racial worlds

[marycatelli]

Advice for a writer -- read primary source, read primary source, read primary source.  Warning for a writer -- it will give you persepctive on modern days things.  And very few will be the people who will be able to fathom it because it's not visible from their vantage point.

For instance, many discussions of race in speculative fiction start with the assumption -- never, of course, laid on the table -- that the racial categories of modern day society are like the law of gravity. 

Reading even Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E. Howard perhaps can clear up the notion, but then, I actually noticed the racial effects far better after I had been primed by reading about the racial science of their times.  (The very, very, very best racial science of their times.)

The classic mix of elves, dwarves, etc. could help:  groups that used to classify themselves all as different races often band together when face with people very much more different than themselves.  It can, however, take a while.  It took several centuries for the Indians to think of themselves as all "red" as opposed to "white" -- whom they generally split up at first.

And you seldom get the terminology that divides the world up into us, the real people/tribe/nationality, and them, everyone else, who get lumped together into one word.

Comments

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

This is rather like assuming that modern ideas of gender and sexuality are fixed in natural law, also, when it's so completely subjective and based in the culture at the time and place. Some of the historical romance writers come up with interesting discussions about how "homosexual as something you are," doesn't even exist in the seventeenth century. You don't have a group of people, in that case, you just have behaviors, "actions considered decadent and disapproved of." Or the class of "slaves, who early on in the US were kidnapped and imprisoned First Nations peoples, and only later started being brought in from Africa. I understand this started with the economics: There was a shortage of Indian slaves, and the folks sold by traders from Africa didn't know how to survive out in the wilderness the way local Indian kids might, so the black slaves couldn't run away so easily.

[marycatelli]

There are these little things called "babies." Which have a certain importance in keeping society going.

When push comes to shove, there are rock-bottom, objective constraints on sex.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

I would put sexually-transmitted diseases in the same absolutist category as babies. However, I do notice that many societies and sub-groups seem to play very fast and loose with how they handle either one of those.
The militias in places like Darfur and the Congo, do not act in "typical ways". Under similar circumstances, many groups will adopt the children of hostile tribes and raise them as their own, while enslaving the older girls and women.

[marycatelli]

But then, the militias are in a grossly abnormal situation. Not unprecedented, but abnormal. Historically you had to have enough people raising food to prevent total famine.

[marycatelli]

And you get Tacitcus's Noble Savage. Who is German.

I once read a solemn pronouncement that dressing up as a savage is PC only for blacks. . . .

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Similar situation in High Ancient Egypt (before the conquests by the Persians and Macedonians). If you were Egyptian in appearance and culture, you were ok: if you belonged to any other race or nation, you were despised to varying degrees as "one who knew not ma'at." S. M. Stirling has fun with this in the Island in the Sea of Time trilogy, with the unfortunate black American deserter McAndrews, who joins the Egyptian court and is horrified to discover that this "black" ancient civilization despises him as some kind of "Nubian barbarian."

[marycatelli]

He was kinda naive. . . what's really sad is that characters like him in real life are writing a lot of books without growing wiser.

It's hardly unique: goyim, gaijin, gorgio. . . . And all those tribes whose endonym means "The People."

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

McAndrews was also the most sympathetic of the villains in that story. Also the only major one of the Islander deserters to escape retribution, of one or another sort.

[marycatelli]

Well, he did go out of his way to hand out horns and haloes. . . the haloes were a little worse fitting, what with the instant evangalism of modern American beliefs to those they bring in.