unity. Europeans would do things like purposely trade items infected with smallpox (there is solid evidence of germ warfare as far back as the crusades, even though germ theory didn’t arrive until the mid-nineteenth century), destroy food sources (such as the railroad companies campaigns to wipe out the Buffalo), and various other mechanisms to demoralize and destroy the indigenous cultures. The purpose of the frontier is to create a situation of chaos and lawlessness that would prevent any effective resistance for any military incursion.

In areas that are stricken with extreme poverty in the world today, we can see the aftermath of these policies. In some cases, this was the final step of colonialism: leaving a broken and fractured culture and people left to fend for themselves in places that are considered less desirable by the invaders. But in other cases, we go on to the next step. Native American reservations offer a glimpse into the aftermath of the frontier scenario.

Step 5: Restore ‘Order’

This step happens when, after the chaos of the frontier subsides, the invading group can move in and establish ‘order’ through military force and occupation to expand their base of power. Much of the process above repeats as they expand and move into new regions. This step may or may not happen, as sometimes creating a permanent or semi-permanent frontier scenario can allow greater access to resources for the invader, or simply provide social unrest in designated areas to prevent successful uprisings.

Step 6: Remove or Assimilate

At some point in this process, a dominant society may find that there is no place left to push the indigenous people. Despite many efforts to destroy their culture and take their land, there are still holdouts, those who will still fight desperately to keep their identity intact. Various institutions will develop in order to deal with the unwanted population. In some cases, like the Indian Removal Act of 1830, passed by the Jackson Administration, Native Americans were forcibly removed from their land and relocated. In other cases, Native American Boarding schools were used to steal children away from their parents and assimilate them into American society. There were hundreds of policies and attempts to deal with what was known as the ‘Indian Problem’ and most of these created horrific consequences. Similar methods can be found in colonial territories all over the world, from Siberia to Australia A great film highlighting the terrible experiences children went through in Australia is Rabbit Proof Fence.

This process of directed and forced cultural change is called acculturation. Acculturation is the process whereby two distinct cultures change as the result of long term contact. In cases of acculturation, one culture is more dominant and powerful than the other and uses a number of processes, like those discussed above, to force change on the less dominant group.

Keep in mind that the various systems and processes used to expand the power of colonialism are variable. A key thing to consider when thinking about colonialism, empire, and globalization, is to consider how they force cultures to change and the political and economic consequences involved.

Culture Change

We’ve talked about culture change several times in this volume, but here it’s important to lay out some of the complex factors in changes in culture and society. Culture change often happens in one of two ways (and sometimes is a mix of both). Either there is an internal change in culture, known as innovation, or external change, known as diffusion. Colonization and globalization would be an example of diffusion while inventing a new tool or technology would be innovation.

There are other elements of culture change as well, some have already been mentioned in this chapter but some of the darker ones should be considered.

Forced Culture Change

In the process of forced culture change, there are three major categories of destruction. Each of these are worth noting as all three are happening on a semi-consistent basis at present and in the history of the world.

Ethnocide - The purposeful destruction of another culture. This may or may not include violence, but boarding schools are a prime example of ethnocide. Language destruction is often a key component in this process.The goal is to destroy a culture and force the group in question to abandon their identity.

Ethnic Cleansing - The forcible removal of a specific population (based on some identity marker) from a region. Examples of ethnic cleansing include the Indian Removal Act and the establishment of Jewish ghettos during the second world war. Keep in mind that killing is not required for ethnic cleansing, only the forcible removal of a targeted population.

Genocide - The extermination of a specific population (based on an identity marker). Notable examples are the Holocaust, Rwanada’s 100 days of blood, and even the violence in Myanmar against the Rohingya Muslims at the hands of the Buddhist based state and military.

Other Kinds of Culture Change

Culture change isn’t always sinister, however. In fact, change is a natural product of interaction across cultures, new technological developments, and new resources or discoveries.

Directed Change - Compared to the previous three, directed change is more nuanced and complex. Directed change can be something as simple as passing a new law in a town requiring a mask ordinance during a pandemic, or it can be the restructuring of a whole society. Directed change usually comes from a centralized government or authority and then impacts the culture as it changes the power dynamics in society. Directed change in and of itself isn’t good or bad; it’s a tool of social control, which, as we stated earlier, can be either positive or negative. It's usually a little of both. Even something as simple as changing a tax rate is directed culture change.

Generational Change - Every generation gains and loses knowledge. Generational change is exactly why older people are always grumbling about ‘kids these days,’ and how great their own imagined past was. Consider the impact on people after the introduction of the smartphone. New elements of culture, socialization, and experiences were available as a result and those changed the context and conditions of the culture. Something like this happens every generation to a greater or lesser degree.

Change is inevitable, but how it manifests depends on the context and conditions of the people who experience it.

Indigenous People Strike Back

Colonialism isn’t always one-sided. In fact, there have been numerous successful resistance movements around the world. Some have led to the establishment of representation in political bodies, others have been able to establish their own states and territories. It’s important to remember that wherever there is power, there is resistance. It is rare that humans just sit back and allow themselves to be oppressed endlessly.

In the 1970s, after many attempts to gain recognition by the United Nation and their host nations, indigenous people began organizing to address their lack of rights in the eyes of the world and to further their goals of self-determination. But what does it mean to be indigenous?

What does Indigenous Mean?

The concept of indigeneity was a direct attempt by communities from around the world to gain recognition in the eyes of the international political community. There are nearly 370 million indigenous people living in the world today. This new identity allowed communities who were previously invisible to another method to make themselves heard. The problem is that indigenous communities are so diverse, that it was difficult to find one single term to define everyone. Instead of a singular definition, there is a list of the following criteria hosted by the United Nations World Council on Indigenous Affairs:

Self-identification as indigenous peoples at the individual level and accepted by the community as their member.

Historical continuity with pre-colonial and/or pre-settler societies.

Strong link to territories and surrounding natural resources.

Distinct social, economic or political systems.

Distinct language, culture and beliefs.

From non-dominant groups of society.

Resolve to maintain and reproduce their ancestral environments and systems as distinctive peoples and communities.

This list of criteria allows a clear difference between those who have lived in say, Germany for centuries vs those who are identified as indigenous. Remember, the concept of indigenous is a means to regain the rights and voices those cultures have lost.

Pan Traditionalism

For cultures that encountered colonialism and survived, there was a strong interest in returning to previous cultural practices that were present before contact with Europeans. Much was lost in the expansion of Europe, but those things that remained underwent a global revival beginning in the 1970s. The movement towards reclaiming your culture and language is sometimes known as Pan Traditionalism. This practice often blends traditional practices of the community with the new world that people find themselves in.

In the United States, pantraditionlism surged after the 1973 uprising on Wounded Knee. For 72 days the American Indian Movement took control of the little town of Wounded Knee on the edge of Pine Ridge Reservation. During this time the National Guard surrounded Wounded Knee on all sides and as the conflict raged, several were killed or wounded on both sides of the conflict. In the wake of this conflict, Native American people from all over the country, even those unable to participate, watched a rebirth of their dignity. After the events began, some came from all over the country to participate in the action and the ultimate result was a revival of many aspects of Native American culture, even though the political fallout for many was poor. The spiritual successors of this movement include The Apache Uprising, Idle No More and of course Standing Rock.

Nunavut Nation

The Nunavut Nation in northern Canada provides a solid example of a long-standing attempt to establish international credibility and recognition of self-determination and tribal sovereignty. After many years of struggle, in 1999, Canada signed an agreement with the Inuit people establishing their land as an official territory in the nation-state. The Inuit received mineral rights over their land and were granted 777,000 square miles of territory, a piece of land a little larger than Mexico. With that land the Inuit work to establish a sustainable nation within a nation. There is still conflict with the Inuit and the Canadian government, but now they have a great degree of self-determination and are a shining example of what is possible after the further expansion of colonialism is complete.

The Power of Change and Psychosocial Stress

In 1962, the newly independent country of Tanganyika (which later became the unified country of Tanzania) experienced a bizarre outbreak of laughter. The epidemic began on January 30th at a mission run girls boarding school in Kashasha with only three young girls. Soon, it spread like wildfire. The strange illness included long bouts of laughing and crying that lasted anywhere from a few hours, to, on the extreme end, sixteen days. As the condition spread over the coming months, 14 schools were shut down, and the strange outbreak spread up the coast infecting as many as 1000 people of all ages. After much investigation, it appeared that the most likely explanation was something anthropologists call psycho-social stress.

Psycho-social stress is something that happens when culture undergoes rapid changes. In the case of the laughing epidemic, not only was there a recent and successful national independence movement, but new religions, new political regimes, new economic systems, all of which crowded out the traditional culture of the newly formed country and forced massive and rapid culture change.

On an individual level, we can see a similar process through the experience of culture shock. When someone travels, (especially by themselves) to another culture for an extended period, it becomes clear that many of the norms and assumptions of your culture don’t necessarily apply to your present circumstances. The things you would normally do to alleviate the stress, or the many things you take for granted, are suddenly upended and significant stress can result. We often underestimate the power of stress and culture change. Combined, both things can have incredibly destructive impacts, especially in situations of significant oppression and cultural destruction. Thus, a key thing to keep in mind when examining colonization and/or globalization is how any culture might interpret and understand the new identities and experiences that they encounter as a result of these processes. Remember the three C’s? Well, what happens if someone’s cultural context is wiped out or deconstructed to make room for new norms and cultural bodies of knowledge?

Colonization as the First Step Toward Globalization

Before you can have large-scale interconnected global trade, you need someone to build those networks. For all the ways in which colonization created pain and suffering, it also created opportunities for new social interactions and directions. As mentioned in our chapter on economics, trade isn’t a new thing, but the scale and social dynamics surrounding a globalized world, provide new possibilities in the human experience. These experiences, as with everything else we have discussed up to this point, are neither inherently good or bad, but represent the interplay of culture and change.

Things to consider in your fictional world:

What are the major change agents in your world? (See the list of the largest above)

If your world includes colonization, what type of colonialism is it? What are the primary goals?

Who is resisting colonization? Why? What traditions and cultural elements will they lose?

What are the resources that are driving colonization why? What are the stakes?

Chapter 19

The Social Webs We Weave: Globalization and Culture

What globalization is and what it does is the source of a great deal of debate among many scholars. Is globalization a good thing or a bad thing? Does it end poverty or increase poverty? What about nationalism? Free markets? Deregulation? Global trade? Scholars spend entire careers examining these questions, and for good reason. Understanding globalization is vital to understanding what it means to be human in the 21st century.

The purpose of this chapter is to look at the relationship between culture and globalization and the costs and benefits of these systems. We don’t pretend to offer you any concrete answers, but rather an examination of some of the relationships that globalization creates so that as you consider your fictional world, be it small-scale societies with limited trade or a galactic federation, you have several key examples to consider. In this chapter, we will consider global cultural flows, foodways, resources, and migration. As with every chapter, this is really just a short summary of the complexities of a much larger dialogue. There are a lot of theories and ideas in globalization about what is good and right and how to solve issues such as poverty. Reality on the ground is often quite different than in theory (something that any anthropologist has experienced first-hand in the field). The differences between what theorists think happens and what actually happens is of vital importance, and it is why, so often, anthropology must be grounded in the real-world experiences of lived people.

Globalization as an Ideal of Interconnected Harmony and Culture

Globalization is, simply put, extraordinarily complicated. But before we dive into those complications, it’s important to note that with the rise of globalization, there have been many powerful elements that represent some of the best ideals of humanity. Organizations like Doctors Without Borders are able to go around the world and intervene in terrible disasters and crises. Non-profits have helped to provide electricity to places that did not previously have any. Food and relief efforts are ongoing daily and people are visible in ways they have never been before. Now, more than ever, we are interconnected.

