Mana, Shamans, and the Cultural Misappropriation behind Fantasy Terms

[Esau Cairn]

I find it bizarre that this even needs saying;. This thread is replete with reference to culture and yet a good chunk of the posters, who casually throw around that term, don't even seem to understand what social artefacts and social proceses it refers to!

Great comment.^^

"The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves." (Clifford Geertz)

A secondary thought to it (and a shake-my-head kinda addition) is how many of those complaining about misappropriation have ever studied or travelled somewhere outside of their own culture? Internet blogs are not, in and of themselves, study. Being an American/British student going to Paris and/or Rome for a summer doesn't really qualify. I mean outside of the comfort zone of same language and familiarity. Somewhere They don't speak Your language. Some would argue you don't know your own culture until you've been outside of it for a while. Sometimes, the traveller will discover the culture they were born into is not the one they find to be their home.

Tertiary thought: self-identifying from what ethnicity someone is speaking from when they make declarations about Others. Intention could also be a factor. Moral judgment included in intention when discussing any part of any culture is a dangerous thing and rarely provides any benefit to discussion. This last part is lathered over a great many statements on this thread and in the greater discussion. Leave your own ideology in a luggage locker and pick it up later is a great suggestion someone once offered.

Anyone can speak to any ethnic criticism regardless of their accident of birth, provided they've done their homework into the topic they wish to discuss. It's a fundamental premise in such things as postcolonial studies, modernity, and hybridity. Y'know, the study of different cultures and how they interact...

 

[pemerton]

This can work as an artistic choice.

It can also be seen as cultural erasure of any reference to shamans in the core books and whitewashing all non-European shamans to become pseudo-European Celts instead of using some mechanical elements of D&D druids to support shamanic concepts being used in D&D games.

I tend to agree with @Ruin Explorer's reply to this post.

Personally I feel there is a bigger issue here that is in the neighbourhood of "whitewashing" but perhaps not quite the same.

I'll start with a non-RPG example: when people in England use the zero to help them with their arithmetic no one characterises that as an Indian or Persian cultural practice. But if a person in Tanzania wears a t-shirt or uses penicilin to treat an infection that will often be described as "westernisation" or in some similar way that characterises it as the uptake by the "traditional" culture of the practices and artefacts of Europe and North America ("the west").

This tendency to treat "the west" as the reference point and norm for cultural practices even extens to ahistorical/fictional assumptions - so the invention and spread of printing is associated with Germany even though (to the best of my knowledge) it was invented in China (wood-block printing) and Korea (metal type printing).

To now bring this back to D&D and fantasy: if our PC uses stirrups that's fine and dandy - the first iimage many RPGers have of a mounted fantasy warrior is a central or western Euroepean knight. Even though strirrups are not a European invention. In other words, stirrups don't carry their history with them because that history is non-European. But the class druid struggles to become generic in the same way (as reflected in Voadam's post quoted above). So using the druid class for non-European religious practices gets flagged as whitewashing.

My (mild, not terrifically strong) preference would be to develop a general conception of a spirit-and-nature oriented religous figure (visions, shapechanging, use of plants and herbs, has a certain sort of kinship with or affinity to important animals) and then use that character type without building in the assumption that because we use the word druid we must be talking about something European. Of the editions of D&D I'm familiar with (and my 5e knowledge is limited) 4e probably got closest to this - the difference between its druid and shaman classes is bascially mechanical, not deeply trope-ish. Oddly enough, and having been very critical of the MM "tribesman" entry just upthread, I think this is one thing it got right. (And @Doug McCrae made the same point in another recent thread). The "tribesman" religious leaders are druids, not the inferior DMG shamans or witchdoctors.

 

[pemerton]

While I understand concerns around cultural appropriation my personal criticisms are not rooted in that concern. My primary concerns all rest around perpetuating negative stereotypes and uncritical portrayals of imperialism, colonialism, centralized power, and authoritarian states. When I speak to punching up instead of down I am referring to those uncritical portrayals.

<snip>

I am no fan of censorious attitudes, but there is another inclination that I find just as pernicious - the notion that cultural criticism and attempts to influence culture are forms of censorship. When someone says "Go woke - go broke" or complains about the social messaging in The Dark Knight or Black Panther I do not interpret that as a form of censorship. I do not agree with them or where they want to move the cultural needle, but I do not see it as censorious.

I basically agree with this. These discussions about racism in fantasy literature and fantasy gaming aren't about censorship. It's about FRPGing finally getting it's head out of <another part of its body> and engaging in some serious critical reflection. That's part of what characterises contemporary cultural activity. (If we were living in Ancient Rome we probably wouldn't be doing this sort of criticism, because it hadn't really been invented yet to the best of my knowledge; but then if we were living in Ancient Rome we wouldn't be RPGing either!)

I'm also a critic of Black Panther, although I think from quite a different perspective than the one you refer to here. I'm thinking of Tejo Cole's essay in Medium and some other essays I read around the same time.

Oh yeah, and don't just be open-minded to criticism . . . . actively go out and seek it! If you are a white guy designing some D&D elements inspired by Asian mythology . . . . try to go find some Asian American gamers (preferably specific to the culture you are borrowing from) willing to critique your work! Or, well, Asian Canadian, Asian Australian . . . Asians born-and-raised in the West. It's cool to get critique from Asians-from-Asia also, but they have a very different lived experience to those of Asian descent in the West.

I think this is very specific advice, making very specific assumptions about who is the audience, whose interests are at stake, and what sort of harm might be done by a cultural work. I think it's somewhat orthogonal to @Aldarc's OP.

