If you read this, you almost certainly know I'm a LARPer. Ridiculous hobby, yes, but heavy on the creativity, and that's my drug. Also heavy on the cultural appropriation - and for better or for worse, it's pretty much necessary.
The British LARP scene, like any social network of sufficient size, has parts which care about this issue and parts which don't. Me, I've had a lot of cause to think about it recently, and how to build cultures from scratch. And the problem for the respectful citizen of the world trying to do so in the 21st Century is that assuming you're using humans, or beings which relevantly resemble humans, whatever idea you have, it's been done already.
Think about dress. There's only so many ways it's possible to dress a human. You can define your culture's clothing by whatever criterion you like, prioritising warmth, comfort, ostentation, beauty, intimidation, alienation: whatever you do, you'll be replicating something someone's done before. Likewise, the materials you use. Likewise, the relevant social conventions.
Think about faith. There's only so many ways it's possible to admire the divine, and if it's going to make sense, it'll be underpinned by one of only a tiny handful of philosophical foundation-structures. Worse yet: if you don't use one of those, but have a religion which doesn't particularly care for its underlying philosophy or metaphysics, you're basically encouraging your players to treat it as a one-dimensional obsession rather than a faith - and even that's been done to death in history.
Think about social structure. There's only so many ways it's possible to organise a society of humans, and every one of them's been tried. This isn't the place to go into them all, but particularly with the accelerated timelines of LARP games (driven by the very short lives of many PCs), most of them end up as thin veneers over "Survival of the Most Competent" anyway.
An ideal solution might seem to be what I'll term the Element By Element solution: take the clothing style of one culture, adapt it for a different environment, then adapt it again for a different religion. Do the same for your religion, if any; do the same for your social structure and rituals, your magic, your relationship attitudes, anything. Sounds like you should have something new, right? Wrong. Whatever you come up with, if it works, someone has done it already. That's just humans. We like to think up new ways to solve old problems. This is the first problem: that there is nothing original in the world.
The second problem is that whatever you do take and however respectfully you take it - wait for it - it's already been taken, and by people less respectful than you. Oh shit. Mind = blown. If you're from a privileged culture, like I am, then it's already been appropriated by members of your own culture, and now not only are you disrespecting someone else's heritage and historical-culture, but you may even be exploiting your people's history of abusing their people to do it.
This quickly grows too complex to discuss successfully without specific examples to hand, so I'm not going to go into it at length here. However, I'd like to know about examples you may have come across.
I'd actually quite like there to be more of a debate on this - not on the respectfulness issue, as we all already know that being disrespectful of other people's cultures is stupid and douchey, and don't bloody do it - but on designing a schema to help media creators understand the difference between acceptable and unacceptable cultural appropriation. "Be respectful" isn't enough. It's problematically nonspecific and ideas of respect vary too widely. I'd like to design a questionnaire or scoring system by which content creators - authors, artists, designers, directors, etc. - can see how their meme-borrowing might cause offence. In essence, I'd like to take the discussion about stereotypes and storytelling seen in this excellent blogpost and try to quantify its conclusions. Because Stargate is less offensive to its borrowed culture than, say, Avatar, and it'd be really helpful if we could say why more clearly than we can right now.
The British LARP scene, like any social network of sufficient size, has parts which care about this issue and parts which don't. Me, I've had a lot of cause to think about it recently, and how to build cultures from scratch. And the problem for the respectful citizen of the world trying to do so in the 21st Century is that assuming you're using humans, or beings which relevantly resemble humans, whatever idea you have, it's been done already.
Think about dress. There's only so many ways it's possible to dress a human. You can define your culture's clothing by whatever criterion you like, prioritising warmth, comfort, ostentation, beauty, intimidation, alienation: whatever you do, you'll be replicating something someone's done before. Likewise, the materials you use. Likewise, the relevant social conventions.
Think about faith. There's only so many ways it's possible to admire the divine, and if it's going to make sense, it'll be underpinned by one of only a tiny handful of philosophical foundation-structures. Worse yet: if you don't use one of those, but have a religion which doesn't particularly care for its underlying philosophy or metaphysics, you're basically encouraging your players to treat it as a one-dimensional obsession rather than a faith - and even that's been done to death in history.
Think about social structure. There's only so many ways it's possible to organise a society of humans, and every one of them's been tried. This isn't the place to go into them all, but particularly with the accelerated timelines of LARP games (driven by the very short lives of many PCs), most of them end up as thin veneers over "Survival of the Most Competent" anyway.
An ideal solution might seem to be what I'll term the Element By Element solution: take the clothing style of one culture, adapt it for a different environment, then adapt it again for a different religion. Do the same for your religion, if any; do the same for your social structure and rituals, your magic, your relationship attitudes, anything. Sounds like you should have something new, right? Wrong. Whatever you come up with, if it works, someone has done it already. That's just humans. We like to think up new ways to solve old problems. This is the first problem: that there is nothing original in the world.
The second problem is that whatever you do take and however respectfully you take it - wait for it - it's already been taken, and by people less respectful than you. Oh shit. Mind = blown. If you're from a privileged culture, like I am, then it's already been appropriated by members of your own culture, and now not only are you disrespecting someone else's heritage and historical-culture, but you may even be exploiting your people's history of abusing their people to do it.
This quickly grows too complex to discuss successfully without specific examples to hand, so I'm not going to go into it at length here. However, I'd like to know about examples you may have come across.
I'd actually quite like there to be more of a debate on this - not on the respectfulness issue, as we all already know that being disrespectful of other people's cultures is stupid and douchey, and don't bloody do it - but on designing a schema to help media creators understand the difference between acceptable and unacceptable cultural appropriation. "Be respectful" isn't enough. It's problematically nonspecific and ideas of respect vary too widely. I'd like to design a questionnaire or scoring system by which content creators - authors, artists, designers, directors, etc. - can see how their meme-borrowing might cause offence. In essence, I'd like to take the discussion about stereotypes and storytelling seen in this excellent blogpost and try to quantify its conclusions. Because Stargate is less offensive to its borrowed culture than, say, Avatar, and it'd be really helpful if we could say why more clearly than we can right now.
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