In her book, The Golden Wave: Culture and Politics After Sri Lanka’s Tsunami Disaster, Michele Ruth Gamburd demonstrates that although the recovery and aftermath of the 2004 tsunami was complicated and messy, there was a real global effort to help the people move on after that terrible tragedy claimed more than 230,000 lives and cost approximately 15 billion dollars in damage. On the ground, people worked together to try and prevent corruption and rebuild. Though situations were often tense, and there was some abuse, communities found numerous strategies to work together to get back on their feet. In fact, one interesting observation of Gamburd’s was that accusations of corruption, true or false, actually helped with accountability in recovery efforts. Recovery from a disaster is never easy, and nothing is ever the same after a terrible event like a tsunami, but globalization provided avenues for recovery that would not have been possible otherwise.

The United Nations, for all its flaws and complications, was founded upon efforts toward peace and human rights in the aftermath of the Second World War. The UN is a space for a variety of cultures to come together to discuss serious world problems, establish diplomatic relationships, and address the needs of the people of the world. The UN has intervened in numerous conflicts, provided food and medical aid for more than 90 million people, is working with 140 nations to address issues around climate change, and has helped resettle nearly 34 million refugees over the course of its history. It is important to remember that the UN is controlled by its most powerful members, and that international law has little in the way of enforcement, but the UN is an attempt to work together as a species to solve some of the big issues that humanity faces.

Global poverty (depending on how you measure it) is down, and with the invention of the internet, our world is more connected, and has far greater abilities to communicate than ever before. There is a lot to celebrate about globalization, but if we only take a positive approach, we overlook the complications and power dynamics present in these systems. After all, most of us have stories of how globalization has impacted us in negative ways as well.

Globalization and Culture Flows

Production, distribution, and consumption are key factors to understanding economics and culture, as you may recall from our discussion of economic systems. Political economy is the understanding of the relationships between economic systems, law, and government. For understanding globalization, we often ask, how does the global system impact local lives? It’s an important question, but as it turns out, when we consider the holistic nature of culture, it’s really only a starting point.

Globalization is a complex, ever-changing experience of culture. There is often the dynamic relationship of how the global markets impact local cultures and politics, but what about things like gender, race, religion, kinship, and other important structures in culture? We need a bigger picture than just global politics and economics. Arjun Appadurai offers us a good starting point to understand the relationship between culture and globalization.

In his article, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Appadurai critiques some of the prevailing theories on globalization. He examines the binary and often one-sided example of global vs. local, and demonstrates that in some ways, the local causes major changes in the global. He also rejects the idea that globalization is necessarily a homogenizing force; rather, the interactions create all kinds of new cultural bodies of knowledge but are also dependent on the culture in which globalization arrives.

Take something like yoga, for example. Yoga, a distinctly Indian tradition, reached the world stage as a result of the 1960s counterculture revolutions in both the United States and Europe. A practice that was long-forbidden to women and reserved for those who had the status and power to explore spiritual life is now often associated most with women in the West. Multi-billion-dollar companies such as Gaiam, centered in Boulder, Colorado, have transformed a spiritual practice into yet another global commodity. The transformation of spiritual practices, food, and other important elements of cultures into commodities is sometimes called “commodification as a worldview”. The idea that money and markets are vital for growth and development is at the core of capitalistic ideology.

Appadurai offers us five distinct scapes, or spheres of influence, that create an interplay between cultures and globalization.

Ethnoscapes - This is the flow or movement of people across borders. It includes tourism, guest workers, migrants, refugees, and anyone else on the move in the global sphere.

Technoscapes - The tools and technologies that allow the cultures of the world to interact and move. This includes everything from transportation systems to telecommunications to any piece of technology that allows the flow of culture to get from one area to another.

Mediascapes - The images, sounds, and words that travel across borders and boundaries. Appadurai makes a special note that we tend to think of Hollywood as an epicenter of the mediascape, but in reality, the United States is just one node in a complex, interchanging web of knowledge that spreads across borders and boundaries. Think about the phenomenon of Bollywood or the Japanese anime industry.

Financescapes - This is the global flow of capital. Commodity speculation, markets, banking, investment, and anything to do with money falls into the realm of financescapes. It should be noted that this particular scape is deeply rooted in the others.

Ideoscapes – Culture’s conceptions and ideologies like freedom, capitalism, democracy, communism, human rights, and any other element of the political and religious landscapes that travel across borders and boundaries.

When you are considering your fictional world, consider the complexity of things like globalization and culture change. Do you have multiple planets your characters explore? In the Star Wars universe, entire planets are designated for city life and agricultural life; how would they fit into the scapes? How about the Harry Potter universe? The Expanse? Lord of the Rings? Consider the costs and benefits of situations like colonization and the dynamics of power and social control. What are the costs and benefits of systems like Star Trek’s Federation? The conflict inherent in these scenarios makes for a lot of great possibilities for storytelling which also mirror real life.

Thou Shalt Not Regulate!

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a philosophy called neoliberalism came to global prominence. It is a philosophy that champions minimizing government power as much as possible and allowing the free market to reign supreme. A common motto in neoliberalism, which may help you to remember what it does, is “thou shalt not regulate.” Neoliberalism suggests that government limits competition and stagnates progress and economic development, but it’s not quite that simple.

The philosophy of neoliberalism saw a huge boom in the early 1990s and was so popular across both the Democrat and Republican parties in the United States that it became known as the Washington Consensus. As communism collapsed under the Soviet Union, the free market thrived like never before. In a nod to capitalist countries, the fall of the Berlin Wall represented an economic turning point; one that legitimized the movement toward mass privatization as a solution towards eliminating poverty and expanding development.

When it comes to globalization, one thing to consider is that no matter how amazing an idea appears to be at the onset, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for anything large-scale (and probably not much on a small scale either). When we consider the three C’s seriously, we realize that different contexts and different conditions will naturally warrant different solutions to the same problem in different cultures. Remember, culture and language influence the way you look at the world, and what works in one place or culture won’t always work in another.

This is another case of the truth in theory vs. the truth on the ground. It is absolutely true that sometimes the government limits innovation and development. It is also true that, at least with some things, the private sector is much better equipped than the public sector (government) to create better outcomes for people. The keyword here is “sometimes”. Neoliberalism would be much more efficient if we didn’t have to consider privilege. If everyone started out at the same spot, and was not limited by identity markers or access to society in general, then neoliberalism might turn out to be a wonderful philosophy. In practice, though, there are many things that governments do better than the private sector. Why? Because the private sector is largely driven by the expansion of profit, and doesn’t always have the community’s best interest in mind.

But, as we often say in anthropology, it’s complicated. For more on the complexities of neoliberalism on the ground, check out Aiwa Ong’s book Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty.

The World Bank

Before we dive into a case study of an area where neoliberalism does much more harm than good, it's important to understand the history and function of the World Bank.

At the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, the World Bank was created alongside another organization called the IMF (International Monetary Fund) in large part to help rebuild Europe in the wake of the Second World War or lend money to allies. The original idea of the World Bank was to provide loans to help things like infrastructure, and in its first two decades, the bank provided small, low-interest loans for a number of countries.

But the World Bank is, in many ways, an American institution. While separate from the American government and a private institution, the World Bank is headquartered in Washington, D.C. and is traditionally headed by an American. For the first twenty-five years, the bank was run out of the United States by Wall Street bankers and former colonial officials.

Beginning in the late 1960s, the World Bank shifted its focus from small loans for infrastructure to large-scale economic development of entire countries. In part, this was due to US President Johnson’s installation of failed Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, who took the reins as the World Bank president. In just the first five years of his presidency, McNamara transformed the World Bank into a powerhouse of global lending. The bank financed 760 projects in those five years. This marked a huge shift in the World Bank’s operation, as previously, in the twenty-two-year history of the bank to that point, it had only financed 708 projects.

McNamara saw a way to extract the resources from the Global South (often known as the third world) and drive their capital and commodities to help fund the Global North (often known as first world countries) while at the same time combating second world countries (the communist block and allies). In many ways, the World Bank did, and continues to operate in a similar manner to the colonies of exploitation, empowering first world countries while often disenfranchising smaller, less economically developed nations.

This is not to say that the World Bank never does anything good. Quite the contrary. The World Bank provides access to loans that help combat poverty and help countries develop in meaningful ways. But the bank is all too often another expression of Eurocentric power. When countries default on their loans because of a crop failure, or the price of a particular commodity plummets, the bank institutes what are known as structural adjustment policies, before they allow a second loan to keep the country afloat. Structural adjustment policies force governments to change their infrastructure and spending practices. Now, you might say, “wait, well, they defaulted on their loan, aren’t conditional demands on a second loan a good thing?” The answer is: It’s complicated, as you will see in our case study about water privatization.

Case Study: The World Bank, Structural Adjustment and the Privatization of Water

Most of the time, deregulation of governments put power in the hands of corporations. Corporations are typically beholden to their investors and shareholders; not the communities they work in. In fact, in publicly traded companies, most boards have a legal obligation, (called a fiduciary duty) to do everything they can to raise the profit margins for their shareholders. If they aren’t working toward increasing the value of their company for shareholders, they can be sued and/or removed from the board of the company and replaced by someone who will. This system is often a recipe for corruption and ethical concerns.

The problem with neoliberalism lies largely in accountability to communities and cultures. In many ways, multinational corporations under the model of neoliberalism behave in the same way that colonies of exploitation do, with constant extraction for the benefit of the powerful group and to the detriment of the community they work with. This becomes clear when we examine the process of water privatization which, under the World Bank, became one of their structural adjustment policies.

In his article, “How ‘Water for All!’ policy became hegemonic: The power of the World Bank and its transnational policy networks,” Michael Goldman examined the relationship between what he terms green neoliberalism (neoliberalism that seeks to address human rights and environmental concerns), water privatization, and the structural adjustment policies of the World Bank. The World Bank forced numerous countries and communities to privatize their water before they could take out a loan; one that they were virtually required to take out.

Goldman discusses the major global forums on water policy and the desire to address the needs of people who have little access to clean drinkable water. In the early 2000s, there was a systematic effort by numerous corporations and world leaders to insist that the answer to the world’s water crisis was privatization. The result of this policy was the concentration of the control of water in six of the world’s largest European-based firms. As the policies of privatization moved into place, the control of water concentrated itself away from those who needed it most, and into the hands of large corporations that then turned a sizable profit from these policies. But did access to water increase? No.

The result of the privatization of water has had a number of outcomes. Massive protests follow the wake of the tide of water privatization. The reason? In places like Bolivia, water privatization caused the price of water to skyrocket. In some areas, water went from costing a small fraction of household income up to a quarter of total household income within the span of a few months. Private firms promised improvement to water lines and increased access, but neither happened. Instead, damaged and leaky pipes that were present before privatization remained in place. The extra costs of water that those pipes created was passed on to the consumer and not the company. Protests over the new high price of water and the lack of access erupted in Gambia, Guinea, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, to name a few. Overall access to clean and affordable water dropped, while many private, European-based water firms walked away with billions in profit. If we consider our discussion of colonialism from the last chapter, water privatization and neoliberalism look a lot like colonies of exploitation.

Guest Workers: Betting on a Maybe

To be an immigrant is to take an extraordinary risk, even under the best of circumstances. You must leave your home, and often your family and friends, travel to a foreign place that may or may not be dangerous because of your appearance or class status, to work a precarious job in order to help you change your circumstances. But there are no guarantees. Immigrants who voluntarily leave their home, and refugees who are leaving because it’s no longer possible to safely reside in their home country, are both making a huge gamble that the conditions for employment and changing your circumstances are better in the place they move to. Sometimes they are, but a lot of times they aren’t. They have to bet on a maybe. It is a gamble that many of you reading this, have not had to take or consider. This is why, when we talk about globalization, we have to remember the impacts on people, their identity, and their culture.

