Mana, Shamans, and the Cultural Misappropriation behind Fantasy Terms

[pemerton]

So you're arguing that I shouldn't describe some fictional thing/being as being primitive? Because???

There's nothing wrong with the word primitive.

For the record, I think describing human cultures as "primitive" is not very desirable. Given that not many people think of themselves as primitive, the terms is strongly suggestive of the perspective of some other culture that is looking down on the "primitives".

I don't want to say there is no need ever to use this sort of terminology. I teach a theoretical sociology course and use the language of "moderntiy" and "pre-modernity" because something is needed to label and explain eg what happened to East Africa between c the first half of the 20th century and c the second. I think modernity is a more useful because more explanatorily powerful lable than primitive.

But in the context of D&D I don't think the word "primitive" - or similar language - is needed. D&D doesn't need explanatory anthropological/sociological terms. Orcs and gnolls are as technogoligically sophisticated as the typical human or elvish village. (Dwarves are more sophisticated, but they do not provide a benchmark against which humans or elves are described as "primitive".)

For lizardfolk, rather than describing them as primitive it would make more sense to say that they don't practice metallurgy.

The term primitive seems to be deliberately intended to establish a pejorative perspective.

 

[Bedrockgames]

But, do you not see the issue?

When the term is being borrowed (which is fine) and ONLY applied in negative light, then it becomes a problem.

Do people really not understand this? There is nothing wrong with borrowing a word into a language. Cognates happen all the time. Heck, Katana is a cognate and there's nothing wrong with using the word Katana to describe a type of sword. However, if you present a Katana as the ultimate in swordcraft, produced by the epitome of human culture to which all other cultures, particularly neighboring cultures, fall far behind in place in terms of culture and civilization and only a proper, civilized culture could produce a katana and a samurai, then, well, there's some problems here.

In the same way, D&D presents shaman as only coming from EVIL, SAVAGE, primitive cultures filled with BELOW INTELLIGENCE beings that ravage and pillage, then there is a problem. The "primitive" part isn't the problem. The fact that @Sacrosanct had to misquote me and cut off the important bits in order to try to show that I was being racist kinda proves my point.

My point in that post was that primitive, as a negative for something like a tribe of hill giants, seemed perfectly fine because it immediately tells me what I am dealing with. Can a word be used in a bad way? Sure, but that is true whether something is a loan word or not. And I think something fairly harmless like the katana being the ultimate weapon, is fine. I've never encountered that trope taken to the extreme of all neighboring cultures being uncivilized and primitive because they don't make katanas (though I could certainly people in a setting thinking that their culture is supreme and holding up the katana as an example maybe----but that seems pretty harmless too, since it is a fake setting and it would just be evoking how groups of people often think highly of themselves). I can't really speak to WOTC Shaman, because I stopped playing WOTC D&D in 2008. I will say I am not particularly troubled by how people decide to use shamans in their settings. If having all shamans be evil, would make the setting useful, or if a lot of primitive cultures have them (and obviously a lot of what the players might be fighting could be primitive tribes of monsters with shamans), it doesn't particularly trouble me (I don't see it as commentary on real world shamans, anymore than if there are an inordinate number of evil primitive priests in a setting performing human sacrifice). A lot of this stuff just makes for an interesting and fun place to adventure. But here we are getting very far from the issue of loan words, and borrowing concepts like mana

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

5e uses the word "primitive" six times in the core rules. Five usages are negative, one is neutral. Emphasis mine.

PHB:
"In these yellowed pages were tales of bold heroes, strange and fierce animals, mighty primitive gods, and a magic that was part and fabric of that distant land."* (This is the neutral one.)

OK. In this case, primitive I think means primeval, so I agree it's neutral. But I will have a small nitpick on two cases.

MM:
"Primitive. Hill giants" congregate in "steadings built of rough timber or in clusters of well-defended mud-and-wattle huts... Their weapons are uprooted trees and rocks pulled from the earth". They wear "crude animal skins... poorly stitched together with hair and leather thongs." [...] Hill giants have INT 5 and are chaotic evil. They are "raging bullies", "selfish, dimwitted brutes" whose "laziness and dullness would long ago have spelled their end if not for their formidable size and strength".

Granted, they are not embodying the Noble Savage trope here. Same with Ogre.

"Whether these tall, gaunt creatures [the ancestors of githyanki and githzerai] were peaceful or savage, cultured or primitive before the mind flayers enslaved and changed them, none can say."

I don't see it used negatively. It's just contrasting primitive and cultured. It doesn't imply any moral flaw in being primitive.

"Lizardfolk are primitive reptilian humanoids that lurk in the swamps and jungles of the world." [...]
Lizardfolk have INT 7. They eat other humanoids and also sacrifice them to their god.

Lizardfolk are also described in the same fluff as "truly neutral creatures" with an alien morality. There is no canonical evil in their eating habit and in their human sacrifices, as they are still neutral. They just see humans as animal, edible and sacrificable, much like we might look at a lizard. They are only evil according to the MM when enslaved by an evil dragon or when their leaders are corrupted by the evil demon Sessinek. I don't see how the primitive label is used derogatorily there. It's just used as a synonym for "neolithic".

 

[Bedrockgames]

For lizardfolk, rather than describing them as primitive it would make more sense to say that they don't practice metallurgy.

