Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
Racism. Lovecraft was racist, so some people feel that anything inspired by Lovecraft is also racist.
Mana, Shamans, and the Cultural Misappropriation behind Fantasy Terms
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Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
Okay. That was even funnier than Hussar's cannibal line.
I find it odd, in this thread especially, that a moment of non-judgement on the part of WotC should be met with such resistance. There's nothing inherently evil about cannibalism. It's certainly taboo, but not evil. At the very least I would think it appropriate to address the issue with some nuance. Endocannibalism? Exocannibalism? Context? That sort of thing.
And those people would be glaringly incorrect.
Wait, so Lovecraft is canceled now?
Aldarc
Legend
Jein. I do think that there are some anthropologists who attempt to use it critically as a term to describe the particular worldview and practices. However, it was often imposed on a number of indigenous cultures’ spiritual leaders, and not always with great accuracy or care (e.g., American Indians / First Nations).* Euro-American scholars most definitely did place shamanism in a lower position in the “ideological hierarchy” regarding what they felt was the evolution of religious thought, typically from more “primitive” animistic shamanism to “lo and behold!” (Abrahamic) monotheism. This was the prevailing way to view religions in the 19th and first half of the 20th century, and despite scholarly resistance against such reductionistic (and condescending) interpretations, it is arguably still fairly pervasive among popular thought. This is part of the “baggage” that the word carries with it as a descriptive term.
* As I said earlier, there have been a number of American Indian nations that have increased their resistance to the imposition of the term “shaman” on their medicine men and other spiritual leaders.
I prefer to say that some people who are incapable of parsing his works have elected to practice a selective blindness as regards the mythos. Their loss.
Agreed
@Aldarc - I think those groups should have some issues. The term has always been very general, and the fit to any one exemplar is never perfect. That does kind of speak to my point though - Shaman is really more of a general use term than it is indexed to a particular culture. It's an academic construct. That's why I think arguments about cultural appropriation and its use fall rather flat.
Hussar
Legend
Seriously?
Good grief, what does a writer have to do? Lovecraft was quite open in his bigotry and used his writing to promote his racist views. Numerous works tie straight into this. Do I need to list them or can we take that as given? Are you seriously questioning the notion that Lovecraft was a bigot? Or, are you questioning that his bigotry never appeared in any of his mythos works?
What, exactly, do you mean by "selective blindness"?
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