In Families Apart: Migrant Mothers and the Conflicts of Labor of Love, Geraldine Pratt examines the Canadian Live-In Caregiver Program that brings guest workers from other countries to come live and work as caregivers in people’s homes. From the world stage, this program was heralded as a fantastic example of what a program should do, but Pratt takes a closer look and demonstrates some of the significant problems that these women face as they migrate from the Philippines to Canada.

The result? Mothers and children sometimes separated for years, and in some cases, as long as a decade. While these women have access to jobs and income they might not otherwise, their lived experiences highlight the difficulties that families face when labor becomes transnational. The conflict between mother and child as they tried to keep in touch across thousands of miles fractured their identity and their relationships. The low wages pushed many of these women to take additional jobs, and added to their struggle to try and bring their children to a new home on the other side of the world.

It shows the ways in which these women are exploited and, when their children finally do arrive, often when they are already teenagers, the conditions of their lives are far from ideal. The conditions of their lives are hard, and there is no guarantee of success, or even that, when someone migrates to Canada, they will have success. For many reading this book, it may be hard to understand the lived experience of betting on a maybe because many of us have well-established social networks of friends and family who will support us if things go wrong. But in the great game of globalization, migrants face overwhelming odds against their success in the hope for a better life. When considering your fictional world, think about what immigration would be like for someone who has little and has to bet on a maybe.

Case Study: The Social Life of the Tortilla

In the article, “The social life of the tortilla: Food, cultural politics, and contested commodification,” David Lind and Elizabeth Barham demonstrate the complexity of food and globalization and how it has impacted the tortilla. The authors show the history of the tortilla in several different epochs.

The first is the indigenous practice of tortilla-making. In this manifestation, the tortilla is a sacred food and relates to myth and spiritual practice. The tortilla takes hours to make and prepare and is considered a vital and important part of the indigenous cultures of Central America. In the second epoch, we see the influence of Spanish rule of the region. Corn is considered to be inferior to flour, a distinctly European product. The tortilla became a symbol of both the inferiority of the indigenous peoples compared to the Spaniards, and one that became appropriated with the introduction of flour tortillas.

The third epoch begins in the twentieth century with the systematic development and economic interference of the United States in the affairs of these cultures and communities. This period saw industrialization of the tortilla, something that could be made quickly and cheaply, and where flour still dominated corn as the ideal form of the tortilla. The production of tortillas in the factories became so cheap that it disenfranchised many of the communities that were previously producing the product. In the fourth epoch, the authors discuss the impact of globalization on the tortilla. The vast majority of tortillas are based on a flour recipe and mass-produced to be shipped all over the world. The food is completely divorced from culture and is now a staple in fast food chains like Taco Bell. By the mid-1990s, the tortilla became the fastest growing baked good in the United States. Several companies took possession of the entire tortilla market, making it virtually impossible for local communities to create and benefit from making tortillas. Many of these communities were forced to shift to other commodities or risk losing their land. Thus, a food product that was traditionally sacred, important to the culture, and had direct ties into their mythology, became another fractured identity marker that dissolved into the wider global sphere.

By examining the social life and history of different foods, we can see reflections of wider cultural trends in globalization. Sidney Mintz, in his book, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, demonstrates how the way that food and products move across borders and cultures provides insight to the costs of globalization. As food becomes globalized, it loses its traditional value and becomes just another commodity in a never-ending engine of global capitalism. Food and cultures become dislocated. This is not necessarily a good or bad thing, but rather another example of what globalization does. Each element of our culture and identity has, to one degree or another, shifted with exposure to the global world, and this is especially true with the internet and social media.

Cultures Don’t Disappear or Collapse

Contrary to popular belief, there has never been a time when one culture was simply erased entirely by another. The concept of cultural extinction is a European idea, and was often a justification for social Darwinism and European superiority. There are certainly cases where cultures are diminished by genocide, war, or catastrophe, but those events are rare and even in these cases, some members of those cultures often remain. Elements of their identity and culture live on as they blend with the dominant culture or migrate to new regions. Remember, culture is an adaptation to the wide environment and changing conditions.

The concept of collapse of a civilization is often a misnomer. While the political system of a culture can collapse, many other elements of culture live on. Life for the average peasant before and after the collapse of the political system of the Roman Empire wasn’t all that different. In regard to changing regimes in political systems, people often celebrate when a brutal authoritarian government topples. But if we examine the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, removing Saddam Hussein didn’t solve any of the country's problems. Rather, this created a far worse situation which gave birth to the Islamic State.

Beyond war or the toppling of political regimes, globalization isn’t as simple as a dominant force pushing out local cultures and ideologies. When confronted with a powerful culture from the outside, much of local culture finds its way into the dominant society. Lacrosse, a world-famous sport, was invented by the Iroquois Confederacy. Martial arts found their way into the West thanks to people like Bruce Lee, and religion doesn’t just assimilate culture, but changes with each culture it encounters. Yoga, Zumba, belly dancing, quinoa, chocolate, corn, potatoes, bananas, and countless other commodities and cultural practices have traveled from local, small-scale communities to dominant economic powerhouses like the United States and China. Appadurai asks us to consider five different landscapes of culture that flow across the borders and boundaries of the world to better understand the process of globalization, but we can also do this to consider how people’s lives are intersections of not only globalization but also a wide variety of cultural forces and identity markers.

Things to consider in your fictional world:

The complexities of globalization that we discussed above highlight how just about every facet of the human experience is impacted by a global system of capitalism and trade. When building a fictional world, a few things you might consider are:

How interconnected is your world? How long does it take to travel and/or communicate?

How common is migration? What kind of immigrants/refugees are considered ‘the good kind’. Why?

How does food change as it moves across cultures?

How do the ideologies of larger groups impact smaller cultures?

What does technology do? Where is it created? Who gets access?

If you have starships, where does that starship get its fuel and who makes it? What about the parts of the ship itself? (Consider this for any advanced technology)

Chapter 20

Ways of Knowing: An exploration of Science and Magic Across Culture and Fiction

Real Magic

When we discuss magic in our classes, we're fond of asking students if they have ever tried magic. A few of them may shyly raise their hands, probably thinking of the time they dabbled in Wiccanism or a love spell in their youth. The truth is, they have all practiced magic. You have as well. Magic is an intrinsic part of human action. Everyone uses it and responds to it, even when they have no idea they are doing so.

A magic ritual is a way to garner favor with or exert control over a supernatural entity or force. Magic, contrary to popular belief, is a logical system. It employs cause and effect in the same way that scientific experimentation does. If a spell or ritual is performed and the desired effect is achieved, the spell is marked as successful and used again. If it fails, it may either be put down to a faulty ritual or the ineptitude or lack of will in the practitioner.

The only real difference between science and magic is that magic is not empirical or testable, but rather relies on forces we cannot measure or detect. Because it relies on forces beyond our ken, we use it in situations that are also beyond our field of reach. We are generally pretty adept at controlling the world around us. We can build structures and make clothes to keep us protected from temperature and weather, we can grow or catch food to protect us from famine, we can learn about and adapt to our surroundings. But some things remain beyond us. We cannot control the weather, we cannot predict if good or ill fortune will befall us, nor can we escape death or even accurately predict when it will come for us. Areas of life where we have no control naturally provide us with anxiety. These are the times we turn to magic.

Bronisław Malinowski discussed magic in the South Pacific in a number of his publications. He watched sailors, incredibly skilled and knowledgeable, perform spells before they sailed on the open ocean. He realized that the spells helped to relieve their anxiety. All their skill, all their experience, all their craftsmanship could still be thwarted by the ocean, a force far greater than any human can predict or overcome. The spells gave them a feeling of control where they had none. Even when these practices are not given the name of “spell,” we still see them performed. Every athlete who performs a ritual before taking the field, every person who wears a certain item of clothing when they take a test, every driver who taps on the window glass to avoid being noticed by the police has performed a spell. These little rituals and spells provide us with relief of anxiety; we may not be able to control which way the cop happens to be looking or how well the other team will perform, but we feel better knowing we’ve done something to influence the outcome.

Everyday Magic

Humans are tremendous magical thinkers. We find magic everywhere we look. Sir James Frazer, a Scottish anthropologist, created the idea of sympathetic magic, which has two main laws: the law of contagion and the law of similarity. Contagious magic can be described as “once in contact, always in contact.” It’s the idea that the properties of one thing may be transferred to another by touch or proximity, and that those properties linger.

We find this idea all throughout human thought. Psychologist Paul Rozin has done numerous studies on the nature of disgust through the lens of contagious magic. His experiments involve asking participants to wear a shirt previously worn by someone they dislike, to drink apple juice out of a bedpan, or to drink from a glass that has contained a cockroach. Even if the items are thoroughly cleaned and sterilized, most people refuse. The idea is that because something we find disgusting touched it, those distasteful properties are somehow a part of the object and will be transferred to us by contact with it. Even if we know logically that there is no physical particle of yuck attached to the object, we just can’t bring ourselves to do it. Could you drink apple juice from a bedpan?

Good properties can be transmitted in the same way. People touch holy objects during worship, we rub the toes or bellies of statues for good luck, and we stretch desperately to touch our favorite celebrities on stage at a show. The idea is the same: We will gain the positive qualities of the object through touch. The properties, if they are strong enough, can infuse whole buildings. Catholic churches and cathedrals frequently contain relics of saints; things the saints carried or touched, or even body parts of the saints themselves. The presence of so holy an object suffuses the whole building and everyone inside of it with some of that holiness. The idea is that we can transfer properties, good or bad, from one thing to another just by proximity.

The second law of sympathetic magic is similarity. This is based on the principle of “like causes like.” The most accessible example of this is probably the voodoo doll. You may be familiar with those little yarn dolls you can get in tourist shops in New Orleans that you can stick needles in if you’re particularly mad at a rival. These dolls are more myth than reality, being almost entirely an invention of popular culture, but the idea is founded in sympathetic magic. What you do to a little model of a person (it only really works if you have a piece of hair or nail clippings from the person, which is a real part of voodoo) would happen to them in real life.

People do this kind of magic all the time, although not always with needles. Pinterest is packed with “vision boards” where you write, draw, or pin things that you want in the hopes that you will get it by writing it down. Recently, TikTok users have been using a combination of numerology and similarity to “manifest” desires. The technique involves writing or posting about the thing you want a specific number of times a day as a way to make it manifest in the real world. Some people have even theorized that prehistoric paintings of successful hunts on cave walls around the world were spells used to manifest a successful hunt.

Holidays and festivals worldwide use decorations and images of things to try and bring them into reality. Dancing around a maypole is a time-honored tradition in Northern Europe, and the act is seen as a powerful way to promote fertility around Midsummer. A maypole, if you have never seen one, is a long, straight pole with two round hoops at the top; not a particularly subtle symbolism for fertility. Celebrants of Lunar New Year will often write words like “luck” or “wealth” on strips of paper and hang them around their houses in hopes of gaining these things in the coming year. We feel instinctively that if we surround ourselves with facsimiles of a thing that the thing itself will come to be.

The Magic All Around Us

Most of us believe in luck. If you ask people what “luck” means, you will often get a vague description of a sort of force that causes things to happen. Luck can be good or bad, and you can gain or lose it by certain actions. Luck is beyond skill and preparation. It’s what causes you to find money on the ground or what causes you to blow a tire on the highway.

Luck can be gained, either by action or by proximity to lucky items. Sometimes a lucky event in itself will create more luck. Athletes will often not wash a jersey after a winning game so as not to wash the luck out of it. Students will use the same pen to take tests after a good grade. We even consider certain animals to be lucky and others to be unlucky. In many parts of the West, a ladybug in your house, especially in winter, is a sign of good luck, but a black cat is a sign of bad luck. Luck is, in essence, a force of magic that we interact with all the time. We are forever trying to influence and change it and thus change our own outcomes. We utilize sympathetic magic in both its forms to bring ourselves more good luck or avoid bad luck. Every time we do something for luck, we are performing a spell.