 

[pemerton]

1e PHB: "[Druids] are the only absolute neutrals... viewing good and evil, law and chaos, as balancing forces of nature which are necessary for the continuation of all things."
2e PHB: "Clerics are generally good"

This is part of the "paradox" of traditional D&D alignments.

If one reads the description of True Neutral as a "naturalistic ethoc" (AD&D DMG) which worries about nature being disturbed by intentinal action (AD&D PHB) various real-world philosophies and religions immediately come to mind: Stoicism, Taoism, a range of indigenous beliefs particularly as these have developed in response to colonisation and the agricultural and industrial productive processes that tend to accompnay that colonisation, etc. Clearly all these outlooks think they they are giving true accounts of right living (including when action is or isn't appropriate, how to accomodate onself to "natural law", etc). But D&D flags them as non-good.

From the TN point of view the description of paladins, clerics etc as good has to be ironic or in inverted commas - "so-called 'good'". This works better for Stoicism or Taoism which are to some extent oppositional outlooks (though like many oppositional outlooks at various points and in various ways they become "mainstreamed"). For indigenous outlooks it's trickier because they are not either objectively or subjectively/self-consciously oppoisitional. So they get positioned as "other" or deviant in unhelpful ways.

It's a bit like REH's somewhat Nietzschean treatment of "barbarism" as superior to "civilisation". He's doing this as self-consciously oppositional to the "civilised" culture from which he comes and in which he lives. But he's hardly giving us the viewpoint of, or an affirmation of, a person whose whole life is rural and non-literate rather than urban, literate and cosmopolitan.

 

[pemerton]

Is it just me, or has neoliberal capitalism eaten every other mode of thinking?

Yes. Yes it has.

Culture ain’t like IP.

Maybe, maybe not.

At a certain point neoliberal capitalism isn't just an ideology but becomes part of the base.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Great news! Already fixed! None of them are based on real world cultures at all. Any resemblance is purely coincidental and it's the coincidence that has people upset.

Shamans aren't based on real world cultures, then? Most of the names for the D&D classes came from real world people.

I don't play D&D to encounter 50 varieties of human. I want to encounter non-human humanoids.

I agree, but I also think that there's more to player races/classes than culture or stereotypical play of them.

 

[Maxperson]

Shamans aren't based on real world cultures, then? Most of the names for the D&D classes came from real world people.

That's quite a goal post haul. You said humanoids, which are races. This isn't basic where some are classes, too.

I agree, but I also think that there's more to player races/classes than culture or stereotypical play of them.

You can make them what you wish. That's one of the beauties of D&D. It's extremely flexible.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

You want to see if it's possible to move the goal posts farther? You said humanoids, which are races. This isn't basic where some are classes, too.

The first part I said humanoids in, because the person I was quoting said humanoids. The second more general statement afterwards was meant to apply to cultures and stereotypes.

You can make them what you wish. That's one of the beauties of D&D. It's extremely flexible.

Yes, but offensive language describing orcs or shamans should be fixed even if I personally could get rid of it.

 

[Sadras]

There could hardly be a claarer instance of the replication of 19th century ideas filtered through late 19th century and first half ot the 20th century pulp tropes.

Pemerton, how would you describe tribesmen in stat terms? We are talking about human history here.
And yet somehow some of us on these forums INSIST on only attributing this sense of tribesman idea to specific parts of the world. People need to get out of that mindset. The Sword Coast is filled with Uthgardt barbarian tribes (black hair, blue eyes). That is hardly 19th century pulp tropes.

My issue with the example that you quoted is the specificity of the location of where tribesmen exist. They should be found within any environment and perhaps to mix it up - create matriarchies as well as patriarchies.

 

[Campbell]

Given that monsters are not built in the same way that PCs are and these "shamans" do not function in the same way mechanically or often conceptually anyway is there a reason why they should have the same name? Why not come up with specific names that match the culture of the race?

This is pretty much what we see in Pathfinder Second Edition. They also tend to vary the cultural orientation and magical traditions utilized by antagonistic ancestries. Here are some examples:

• Deep gnomes who organize in underground settlements and cities. They have Rockwardens (Prepared Primal).
• Derro are sparsely detailed. They have Magisters (Spontaneous Occult).
• Duergar are also organized into settlements. They are known for their strict hierarchy. They have Taskmasters (Divine Prepared)
• Drow are organized into a loose collection of noble houses. Some are matriarchal and others are patriarchal. The listed spell caster is a Drow Priestess (Divine Prepared).
• Goblins are primarily organized into tribes. They have a Goblin Pyro (Spontaneous Arcane) and Warchanter (Spontaneous Occult) listed.
• Gnolls are organized into clans. They have cultists (Prepared Divine)
• Hobgoblin Society is organized into military units from birth. They have no listed spell casters. Their ancestry write up says they distrust arcane magic, preferring the science of alchemy.
• Kobolds are organized into Tribes. They have Dragon Mages (Arcane Spontaneous)
• Lizardfolk are organized into villages. They are indigenous, but they are described as having a society with literal hidden depths (under water settlements). They have Stargazers (Prepared Primal).
• Orcs are organized in more of feudal fashion (socially they remind me of Anglo Saxons). They belong to their hold. There are no listed spell casters, but the ancestry write up in the Advanced Player's Guide mentions they respect the Primal and Divine traditions.

I am not entirely sure this approach is something that Fifth Edition should copy. Paizo has a single setting so they get to add a level of depth and nuance that might be impractical for Fifth Edition. I do think some additional diversity in spell caster names and roles would be helpful - particularly given that goblin shaman are pretty much wizards that use Wisdom instead of Intelligence.