This seems a strange way to describe such things. With primitive you basically understand this is a culture that doesn't have technology that is advances as the more advanced cultures around them in the setting. Saying they don't practice metallurgy, isn't terribly clear (is this a moral choice, is this because they are behind technologically, is it because they have a better alternative to metal?). If the point you are trying to make about a group in a setting, is they are still in the stone age, then describing them as primitive, neolithic, etc is a lot more effective than "they don't practice metallurgy". The latter sounds strained to me and is more confusing. That isn't to say you couldn't have a more nuanced take on such a culture in a setting book or monster manual. But it definitely conveys quickly to the GM what they are dealing with, and how they should run them, when you use language like primitive.

 

[Bedrockgames]

As I said, there's nothing wrong with the word shaman. There's nothing wrong with the word primitive. You can't pull things out of context and then pretend that there is no issue.

I understand you are saying the problem isn't the borrowing but the way that the borrowed word gets used (in this case what proportion of primitive cultures and shamans in the game are portrayed as bad). But I think here people are mistaking content for message. I have had tons of games with extremely evil civilized empires, that are much more advanced than many of the other cultures in the setting. That isn't a commentary on civilization. It isn't me saying civilization is evil. It is me finding an advanced and oppressive civilization interesting for gaming purposes. Just like it is possible there are lots of evil primitive monsters and shamans, because that proved interesting to the designers for gaming purposes. Evil is more fun when you are world building. Most of what I invest my energy in are the bad guys. It would be very surprising to me, if we are looking at a monster manual, that most of the entries are not portrayed in some kind of negative light. Primitive evil ogres are a common trope, but so are insufferably arrogant and snobbish elves. Just because something is in the setting, it doesn't mean there is a message about some corresponding idea in the real world.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

I understand you are saying the problem isn't the borrowing but the way that the borrowed word gets used (in this case what proportion of primitive cultures and shamans in the game are portrayed as bad).

Not all primitive cultures in the MM are labelled as primitive. But we can make the survey with shamans: it occurs 7 times in the MM:


1. Stone giants have shaman. They are "reclusive, quiet and peaceful as long as they are left alone [...] artistry is the greatest value [...] graceful..." They are neutral and as intelligent as humans are. It seems a positive representation.
2 and 3. Lizardfolk have shaman. I see them portrayed as neutral. Alien, but not evil.
4. Quaggoth have shaman. They are evil and warped.
5. Druids in the NPC section are said to act as tribal shaman who heal the sick, pray to animal spirits and provide spiritual guidance. Sounds positive.
6 and 7. Twice in the index, without context.

That's 4 groups having canonical shaman, two described positively (humans NPC druids and stone giants), one neutrally (lizardfolk) and one badly (quaggoth).

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

Let's see if I can make a comparison for primitive without crossing some forum line. Primitive vs cultured. Primitive people are violent, savage, and unintelligent and when they don't like something, they scream and shout and destroy things that do not belong to them. Cultured people do not lose their temper and sit down and have reasonable non-violent dialogue and find a peaceful solution to the problem. Neither one of those is true all the time for primitive or cultured. Primitive people can be peaceful and cultured people can get very violent. But primitive has that negative stereotype when applied to a people or society.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

My sense is that 1E's original vision of "shaman" is firmly rooted in early 20th c. ideas of cultural evolution propounded by social anthropologists like James Frazer. In this milieu, it makes sense that terms such as "uncivilized" or "primitive" or "rudimentary" were associated with the word, especially in the context of "savage humanoids." This is the same environment which produced the equally difficult notions of "race" which D&D is still trying to unpack.

Shaman and shamanism are massively problematic terms for anthropologists and ethnologists, as there is no clear consensus regarding either the particular practices which comprise shamanism, or its geographical extent. Is it a Tungusic phenomenon? Tungusic-Altaic? Is the Sami picture a kind of Siberian hinterland? Is shamanism a circumpolar phenomenon? Circumpacific? Can we see "shamanic" ideas underpinning Odin? In Tibetan Buddhism? Can "shamanic" practices be linked to ancestral haplogroups A, C, D and X?

With the 60s, and the conflation of other ideas (e.g. Castaneda's brujo with "shaman;" other medicine traditions), and the further popularization of "Shamanism" as part of the New Age movement, the term became even more muddied. At this point, the idea "shaman" has become so divorced from its original context, that I'm not sure that D&D can commit any more violence against the word than has already been made.

Can't speak to mana as Pacific/Austronesian/Papuan stuff is something I have no experience of.

 

[pemerton]

With primitive you basically understand this is a culture that doesn't have technology that is advances as the more advanced cultures around them in the setting.

So why are humans not "primitive", then, given that they don't have technology that is adavanced as the more advanced (Dwarvish) cultures around them in the setting?

The answer is because primitive is a perspective term. It centres a certain group as the norm.

If the point you are trying to make about a group in a setting, is they are still in the stone age

And this also reproduces all the problems.

Why "still"? Is there some inevitable trajectory of technological change?

And given that "stone age" is generally taken to refer to a period (an age, even) how can two people be living contemperaneously yet one be in the stone age and one in the >whatever? age?

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

So why are humans not "primitive", then, given that they don't have technology that is adavanced as the more advanced (Dwarvish) cultures around them in the setting?

The answer is because primitive is a perspective term. It centres a certain group as the norm.

The native human tribes in Chult prove this wrong.

And this also reproduces all the problems.

Why "still"? Is there some inevitable trajectory of technological change?

And given that "stone age" is generally taken to refer to a period (an age, even) how can two people be living contemperaneously yet one be in the stone age and one in the >whatever? age?

There have been several cases from the 20th century of the discovery of primitive, almost stone-age tribes living in remote parts of jungles or on remote islands, yet they have been living contemporaneously with all of us in the modern world.