A similar, although by no means identical, concept is mana. Mana is found all around the Western Pacific. The word itself comes from the ancestral language to all living Pacific languages: Austronesian. Mana is something like the Force from Star Wars, something like luck, and something like charisma. Like the Force utilized by the Jedi, mana can be found in varying concentrations in objects and living things. While it cannot be used to lift rocks, it is a powerful energy that can be utilized for good or for evil. It can be found in all things, but its level increases in a hierarchical way: Animals have more mana than objects, and humans have more mana than animals. Certain objects and people have higher levels than others. A fish hook that is particularly good at catching fish or a chicken that lays more eggs than others is thought to have more mana. Kings have more mana than commoners, and their mana is considered to be a particularly powerful type. Mana, like luck, is communicable; it can be gained, transferred, or lost.

Gamers, especially players of Magic: The Gathering and World of Warcraft, are probably more familiar with the concept of mana from the realm of fantasy games. Gaming mana is a magical reservoir from which you gain the power to cast spells. It has been used in high fantasy in a similar context all the way back to the 1960s in the works of Larry Niven. This interpretation also led directly to the creation of the Force in Star Wars and the use of chi energy (which is itself a real concept in Taoism) as a superpower in comics like those published by Marvel and kung fu films beginning in the 1970s.

Witchcraft and Sorcery

While everyone practices some form of magic on a layman level, there is a more formalized type of magic. In this form, magic can be used to terrific effect, either for good or evil. In anthropology, these formal types of magic are broadly divided into “witchcraft” and “sorcery”.

“Witchcraft” is often used to denote bad magic, the kind used against people by jealous neighbors. This usage academically goes back to 1937, when Evans-Pritchard wrote Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Contrary to visions of Macbeth’s witches or the Sanderson sisters, witchcraft in this sense is used almost unconsciously. The negative effects of it (a cow or person getting sick, a building collapsing, or a kitchen catching fire) are produced by the envy and malice of a person who generally wishes ill upon someone else.

This is a fairly common view of witchcraft worldwide. The most visible symbol of this belief is probably the “evil eye” charm, found almost universally around the Mediterranean and throughout South America, where it was brought by Spanish colonists. You’ve probably seen them and might even have one; glass discs or beads with concentric rings of cobalt blue, white, and sky blue that look like a wide, blue eye hanging on walls or around people’s wrists. The charm is meant to protect against the “evil eye,” which functions exactly the same way that Evans-Pritchard’s witchcraft does. The animus of one person against another can send negative energy their way and cause bad things to happen, from breaking the heel of a shoe to a tragic accident. The evil eye charm acts as a shield. Folklore says that if the charm ever breaks, that means it stopped a curse from befalling the wearer.

When we strip off the negative connotation, we can look at witchcraft through a slightly clearer lens. Witchcraft has a DIY flavor to it. It is practiced by individuals; common people rather than trained practitioners. Other types of small-scale magic fall under this category as well, not just curses and ill will. Many folk rituals fall under the purview of witchcraft. Practices like dropping a coin into a well to grant a wish, burning herbs or incense in a new home to cleanse it, or painting a porch roof blue to ward off spirits (a practice common in the American South) are all part of witchcraft. All those little rituals to gain us luck or ward off bad luck are witchcraft. These spells and rituals are small, with fairly general goals. They do not require much power or training on the part of the participants, merely the will to create an effect, and sometimes a little ceremonial nudge to help it along.

Sorcery is more intentional and forceful than witchcraft. Sorcery requires specialized training and draws on an innate well of power within the practitioner that is not found in normal people. It frequently involves travel between the physical and spiritual realms, the manifestation of objects, transformation into animals, and astral projection. The actual term, like witchcraft, is often used with a negative connotation. Here, however, we’re going to discuss it as an action, free from valuation.

We see sorcery most frequently practiced by shamans. The word “shaman” comes from the Evenki language in Siberia, and has been applied to people who perform similar functions worldwide. While the popular conception of shamans is that of spiritual healers, shamans have a much wider role than healing alone. They act as both magical practitioners and societal authorities, settling disputes, defending people from bad magic, coercing spirits or powers into helping them, and doling out punishment for people who have transgressed against the community.

Shamans and sorcerers are chosen; imbued with their powers by spiritual forces. Sometimes this happens at or before birth, and sometimes it happens during life through a coming-of-age or other ritual. Shamans must often apprentice with an experienced teacher for many years before becoming a qualified practitioner, and may even be granted their teacher’s power after their death.

Shamans sometimes use psychotropic drugs as a channel to the spirit world, which they travel to in order to commune with spirits. Their visions have a significance beyond what an ordinary person sees while on psychotropic drugs. They are able to interact with and influence the spirits they see while on their journeys. They will often guide others into the spirit world using ceremonies involving substances like peyote or ayahuasca.

The manifestation of objects and possession of animals or people is common in sorcery. Many shamanistic healing rituals involve the physical manifestation and removal of harmful objects from the human body. This does not happen in a surgical sense, like one would see in a biomedical context; rather, it happens magically. Hands are placed on the sufferer or a sucking tube may be placed against an afflicted part. The healer puts good energy into the body, but will also often remove something as well. Worms, oily goop, stones, or other matter will magically appear in the shaman’s hands or the tube. If the ritual is done correctly, the sufferer will recover from their ailment, whether it is physical or spiritual.

These object manifestations are not always in the aid of healing, however. Evgenia Fotiou describes shamans in Peru being commanded by the spirits to attack people or even engaging in magical warfare with other shamans by manifesting objects and animals to attack them.

In a fictional context, we can see the difference between witchcraft and sorcery outlined clearly in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Witches, for the most part, practice small-scale magic. While they must occasionally summon a demon or alter the flow of time, they mostly use magic at a more garden level. Their witchcraft helps heal the sick, grow crops, and keep animals healthy. Most of the actual magic, however, is in the will of the practitioners, not in spell work. Granny Weatherwax, possibly the most powerful witch in the books, practices what she calls “headology”, using what people believe about magic as a tool to get them to help themselves. Prescribing putting good stout pine boards under the bed to treat a bad back convinces the sufferer that the knots in his back will magically transfer into the wood, but mostly helps by fixing a sagging mattress.

Wizards in the Discworld use more traditional sorcery. They are more shamanistic in their approach to magic, with a natural ability to use magic being honed by long, formalized training. Instead of small nudges and subtle influences, they practice magic on a much grander scale. They travel between dimensions and warp the fabric of the world to produce their magical effects. They produce huge balls of fire, summon Lovecraftian monsters, and turn people into animals. Their training and schooling leads to a more formalized and experimental type of magic. Sorcery and science in this world are intimately tied together because the wizards largely use the scientific method in their practice. Magic and technology, a practice called “technomancy” blend together at Unseen University, a sort of magical MIT, replete with research laboratories, libraries, and even its own magical computer system.

We tend to understand the distinction between witchcraft and sorcery unconsciously. Think of all the witches and wizards you find in fiction. Witchcraft, practiced by witches and warlocks, covers health, love, and prosperity (or their opposites), usually using kitchen or garden paraphernalia like herbs and cauldrons. Sorcery is practiced by wizards and sorcerers, who require formal training or an apprenticeship to create much showier displays of magic.

The only real exception to this rule is in Harry Potter, where these terms are used as gender markers. Hogwarts almost universally teaches sorcery; however, the term “witch” is applied to female practitioners. This distinction (female = witch and male = wizard) is found almost exclusively in English speakers and has more to do with Macbeth and King Arthur than it does with our conceptions of magic.

Mana and sorcery both entered the realm of fantasy and gaming through the same route. Anthropologists wrote about it in the 50s; the culture of psychedelia in the 60s drew people’s attention to it; and the rapid rise of fantasy fiction, film, and gaming in the 70s and 80s adopted it as part of their fabric.

Fictional Magic Systems

Fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson discusses two distinct systems of fictional magic. The first is a hard magic system and the second a soft magic system. Soft magic systems don’t have hard or fast rules. Their limitations are minimal, and in worlds that have soft magic, those who wield the magic have incredible power. The Lord of the Rings is a great example of a soft magic system. Just what are Gandalf and Sauron’s limitations? There is no way to know.

By contrast, hard magic systems have strict limits. In Avatar: The Last Airbender, for example, with the exception of the Avatar, a bender (one who controls a particular element) can only wield the element they are aligned with. They cannot simply decide to wield fire if their element is earth. Similarly, in the anime series, Fullmetal Alchemist, all magic has a hard cost under the laws of equivalent exchange. In other words, the characters can’t simply do whatever they want. They can rearrange whatever matter is present, but they cannot increase the matter or draw on an element that isn’t there. The core question of this series surrounds two young boys trying to use alchemy to bring back their mother, which goes horribly wrong because there is no matter equivalent to a human soul.

Which one? Soft or Hard Magic Systems?

Each kind of system of magic will reflect the kind of story you wish to tell. Hard magic systems could be said to represent the logical and rational experiences of life. A writer can use hard magic to help their characters to solve issues within the limitations of their world using logical consistency. Those limitations force the characters to engage in logic to find creative ways to solve their difficulties.

Soft magic systems can represent the deeper and more chaotic elements of our lives. Our emotional life, our experiences of trauma, and culture change have elements similar to the unpredictability of soft magic systems. Soft magic systems can sometimes allow for a deeper exploration of the psyche, while hard magic systems can sometimes allow for a better evaluation of the structure of society. Neither is necessarily better or worse than the other, they are just different ways of telling stories.

When exploring culture, we should always hesitate to deal in binaries. There are many stories out there that use a mixture of soft and hard magic systems. Like much else we have discussed in this volume, you should probably think about systems of magic as a range of experience and not an “either/or” scenario. Much of the Marvel universe is filled with characters who fit into either soft or hard magic, but sometimes both at once. This is because Marvel tells lots of different kinds of stories about what it means to be human.

When choosing a system of magic, think about what kind of story you are going to tell. Is this a story about trauma and recovery? Leaning towards soft magic may be a better option. Is this a story about inequality and discrimination? Hard magic may be a better choice here. That doesn’t mean you can’t do the reverse of that, or a combination of both, but it’s often best to know what kind of tools you have before you build a house.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Indigenous Science

It is often assumed by colonial powers and their citizenry that indigenous people didn’t manage their land; that they simply occupied it. The axiom “they aren’t using their land anyway” is not only a false statement, it is often the precursor to ethnic cleansing or genocide to clear the way for colonial land use. The truth is, all humans throughout history have had a relationship to their environment and gained knowledge surrounding it for better management practices.

Humans have always shared knowledge and passed it down to the next generation, gathering information and changing the face of their culture and environment. While a large part of the culture of industrialized nations in the last few centuries has been focused on the development of analog and then digital technology, there are many other cultures around the world that have extensive empirical ecological knowledge that can and does benefit the rest of the world.

Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) looks at the various kinds of knowledge that indigenous and local people have gained over thousands of years that may contain important insights colonial and industrial powers have missed. It provides for an acknowledgment that digital technology is only one option in the development of science and learning. In an examination of the relationship between conservation and TEK, Fikret Berkes explores TEK and how that knowledge can be helped in land management. Drawing on the work of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, he highlights that TEK and Western science are parallel tracks of knowledge, one which approaches the world from abstract and the other from more concrete observations. Both are valid approaches and can yield different relationships and results. Of course, we once again need to note to be wary of false dichotomies as many of these systems overlap in a number of ways; only the approach differs.

TEK can arise as an adaptive strategy to changing environmental conditions or a crisis. Sometimes this knowledge is justified through a spiritual lens. As Berkes describes, TEK functions on several levels, each integrated with the next. On the most basic level is local knowledge of land and animals. This knowledge then translates to land and resource management systems. Those systems, in turn, impact the social institutions within the society as their interaction with the environment naturally translates to how they manage their lives. At the top level, Berkes uses a wider, spiritual worldview that comes, at least in part, from all the previous levels. Understanding these different levels allows someone to understand the deeper relationship between the empirical knowledge gained and passed on by the culture and how they interact with their natural world.

TEK has implications beyond just land management. Jay Martin and his coauthors discuss the fact that numerous cultures have used this type of knowledge to advance and manage their society. They point out that the ancient Mayans had developed underground cisterns, reservoirs, and drainage systems for management of their water systems. Kendra Wendel demonstrated that water management and conservation have long standing traditions in Nuwuvi (Southern Paiute) culture. Some of the policies of the US Forest Service even include management practices from First Nations cultures. Things like controlled burns and water management policies have been directly influenced by indigenous knowledge.

Medicine is another arena of TEK. The World Health Organization estimates that 80% of the world's medicine is directly derived from plants or animals. In their article, “Why study the use of animal products in traditional medicines?”, Alves and Rosa point out that one danger of taking this kind of knowledge without reverence and respect of the indigenous communities and the environment in which they live is that we risk degradation of the environment and furthering the problem of endangered species. TEK, like anything else, can take the form of cultural appropriation and cultural destruction for the benefit of one group over another.

Loss of Knowledge in TEK

One thing that has happened as the result of trade, tourism and globalization is a loss of much of this TEK. Jeremy Spoon noted that tourism around Mount Everest has made a direct impact on both spiritual knowledge and conservation efforts in that region. As tourism grew and new generations of children integrated into the new global economy, much of the TEK of the region has begun to fade. This has led to a loss of knowledge surrounding sacred and ecologically protected values, mountain protector deities (that reinforce good conservation models), and compassion toward animals and sentient beings. This knowledge isn't just fluff, but constitutes how these communities interact with their natural world. Changes to these values will change how a culture behaves, as well as their priorities toward their land.

The important thing to take away from considering indigenous knowledge and land management strategies is that not only is it based on empirical knowledge gathered across generations, but that it often provides a framework for a relationship to the environment in which the culture thrives. When thinking about your fictional world, what kinds of relationships do your people have to their environment? What do they know? How does this relate to science, magic, religion, and more? If your culture thrives in its environment, they do so because of the knowledge they’ve passed down over many generations. What happens when that knowledge is no longer useful or the environment changes in your culture? TEK can provide a great way to think about the world from the point of view of your characters.

Speculative Fiction Outside the Lens of Europe

When the Marvel film, Black Panther, arrived on the scene in February of 2018, the term Afrofuturism, a little-known concept before, came to public attention. Afrofuturism is a genre that centers experiences of African cultures as the primary driver for the narrative. Much of the famous science fiction of the past century has been centered in European culture. Why make the distinction? Because different kinds of cultures are going to have different experiences and ask different questions, not only in their myths but also in their predictions for the future. Noted Afrofutrist writers N.K. Jemisin and Octavia Butler explore some of the complex questions surrounding racism, oppression, and the restoration of their culture after the horrors of colonialism and globalization.

Indigenous science fiction is another field that explores many of these similar questions. In her book Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, Grace Dillon explores the different dynamics and questions that Indigenous science fiction writers employ in their prediction of the future. Since Indigenous people are already living in a kind of post-apocalyptic world after having their cultures ravaged by colonialism, they will naturally ask different kinds of questions about the future than those of European colonial descent. With different languages and different knowledge, they may even hold the key to solving some of the world's major problems.

Speculative fiction has always been an arena to ask unique questions and play with ideas. There are many examples of how science fiction, horror, and fantasy have had lasting impacts in culture and technology throughout the last century. The robotic arms used in nuclear facilities, tasers, even cell phones and video calling were all brought into being by inspired science fiction fans. So, it’s important to consider the kinds of knowledge that all cultures have and the way they speculate on the future. After all, we are all in this together.

Things to consider in your fictional world:

If there is magic present in your world, consider if it’s contagious or sympathetic magic and if it’s a hard or soft magic system

What traditional ecological knowledge, or local knowledge is passed from generation to generation?

How is the traditional knowledge in your culture changing? What’s driving that change?

How does your culture imagine the future? How does this relate to their myth?

Chapter 21

Honoring the Dead: Funerals, Decomposition and Mourning

If you grew up on Star Wars like so many people in American culture, you might remember one of the iconic final scenes in Return of the Jedi where Luke watches Darth Vader's remains burn on a funeral pyre. Soon after, during the celebration of the destruction of the second death star, we see three force ghosts smiling at Luke, including Obi-Won, Yoda, and Anakin. Death is all around us, even in our fiction. Arguably the world's first written story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, is a story ultimately about the loss of a dear friend and the search for immortality.

All creatures in the universe have to deal with death or loss in some form. So much of our fiction is driven by loss. Think of all the Disney films where the main character loses their parents early in the story (most of them actually). Even stories about immortals like the 80s film Highlander, tackles what happens when you live a lot longer than everyone else and must suffer loss after loss. This chapter will highlight some of the key things to think about when considering death and loss in your fictional world.

Humans have a very complicated relationship with death. It is an inevitable part of our existence. We fear it even though we know there’s no way around it. Humans cope with this fear in many ways. We personify death; turn it into a corporeal figure we can theoretically interact with. We tell stories of the lands beyond death and what happens when you go there so we are no longer facing the unknown. We surround death with rituals, spells, and magic to give ourselves a sense of control. Cultures spend a great deal of time and energy dealing with both the concept and the reality of death.

Why Do We Feel Loss?

At the center of dealing with death is an important question: Why do we feel the loss of a person? As we have discussed in several chapters in this volume, you aren’t really an individual. Not only are you made up of your context, conditions, and choices, but you are also a social being, one that has deep connections to the people and places around you. We feel loss because when something significant is removed from our life, we have to contend with a change in our identity. Death then, is a hole in the social fabric of your life. Many cultures have rituals and practices to deal with this social hole. One of the reasons that cultures often provide support and throw parties around death is so that on some level, that social hole can begin to be repaired and new people have a chance to fill in the gaps that the deceased person left behind. You mourn not just for the person gone, but the sudden and unexpected changes you experience in your own life. Remember our discussion of psychosocial stress and culture change in Chapter 19? Dealing with loss has a lot of similar features.

Saying Goodbye - Mourning Customs

Before we begin on this section, we must make something clear: Mourning and grief are not the same things. We cannot cover grief here, because that delves deep into the realm of psychology and is out of our purview. Grief is an emotion; personal and unique, and how each culture handles grief can be different. As Catherine Lutz demonstrated in her book, Unnatural Emotions, even emotions aren’t necessarily universal. Mourning is different. Mourning is a ritual observed by the bereaved to demonstrate loyalty, loss, and finally, acceptance of death. Mourning rituals are a way to process through our emotions after a loss in a public way. They can also be ways to appease the spirits of the dead and to protect the living from their unhappy vengeance. They are deeply symbolic and demonstrative, and they often have very practical reasons behind them.

Showing Your Mourning

Special colors, clothing, adornments, and even haircuts are often used to signify mourning. These provide a handy signpost for everyone in the community that a person has experienced a loss. In the West, we dress in black, or at least we did historically. This practice has lessened somewhat in the modern era as public mourning has become unfashionable. In much of East Asia, white is the color of mourning. Often, plain white gowns or robes are worn with little adornment. In both cases, these colors are not often worn after the funeral has been completed.

In parts of Oceania, South America, Native North America, and Africa, the hair is cut close to the head or shaved completely as a display of mourning. This is either done by a family member or by the mourners themselves. This practice is usually reserved for close family members and is done as a sign of grief and respect. The mourning period generally lasts until the hair grows back to a certain length.

Ritual crying is also a common occurrence worldwide. Ritual crying is different from “real” crying in that it has a specific cadence, is practiced only by certain members of the community, and lasts a prescribed amount of time. It is often loud and shrill, with a throbbing modulation done in unison by the practitioners. This practice can be traced back to ancient Egypt and is found all over the world.

In some parts of the world, physical pain or even mutilation is a part of the mourning ritual. In a now-outlawed practice, the Dani people in Papua New Guinea would amputate portions of their fingers before attending a funeral. This was mostly practiced by women on the death of a close family member, husband, or child. The finger would be tied off with a tight string to numb it, then cut with an ax. The wound would be cauterized and the finger hung up in the house to appease the spirits. The practice also served as a physical expression of the emotional pain felt by the bereaved.

The Mourning Period

The time spent in mourning is often very specifically regulated. There are many reasons for this. Often it is dictated by the amount of time it takes for the person’s spirit to enter the afterlife. If the mourning period is cut short, the spirit may become angry and curse the living, or may not be able to enter the afterlife at all if the proper rituals are not performed.

Sometimes the period is more nebulous. We find this in the West. We do not have a prescribed mourning period, but people consider it indecent to do certain things too close to the funeral. Throwing a party the same week as the funeral, for example, or remarrying too soon may be frowned upon.

In some cases, the mourning period is extremely specific. Under Islamic law, widows must remain in iddah (waiting period) for four months and ten days after the death of a husband. During this time, she may not remarry. The reason for this time frame is to ensure the parentage of any potential children. If the widow is pregnant, four months is sufficient time to find out. If there is no child, the woman may remarry. If there is a child, she will remain in iddah until the birth of the child, after which she may remarry.

The Big Send off - Funerary Customs

Funerals generally look different worldwide, but their overall structure is the same. They follow the same pattern as any other rite of passage, just like marriage or coming-of-age. These rituals always follow three steps: separation, liminality, and incorporation.

The separation period with a funeral begins with the death itself. For purposes of clarity, we’ll go with the medical definition of “death” here, since some cultures describe death differently than English speakers. So, when the heart stops, the person becomes separated from the world of the living. Then begins the period of liminality. This is a time when the spirit or soul of the deceased is not yet in its final form. It may be hanging about the house, stuck inside the body, in a metaphysical waiting room like purgatory, or awaiting trial by a celestial being. Wherever the spirit resides, it’s up to the mourners to move it along. Sometimes this just means waiting a certain amount of time, but usually, there is a ritual involved. These rituals may involve prayers, spells, wards, or tasks. If they are not performed properly, the spirit may forever be trapped in this world or may become angry and vengeful.

Once these rituals are performed, the spirit may move on. This looks different in different cultures. The spirit may move on to an afterlife; some kind of paradise or just a different form of our world. They may be reincarnated into a new vessel. They may become a ghost, but a happy and helpful ghost rather than a cruel one. The funeral itself is often the culmination of these preparation rituals.

Funerals are also a chance to say goodbye. They are often the last chance to show respect, to make offerings, or to tell the deceased anything we wanted to during their life. They represent the moment when the spirit moves from our world to the next. Funerals may be sad or joyful, small or large, intimate or public.

In some cultures, the number of mourners at a funeral is a direct reflection of your prestige in life. In Taiwan, marching bands, performers, and even strippers are common features of funerals as a way to attract large crowds. In other cultures, like Tibet, funerals are intensely personal and only for family members. They provide a quiet, intimate way to say goodbye away from the public eye.

Funerals in Europe and North America tend to be quiet, somber affairs. Mourners speak in hushed voices and lights are dimmed to promote reflection and introspection. In West Africa, funerals are raucous and joyful, with singing, dancing, and marching through the streets. Funerals like this are intended to promote a celebration of the person’s life rather than focus on the sadness of their death.

What Happens When You Die (Physically)

Death is the cessation of bodily functions. Although there are about a million different things that can kill you, the actual death boils down to the heart ceasing to beat. This causes the rest of the body and organs to suffocate. Without going into too much grizzly detail, this is what happens next: First, without a metabolism to produce heat and venous tension to keep blood in place, the body begins to cool and blood begins to pool in the direction of gravity. These processes are called algor mortis and livor mortis respectively. The blood pooling causes whichever parts of the body that are facing upwards to pale (pallor mortis) and causes the parts of the body facing downward to turn a deep red, a trait which is often called “post mortem lividity”. After about 8 hours, the pooled blood congeals and can no longer flow, fixing the lividity in place. Forensic investigators can use this to see if a body was moved (if, for instance, the lividity is pointing upwards) and how the body was lying. Anything pressing into the skin (anything a body was laying on) will not allow blood into the capillaries there, leaving a white impression after lividity has fixed.

A few minutes after someone dies, their cells begin to die. The enzymes, lactic acid, and other products, like stomach acid, begin to destroy the cells in a process called autolysis; literally, “self-destruction”. This process occurring in the muscle cells produces rigor mortis, which builds for 12 hours until it peaks. During this time, it is nearly impossible to move the body out of the position it is in until rigor mortis dissipates after 48 hours. As decomposition progresses, the bacteria in the gut, now without food, begin to eat the tissues of the body. This creates cadaveric gases to build and cause the body to bloat. Eventually, insects and animals begin to eat the tissues as well. Eventually, only the bones and teeth will remain. The actual time needed for full skeletonization is widely variable but can happen in as little as two weeks.

This process, in addition to being icky, creates a great deal of dangerous material, from gases to bacteria. All cultures have some way of disposing of the dead that mitigates the danger, and yuck factor, of this process.

Disposing of the Dead

There are myriad ways that we dispose of our dead. The majority of cultures either inter or cremate their dead. These two options have a lot of perks to them. With cremation, the body is completely consumed by fire before the decomposition begins, leaving ashes and bones, which are easy to dispose of. With interment, either in the ground or a tomb of some kind, the body is isolated from the community and the natural processes can go on without notice. Some cultures mummify their dead to preserve them for ritual purposes. Still others feed the bodies to animals or place them on platforms in the wilderness to decompose naturally. Some cultures even ritually consume their dead.

The method a culture chooses to dispose of their dead will always fit into the framework of the culture itself. Remember that no part of a culture is an island; it's an interwoven whole and death is not apart from that. Let’s explore examples of each of these disposal methods and discuss how they blend into the fabric of the culture.

Interment

Interment, in an etic sense, is very practical. It’s easy enough to dig a hole in most places, and it’s an effective method of disposal. Emicly, it also has the benefit of leaving a body intact and retaining it in a specific location. This is symbolically important for a great many religious ideologies. For a very long time, it was illegal for Christians to burn their dead because it was believed that the body, and the whole body at that, was needed for the Second Coming. Christians today have a slightly more metaphysical take on the idea that the dead would rise from their graves, but in the past, they thought of it in a much more literal sense. If you didn’t have a body, you couldn’t get up and join the Lord. We see similar sentiments echoed in the ancient Egyptian ideas of the afterlife. You needed your actual, physical body for the afterlife.

Family crypts and tombs are popular around the world, not just for the convenience of mourners and descendants, but also for the symbolism of the family being together forever. Their bones lie together so their spirits are also together. A great number of religions will inter the clergy of that religion within the grounds of the place of worship. Friars entombed in catacombs below monasteries, monks mummified and placed in viewing windows in temples, even religious leaders being buried under the floors of cathedrals. The feeling that they are still watching over the place is very strong because we know that they are physically still there. Many cultures, although fewer now than there once were, bury their dead underneath the house where people continue to live. The idea is to keep them close to you, even after death.

Interment also allows for the burial of grave goods along with a body. Many cultures believe that whatever you need in the afterlife must be buried with you in order for you to have access to it. This can be anything; spouses and slaves, weaponry, clothes to keep you warm, money for the voyage, or offerings to the gods so they judge you favorably. Humans, being the sentimental creatures we are, will even place objects in graves with no practical purpose in the afterlife. Toys or jewelry that was meaningful to the person in life, tokens of remembrance like letters or locks of hair, and even flowers. The tradition of placing items in graves goes back to the Neolithic era, and may even predate humans. Though controversial, there is some evidence that a Neanderthal found at Shanidar Cave was buried with flowers placed on the body.

Cremation

Cremation, or the consumption of the body by fire, is another popular option worldwide. It’s extremely tidy, after all. No soft tissue remains after the fire has burned; there is only ash and bone. Commercial crematoriums will grind the bones to a fine powder and mix it with the ash from the soft tissue, so many people do not know that at least some bits of bone will survive even the hottest fire. They are brittle, however, and easily broken down to be mixed with the other ashes, even without the big, mechanical grinders used by commercial outlets. Cremation is also deeply symbolic. The physical body is erased, and the smoke and embers drifting toward the sky make for a powerful visual metaphor. Religions that tend to emphasize the separation of the body and soul at death generally opt for cremation. Religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, which believe that the body is only a vessel for the soul, encourage or even mandate cremation as a way to dispose of the body. Fire has always been a powerful tool in communication with gods, so sending a person to them in the same way makes a great deal of sense.

In the modern world, cremation has become a popular form of disposal for the simple reason that we’re running out of room. Cremation was illegal in much of Europe until the early 1880s. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, cemeteries were getting more and more crowded as they just piled the dead on top of one another. Cemeteries were so full that they would heap earth on top of the new bodies, actually raising the ground level. Some cemeteries were so full they became unstable. In 1878, the wall of Les Innocents cemetery in Paris actually collapsed, spilling bodies into neighboring properties. Cremation was a sanitary, practical alternative to burial.

Cremation, at least since the invention of the cremation oven, is also relatively cheap compared to burial, where a plot must be secured, excavated, and maintained, in addition to the cost of the headstone, casket, and embalming. It’s been growing steadily in popularity in America for this very reason.

Exposure

Exposure burial means that a body is left to the elements or animals to consume naturally (or sometimes with a bit of help). To many people, this seems callous, but the symbolism behind it can be every bit as beautiful as interment or cremation. It’s rare in the modern world, as many colonial governments have outlawed it, but it used to be practiced across North America, Southeast Asia, and Australia. In these areas, the body would be placed on a platform away from the village and left to the elements. In some cultures, like the Sioux, the bodies would be taken down and buried after a certain period of time. The Zoroastrians still practice exposure burial, at least in India. The body is placed in a “Tower of Silence”, where it is exposed to the elements and to vultures. As soon as the soul has left the body, it is seen as a vector for contagion, both physical and spiritual, and is sequestered in the towers on stone slabs to keep it away from the earth. Unfortunately, declining vulture populations in India are making this practice increasingly difficult.

Vultures are a key element of another type of exposure burials: sky burials. Sky burials are practiced by Vajrayana Buddhists, although similar rituals have been practiced in the rockier mountain regions of Asia for thousands of years. Sky burial is similar to the Zoroastrian burials in that vultures play a key role; however, undertakers in Tibetan Buddhism take a more active role in the proceedings than in Zoroastrianism. Bodies are carried to the charnel grounds where the undertaker, overseen by lamas, dismembers the body and scatters it. Bones are crushed and splintered so the birds can eat them as well. Vultures descend in crowds and consume the body, leaving nothing behind.

The ritual serves many purposes, both eticly and emicly. The Himalayas are steep and rocky, and digging graves can be nearly impossible. A majority of settlements in the region are too high for many trees to grow, so traditional pyre cremation is not an option as it would be for other Buddhists. The body is seen as an empty shell after the soul has left it, and the vultures need to eat. Sky burials are a generous way to dispose of a body; the former inhabitant has no need for it, but the birds do. The body is disposed of quickly and the vultures, a vital part of the ecosystem, are kept fed and happy.

Ritual Cannibalism

Cannibalism, probably more than any other death ritual, is something that never fails to make people shudder. After all, it’s a nearly universal taboo, at least to one degree or another. Countless inaccurate and racist works of fiction throughout the decades have portrayed jungles full of bloodthirsty cannibals and horror movies are peppered with them as well. If we aren’t picturing one of these monstrous visions, we tend to picture cannibalism as a desperate act of survival in a starvation situation. In reality, ritual cannibalism is not like either of these tropes. While there are certainly cases of cannibalism for survival, as a result of psychosis, and as a ritualistic addition to inter-tribal warfare, funerary cannibalism doesn’t fit into any of these boxes. There are plenty of groups which practice it to some degree, and probably more than you would think, but it’s very much the same as any other funerary ritual around the world. It’s a way to dispose of a body while remembering and honoring the deceased.

The Yanomamo (sometimes spelled Yanomami) group in Brazil are perhaps the best-known practitioners of funerary cannibalism. When a person dies, the body is first cremated. The ashes are then mixed into a banana soup and consumed by everyone in the village. This is seen as the only way the soul will be at peace. The symbolism of community is powerful as well; the remains of the dead person are physically taken into the bodies of the remaining group members. A number of other groups in South America practice similar forms of endocannibalism for the same reasons.

Mummification

When most people hear “mummification”, they think of the ancient Egyptians. While they were certainly prolific in the practice, they are far from alone. Hundreds of cultures across the globe and throughout time have and still do practice mummification of their dead. There are a number of reasons for this. First, as discussed with interment, the idea of the body being kept as complete as possible is important for many groups. The preservation of the body can also be seen as a way for humans to triumph in some way over death; the halting of the physical process of decay being a victory over natural forces. There is also a practical element to mummification and preservation: it prevents all the yuckiness associated with decomposition.

Mummification as a triumph over death is a broad way to describe a range of more nuanced feelings towards the preservation of the body, but it is accurate. Many religions see the process of decay as a process of corruption or the influence of evil spirits. Mummification, then, is seen as a way to thwart this evil. Although not as common in the modern era, Catholics have long believed that decay was corruption. Preservation was seen as a miracle and proof that a person was holy and was actually a criterion for sainthood. You didn’t even need the whole body to mummify; cathedrals and monasteries all over the world contain the mummified body parts of various saints - hands, feet, ears, and even tongues. Many orders actually began intentionally preserving their dead to mimic this holy miracle. This practice was particularly common in Italy, where monasteries like that belonging to the Capuchin order amassed truly prolific collections of mummified monks, town notables, and ordinary citizens. Japanese Buddhist monks hold a similar belief since about the 8th century CE, and will occasionally practice “self-mummification” by strictly controlling their diet and liquid consumption prior to death. Their bodies are then further preserved from desiccation by heat and smoke after their death and are kept within the temples.

Mummification as a matter of convenience is not as rare as people think, either. In fact, our modern practice of embalming the dead to preserve them until the funeral is a form of mummification. This practice, at least in the United States, goes back to the Civil War, when families wanted the bodies of soldiers returned home for burial. Embalming, a science which was still in its infancy at the time, staved off decomposition for just long enough to get the bodies home for burial.

Preservation for display is also a common motivator in the creation of mummies. Placing mummies in display cases, reliquaries, and even in open-air nooks is not uncommon. Numerous world leaders have been preserved in such a fashion; the most famous of which being Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong. A great number of groups throughout Southeast Asia and Oceania will preserve the dead and place them in nooks cut out of cliffs above villages. The symbolism is clear: The deceased is still very much present and watching over their domain, whether that means a political structure they founded, a religion they were part of, or even a village they were a prominent member of.

Novel Ways of Disposal

Science has given us a slew of new ways to dispose of our loved ones. While interment and cremation are still the only legal methods of disposal in most Western countries, there is some wiggle room. Cremains (cremated remains) allow for perhaps the most flexibility because what you do with the cremains after they have been returned to you is generally up to you. There are a great many companies that will turn human ashes into gemstones which can then be placed into rings or necklaces. The ashes can be launched out of the atmosphere in a “space burial” (Gene Roddenberry was the first person to have a space burial in 1992). You can even have your loved one’s ashes mixed into ink and tattooed on your skin; a process that bears marked symbolic similarities to Yanomamo endocannibalism.

Novel forms of interment lag behind slightly, since approval must be granted by the government to place bodies in the ground. In some places around the world, however, “green” or “forest” cemeteries are being created. Pods have been invented which bundle the body with fertilizer and tree seeds. After the burial, the decomposing body helps to fertilize the new tree, leaving a living memorial to the deceased. Beginning in 2021, you will even be able to send your loved one to a human composting facility. The body is broken down, mixed with nutrients and compost, and shipped back to you to put in your garden. These methods really emphasize “life after death”. This is similar to the practice in the fictional culture of the Fremen from Dune, mentioned in the previous chapter on religion.

While many of these new methods have the ring of science fiction, the symbolism behind them is strikingly similar to just about every other method we’ve used to dispose of our dead for millennia. We want to keep the memory of our loved ones close, send them into the heavens, or know that new life has sprung, literally in some cases, from their ashes.

Things to consider for your fictional world:

What does your culture think of death?

How are bodies dealt with? Consider the environment of your culture.

Are there particular rituals associated with the death and mourning process in your world?

What social issues beyond mourning have to be addressed when someone in your fictional world dies? Is there a ritual to redistribute the labor or reforge social ties?

Chapter 22

Monsters, Aliens, and Evil Androids: An Exploration of Fear and Anxiety

What Is a Monster?

It has been stated by numerous philosophers and ethnographers that monsters are simply the embodiment of cultural fears; our anxieties made flesh and blood. We see these reflections and patterns across cultures over and over again for good reason. The monsters a culture believes in often shed light on the things they fear most, and monsters that emigrate to new cultures often change form in their new surroundings. Monsters represent a fascinating blend of the familiar and the foreign; easily recognized but alien enough to terrify. Many monsters possess elements of humanity and exemplify the very worst elements of a culture as a form of hyperbole. Their faces may change, but it is the bones; the spirit of what a monster is and the fears that they embody, that reflect the heart of what it means to be human.

Like our anxieties about death, monsters often follow patterns that reflect our collective fears as a species. As we see in every horror movie, monsters attack when we are vulnerable in lonely places, in the dark, and in our sleep. They reflect our anxieties about our natural environment when they come from the water or from caves or from the night sky. Demons and spirits come for us when we are weakened by illness, childbirth, or impending death. They target the isolated, the frail, and the young. They can often appear human to gain our trust, only to reveal their true forms when it’s too late to escape them. They can lure or entrap us through promises of food, comfort, or money; playing upon our moral weakness and greed.

Think of how often a monster’s teeth are discussed. Monsters often feed off humans, either in a spiritual or a literal sense. Vampires suck blood, zombies eat brains, dragons and sea monsters devour virgins. Even in modern monster movies, monsters nearly always eat the defenseless humans. Giant animals like sharks or snakes, aliens that feed us to their young, or giant kaiju that eat us like popcorn. They are discussed with terms like “fangs,” “razor-sharp teeth,” “drooling,” “sucking,” and “crunching.”

When you consider our species, these fears are logical. Imagine early humans, alone on the African plains, surrounded by frightening animals that lurked all around. These monsters were very much real, but this did nothing to lessen their terrors. We were small, between three and four feet tall, had terrible night vision, and no claws or fangs to help defend us. We were prey to birds and leopards that could drop from above. Snakes grabbed us from holes in the ground and lashed out with sharp, poisonous fangs. Lions and hyenas slunk through the darkness just beyond the edge of vision; shadows out of the corner of our eyes. Crocodiles and hippos lurked in rivers and lakes, making people disappear beneath the surface. Our only protections from the creatures that wanted to consume us lay in the light of day and our campfires, in our culture and its defenses, and in each other. The darkness, the water, and isolation became natural reservoirs for our terror.

Modern Monsters

Most of the world now lives apart from these real monsters. The megafauna that hunted us like any other prey are gone and the remaining large predators are dwindling in number and range. The vast majority of humanity has nothing to fear from large beasts. However, our fears remain. A tremendous number of monsters are described as being “prehistoric” or pre-large-scale human civilization. We find these descriptions from as far back as we have writing. Many monsters that haunt religions are described as being from the time before their deities created peace and order in the world or before the world was civilized. Writers of weird fiction and cosmic horror like H. P. Lovecraft write of “antediluvian terrors” and “prehistoric nightmares”. It's as though we, as a species, have some lingering genetic terror of the time when we were small and vulnerable. Coupled with our gifts as a species to spin tales and exaggerate for the purpose of entertainment, many of these creatures became larger than life when they filled our nightmares.

Many monsters also reflect the fears we still face in the modern world, despite our cultural advances in the last three million years. We can still be carried off by disease or poison, by other people, or, worst of all, by unknown causes. These very real and very human fears are interpreted through a cultural lens. Numerous cultures speak of spirits that will steal a woman’s life away during childbirth if attracted by her cries. This is particularly common in foraging cultures where the margins for survival are slim and medical care is an at-home affair. Cultures with a focus on purity (Catholic and Malaysian cultures are good examples of this) have demons that possess the body and cause their vessel to break the laws of the society, causing bouts of violence, sin, and general bad behavior. Industrialized nations tend to have human monsters; serial killers, zombies, or criminals, that reflect the unease we feel when surrounded by strangers, as well as anxiety about dark, crowded spaces.

To Die, To Sleep...

Sleep is one of the reservoirs of fear for humans. Sleep makes us vulnerable as we lie unconscious in darkness for hours on end. Sleep also exposes us to the world of dreams, which are as likely to be horrifying as they are to be pleasant. Many cultures have tales of beings that can drain the life from a person while they sleep, often while the person is awake but trapped in a horrified state of sleep paralysis. People’s sleep paralysis nightmares almost always follow patterns. In the US, sleep paralysis monsters have passed through different phases. In the 1990s, when the cultural zeitgeist had become fascinated with aliens, sufferers often reported little gray men with giant eyes performing tests on them. In the early 2000’s, when there was a spate of demon-child films, people began to report nightmarish children crawling onto their beds as they slept. Suffers from southeast Asia tell stories of a horrible old hag with white skin who sits on their chest and slowly chokes the life out of the sleeping person while they lie awake, unable to move or cry out.

This monster, the dab tsog in the Hmong language, became widely known in the 1970s and 80s when there was a rash of deaths attributed to it in the United States and Thailand. More than 100 Hmong refugees in the US, almost exclusively men in their 30s, died in their sleep from unknown causes. Some men reported nightmares about the dab tsog at the time. Men became terrified of sleep and would try desperately to stay awake. The story so intrigued director Wes Craven that he went on to write A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984. Instead of the white-skinned hag, however, Craven changed the face of the monster to that of a disfigured homeless man who had chased him as a child and changed him from an evil spirit to the ghost of a murderer.

Stories of night hags may be so common in Southeast Asia because of a very real genetic condition. Brugada syndrome causes electrical abnormalities in the heart that can lead to sudden unexplained nocturnal death syndrome (SUNDS). This syndrome is found most commonly in Laos and Thailand, and predominantly affects men, with most deaths occurring between 30 and 40 years of age. A monster that kills men in their sleep is a much more palatable explanation, especially before the era of electrocardiograms, than no explanation at all. A night hag may be terrifying, but not nearly so terrifying as the unknown.

Sometimes monsters are used to explain myriad, nebulous fears; things we could hardly put into words. The wendigo is a perfect example of this. Territorially, the wendigo is one of the most widespread monsters in the world; it’s spoken of in the mythology of a collective of First Nations groups all across subarctic Canada, stretching from the Rockies to the Atlantic coast and down into the northern United States. The wendigo is a fascinating monster because it is a curious mix of a physical creature, a possessing spirit, and a culture-bound syndrome. While there are slight variations in the story between the different groups, the stories all agree on the main features of the monster. The physical body of the wendigo is towering and lanky, with enormous, clawed hind feet and paw-like hands. Its breath creates howling, icy winds that blow with such force that they can knock down trees and even start tornados. Its heart, and sometimes its other organs, too, are made of solid ice. Its most distinctive feature is its insatiable desire for human flesh; so strong that it chews off its own lips in its hunger, baring its pointed teeth.

Wendigos were once human. Once the wendigo gets hold of you, it changes you into a monster like itself. This is where the wendigo begins to shift its mythological form. I can get hold of you in a number of ways; through dreams, visions, possession, physical force, or even through your own thoughts. If it catches you physically, it does so while you’re out hunting. Those who venture off into the forests in winter and never return are thought to have been taken by the creature. It captures you and transforms you into a monster like itself.

If it catches you through your thoughts or dreams, it has worked its way into your head through your hunger and cold. When a person dreams of a wendigo, they begin to have cannibalistic desires toward their own family. Most cultures believe that a person in the early stages of wendigo madness can be stopped and cured, although the cures are often horrifying enough, but if the person actually consumes any part of another human being, they are done for. There’s no hope for a person who has turned wendigo, and the only course of action is to kill them for the safety of the group. There are numerous recorded cases of wendigo killings in tribal and legal records throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. The diagnosis of “wendigo madness” is found in psychological papers throughout this time as a way to explain a temporary psychosis with a focus on cannibalism.

Look at the main features of the wendigo story: a monster of cold that lives in the wild spaces and feeds off hunger. It drives people to cannibalize their family and turns them into cold-hearted monsters. It will ultimately separate you forever from the people and civilization you love and strip you of your humanity, leaving you to wander alone in the freezing wilderness. These fears are easy enough to imagine in subarctic Canada, where temperatures that go well below freezing and isolation caused by snow and wind can lead to starvation and madness over the long winters. It’s the same set of vague fears that drive Stephen King’s The Shining or John W. Campbell Jr.’s Who Goes There? The wendigo is a single, corporeal manifestation of these fears. It groups them all into one grotesque form and gives them shape.

Fears of Domination, Experimentation, and Colonization

In the pantheon of monsters, aliens are relatively new. In some ways, they are just a new face on the same stories people have been telling for millennia. Space, after all, is just a combination of those things we fear. It’s cold, dark, isolated, far older than our little planet and almost completely unexplored. Aliens are often just monsters from this final frontier rather than our own backyard. Many aliens fit the mold of grotesque, slobbering, man-eaters or shape-shifting deceivers. Even stories of alien abductions, lost time, and mysterious lights are nearly identical to stories that people have been telling for centuries about fairies, will-o-the-wisps, and the little people of the hills, all of which can lead you away and trap you in another world.

But aliens can embody fears that other monsters cannot. These fears, like all others, are reflections of the time and culture in which people live. Aliens as colonizers, as invaders, and as dispassionate scientists are all reflections of the fears that stalk people in the industrial age. H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (1895-97) was written after the author and his brother discussed the terrible disaster the Tasmanians suffered after their invasion by the British. Wells was musing about what would happen if someone did to the British what they had done to the Tasmanians. In fact, there were a number of “invasion” stories written at that time, although Wells was the only one to use aliens as his aggressors. Britons were worried that their military might was waning, and the increasing armament of Germany and France stoked anxieties that the British would face the same treatment they had given their colonies.

Throughout the Cold War, science fiction featured alien invaders, either working secretly or in open displays of aggression, trying to take over the Western world. Endless troupes of aliens landing on the White House lawn fill the fiction of the 1950s and 60s. Change “aliens” to “Russians” and you have a nearly exact mirror of what Americans feared happening at the time. Many aliens are often a gestalt consciousness, a shared mind, or can manifest as a kind of extreme conformity and the end of the individual as seen in the famous Star Trek villains, the Borg. We can also look at the protagonists in these films and see the kinds of qualities they embody and how they reflect the morals and values of our society like a modern myth or morality play.

Many science fiction stories from that time also reveal an uneasiness about the level of violence and aggression the world was experiencing. In the 1950s, the 20th century was only half over and had already seen two world wars, half a dozen genocides, and the invention of weapons that could unleash destruction on a level we had never dreamt of. Many films in the 1940s and 50s, perhaps most recognizably exemplified by The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), feature aliens as advanced beings, capable of great destruction but also of nearly miraculous feats of science and medicine, who come to Earth to warn us away from a path of violence. Klaatu, the alien emissary, warns all of Earth’s leaders, “Your choice is simple: join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration.” People around the world, after decades of violence, nationalism, and xenophobia, were afraid. They feared that the ever-mounting aggression would eventually lead to a conflict that no nation could win.

“I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen...”

The famous words of HAL 9000, the evil artificial intelligence that coldly murders its crew in the sci-fi book and film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, demonstrate another one of our fears made manifest; our fear of the dangers of technology.

On August 6th, 1945, the world entered a new age; an atomic age. After the first atomic bomb was used on a population in Hiroshima, our relationship with technology changed forever, and with it came the rise of a new kind of monster, one of our own making. To be sure, humans have always had anxieties about new technology, and with the industrial revolution came literature about automatons (what we now call robots) and other technological wonders that sometimes turned against their masters. One of the earliest examples of modern science fiction, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, explored the potential and dangers, as well as the deep philosophical questions surrounding electricity. Shelley set off a wave of stories about the idea of our technological creations getting the best of us.

As anthropologist Willi Lempert explains in his article, “Navajos on Mars,” humans have developed countless films, like The Matrix, 2001, and Terminator, to highlight our fear of technology. Even the new Star Trek: Picard series features a plotline surrounding evil ‘synths’ and questions about the humanity of artificial intelligence and its compatibility with organic life. Part of this has to do with religious worldview. In most of Western, European-based culture, there is only one kind of intelligence: humans. Cultures outside this paradigm, however have multiple kinds of intelligence. Further, Western fear of AI may stem from the idea that only the Judeo-Christian god has the true power of creation. Ultimately though, fear of AI stems from the fear of what we do to what we consider to be inferior species.

As we entered the 1980s and 90s, aliens changed slightly. No longer were they brazen colonists landing on our shores, they were shadowy and subversive, often entwined with the murkier branches of government. Aliens and the government branches that studied them would abduct people and experiment on them. They would implant people with tracking devices, create alien-human hybrids, and mutilate cattle in their ruthless quest for data. They were cold, unfeeling scientists that existed outside of human empathy or compassion. The declassification of wartime documents about Nazi scientists, exposure of government experiments like MK-Ultra, and a number of dubious psychological research projects like the Stanford Prison Experiment were increasingly making people uneasy about science and scientists. The perpetrators of the experiments seemed, to regular people, just like the inhuman aliens from another planet. Add this to a growing dissatisfaction with the government nearly everywhere in the world and the X-Files style alien/government conspiracy became not just a popular element in fiction, but also an integral part of the mythology of the time period.

When you are creating memorable monsters or antagonists in your world, it’s important to consider the core values of your fictional culture. Remember the chapter on imagined past, myth and cultural purity? The core lessons of that chapter are essential to creating a creature that challenges the core values of your characters’ and readers’ world view.

Things to consider in your fictional world:

What are the most significant fears and anxieties of the culture? How does it relate to their imagined past?

What keeps people up at night in your world?

If you have a creature or monster, what are some memorable features of your creature?

How does your creature tie into the myth structure of your world? How does it tie into your culture’s sense of purity?

Is your monster/creature sentient? How are its goals similar or different to your main character?

What arenas of your culture does the monster most impact?

What’s at stake if your protagonist fails to subdue the creature?

Additional Resources

Throughout this book we’ve mentioned various websites and cultures that might want to further explore to improve your craft. This link below will take you to a list of numerous resources that might just help you in crafting a better fictional world. Best of luck with all your creative endeavors.

https://linktr.ee/BuildBetterWorldsBook

Thank you so much for reading! If you don’t know already, rating and reviewing a book are important for author's livelihood. If you haven’t already, could you take a moment to rate and review this book? We would be eternally grateful.

About the Authors

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Kyra Wellstrom earned a Bachelor's Degree in anthropology from Metropolitan State University of Denver and a Masters Degree in forensic anthropology from the University of Edinburgh. The Applied Anthropologist published her paper Forensic Anthropology and Facial Reconstruction as Applied Anthropology in Vol.35.No.1. She has taught at Front Range Community College and other schools since 2014, where she has composed courses in biological anthropology and human evolution, forensic anthropology, and medical anthropology. She currently teaches archaeology, cultural anthropology, forensic anthropology, and biological anthropology, always with a focus on biocultural interaction and holism. Kyra has a passion for teaching and enjoys helping students engage with material by encouraging their creativity. She designs her courses with a focus on game play, multimedia interaction, and world building.

Michael Kilman is an anthropologist and a lecturer at the University of Colorado at Denver and host of the YouTube series Anthropology in 10 or Less. His graduate research focused on the Romero Theater Troupe, a community organization that seeks to address stereotypes in media and gives a space for individuals to share their stories and represent themselves. After teaching anthropology for 6 years and working with 25 native American Tribes over the course of ten years, Michael published four science fiction novels in a series called The Chronicles of the Great Migration. As a documentary filmmaker Michael has produced several documentaries including the short form pieces titled Native American History in Colorado and the Language Hunters. His long form documentaries include Unbound: The Story of the Romero Theater Troupe and The Crossroads at Stonewall. Recently, Michael was elected President of the High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology.

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Ambrosino, B. (2017, March 15). The Invention of Heterosexuality. BBC Future. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170315-the-invention-of-heterosexuality

Herdt, G. (1999). Sambia sexual culture: Essays from the field. University of Chicago Press.

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Wekker, Gloria. The politics of passion: Women's sexual culture in the Afro-Surinamese diaspora. Columbia University Press, 2006.

Chapter 15

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Elman Rogers SERVICE, & DELÉLÉE-DESLOGES, J. G. (1971). Primitive social organization. An evolutionary perspective. Random House.

Foucault, M. (2012). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage.

Graeber, D. (2009). Direct action: An ethnography. AK press.

Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (2010). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. Random House.

Jackson, P. T. (2009). News as a contested commodity: A clash of capitalist and journalistic imperatives. Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 24(2-3), 146-163.

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Dalrymple, W. (2005). Sufi soul : The mystic music of islam. Brighton, England: Electric Sky.

Deloria, V. (2003). God is red: A native view of religion. Fulcrum Publishing.

Deloria, V. (2006). The world we used to live in: Remembering the powers of the medicine men. Fulcrum Publishing.

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Kane, S. (1974). Holy Ghost People: The Snake-Handlers of Southern Appalachia. Appalachian Journal, 1(4), 255-262.

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Kapferer, B. (Ed.). (2003). Beyond rationalism: Rethinking magic, witchcraft and sorcery. Berghahn Books.

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Chapter 17

Bodley, J. H. (2014). Victims of progress. Rowman & Littlefield.

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Chagnon, N. A. (2013). Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists. Simon and Schuster.

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Abu-Lughod, J. L. (1989). Before European hegemony: the world system AD 1250-1350. Oxford University Press, USA.

American Experience. (2009) We Shall Remain: Wounded Knee. Boston, MA: GBH Archives. Retrieved from http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_F88421E4E1214114957BB68A15885D00

Bodley, J. H. (2014). Victims of progress. Rowman & Littlefield.

Deloria Jr, V., & Lytle, C. M. (1983). American Indians, American Justice. University of Texas Press.

Dunbar-Ortiz, R. (2014). An indigenous peoples' history of the United States (Vol. 3). Beacon Press.

Duthu, N. B. (2008). American Indians and the law. Penguin.

Eller, J. D. (2015). Cultural Anthropology: 101. Routledge.

Garrett, M. T., & Pichette, E. F. (2000). Red as an apple: Native American acculturation and counseling with or without reservation. Journal of Counseling & Development, 78(1), 3-13. Sigler, L. (2003). Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci: a translation into modern English of Leonardo Pisano’s book of calculation. Springer Science & Business Media. Hempelmann, C. F. (2007). The laughter of the 1962 Tanganyika ‘laughter epidemic’. Humor, 20(1), 49-71. Indigenous Peoples at the United Nations For Indigenous Peoples. (n.d.). Retrieved May 08, 2020, from https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/about-us.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIndigenous%20communities%2C%20peoples%20and%20nations%20are%20those%20which%2C%20having,territories%2C%20or%20parts%20of%20them.

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Wolf, E. R. (2010). Europe and the People without History. Univ of California Press.

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Appadurai, A. (1990). Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. Theory, culture & society, 7(2-3), 295-310.

Bodley, J. H. (2014). Victims of progress. Rowman & Littlefield.

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Gardner, A. M. (2008). Strategic transnationalism: The Indian diasporic elite in contemporary Bahrain. City & Society, 20(1), 54-78.

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Murdock, D. F. (2003). Neoliberalism, Gender, and Development: Institutionalizing" Post-Feminism" in Medellín, Colombia. Women's Studies Quarterly, 31(3/4), 129-153.

Ong, A. (2006). Neoliberalism as exception: Mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. Duke University Press.

Pratt, G. (2012). Families apart: Migrant mothers and the conflicts of labor and love. U of Minnesota Press.

Wallerstein, I. M., & Wallerstein, S. R. I. (2004). World-systems analysis: An introduction. Duke University Press.

Wolf, E. R. (2010). Europe and the People without History. Univ of California Press.

Chapter 20

Alves RRN, Rosa IL. 2005. Why study the use of animal products in traditional medicines? Journal ofEthnobiology and Ethnomedicine 1: 1–5.

Berkes, F., & Usher, P. J. (2000). Sacred knowledge, traditional ecological knowledge & resource management. Arctic, 53(2), 198.

Dillon, G. L. (Ed.). (2012). Walking the clouds: An anthology of indigenous science fiction. University of Arizona Press.

Fikret, B. (1999). Sacred ecology: traditional ecological knowledge and resource management. Tylor & Francis, London & Philadelphia.

Fotiou, E. (2010). Encounters with sorcery: An ethnographer's account. Anthropology and Humanism, 35(2), 192-203.

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Kapferer, B. (2002). Introduction: Outside all reason—magic, sorcery and epistemology in anthropology. Social Analysis,46(3), 1-30. Chicago

Malinowski, B. (1954). Magic, science and religion. New York, 8

Martin, J. F., Roy, E. D., Diemont, S. A., & Ferguson, B. G. (2010). Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK): Ideas, inspiration, and designs for ecological engineering. Ecological Engineering, 36(7), 839-849.

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Spoon, J. (2011). Tourism, persistence, and change: Sherpa spirituality and place in Sagarmatha (Mount Everest) National Park and Buffer Zone, Nepal. Journal of Ecological Anthropology. 15(1): 41-57

Strauss, M. (2012, March 15). Ten Inventions Inspired by Science Fiction. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ten-inventions-inspired-by-science-fiction-128080674/

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Chapter 21

Boyce, M. (2001). Zoroastrians: their religious beliefs and practices. Psychology Press.

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Conklin, B. A. (2001). Consuming grief: compassionate cannibalism in an Amazonian society. University of Texas Press.

Cremation Ink. (2020). Tattoo Ink with Ashes. Cremationink.com. https://cremationink.com/tattoo-ink-with-ashes/

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Chapter 22

Akhtar, A. (2017, May 9). Some Nightmares Are Real — the Mysterious Deaths that Inspired “A Nightmare On Elm Street”. Medium. https://medium.com/@arifakhtar/some-nightmares-are-real-the-mysterious-deaths-that-inspired-a-nightmare-on-elm-street-1cafb7450c78

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Lempert, W. (2017, March). Navajos on Mars: Native Sci-fi Film Futures. Research Gate. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.23177.03689

Marks, C., & Tannenbaum, R. (2014, October 20). Freddy Lives: An Oral History of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Vulture. https://www.vulture.com/2014/10/nightmare-on-elm-street-oral-history.html

Vatta, M., Dumaine, R., Varghese, G., Richard, T. A., Shimizu, W., Aihara, N., ... & Li, H. (2002). Genetic and biophysical basis of sudden unexplained nocturnal death syndrome (SUNDS), a disease allelic to Brugada syndrome. Human molecular genetics, 11(3), 337-345.