The problem with Evil races is not what you think

[Malmuria]

Then you might want to check the dictionary again.
of or denoting a simple, naive style of art that deliberately rejects sophisticated artistic techniques.

Yes, it was used to contrast the "sophisticated" style of 19th c. French painters with the "naive" style of people of color. It is completely dismissive of non (elite) European culture (at least until it was time for European modernists to appropriate primitivist aesthetics).

So again, the world primitive fits with how the word is used as a neutral description of the art style.

The change to primitive could simply have happened to give players a clearer image of how their art looks like as "meaningful and important, but different" is very nondescriptive.
That the author does not want his name added to the work is his right but its not evidence for anything.

That was not his wording, but my gloss on what he was trying to communicate, per his blog post. His actual wording will probably never be available because wotc owns the copyright.

Yeah, it looks like you are now(?) just arguing for arguments sake. Do you really expect adventures to provide a detailed historic justification for the current state found in said adventure? A treatise about the socio-economical circumstances which made a specific tribe of goblins live in the same cave structure as a beholder?

No you don't, because it is not relevant for the adventure which describes the current snapshot in time the adventurers are confronted with. Only now you suddenly want this requirement because you failed to argue that "primitive" is an inherently racist word used to degrade entire societies instead of just describing the state of technological development (or artistic style).

When all of this went down I went through a did a word count on several of the adventures in the book. This particular adventure is one of the shortest, coming in at 6000 ish words. Other adventures are 8-10k words. The problem that the author had with the editing is not just the inclusion of this word, but the fact that they cut out a lot of necessary context that made the lore of the adventure richer.

Btw, if wotc had a decent editing process they would have caught this particular problem (use of the word primitive) before the adventure was published. Contemporary editors have to consider how a text will be interpreted by a variety of readers. Even small indie ttrpg designers hire sensitivity readers.

In terms of arguing for argument sake, if you take a step back this thread is a bunch of people trying to think through issues of race and colonialism in fantasy gaming in a nuanced and informed way. And then there is one person--you--who is telling everyone else their extremely well researched positions are mere fabrications. What is your investment in this discussion? Why is it not possible for you to accept that people who are not you might interpret a text differently?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Agreed.

This discussion of rates of change and diffusion also relates to my question about the Grippli and Cormyr - what is the timeframe in relation to which I am expected to imagine there has been no significant technological diffusion. And also why I asked about a comparison to twelfth-century Kent and western Ireland.

If Cormyr resembles twelfth-century Kent, but the Grippli who live nearby resemble much of Australia in the same period, what is the reason why? As far as I can tell there's no in-fiction explanation, just an authorial stipulation that the Grippli are primitive.

That is reinforced by the fact that, in D&D, all the ways in which we would find mediaeval Kent "primitive" - be that in public and personal health, or the amount of material goods around, or the quality of a lot of manufacturing - are glossed over in depictions of Cormyr; while the descriptions of the Grippli doubld down on the ways in which they are "primitive".

It's not a presentation of a seriously considered social reality. It's just the reproduction of pulp tropes.


This is why I hardly find it surprsing that, after a short (ie approximately two century) blip, China is returning to its status as a centre of world production. The same is true for India.

Here's another salient quote from Hodgson (same essay, p 46):

At least till very recently, there was a tendency among Europeans (including, of course, Americans) to take this remarkable fact [of European power] for granted. . . . Such Europeans have wondered why in recent years, after many centuries (so they suppose) of static quiescence, the various "backward" peoples now are stirring. They have overlooked the wonder of how it could be that, for what is in fact a rather brief period of little more than one century, Europeans could have held so unique a position in the world. [Fn: The notion of the "millennial torpor" of "the East" remains so widespread partly because of touristic misimpressions but also because it has been subsumed in the approach of two sorts of scholars: the Westernists, who downgrade all alien societies, and the area students, who suppose all pre-Moderns were overwhelmed by tradition.] The real question, from the standpoint of the world at large, is just that: what gave the Europeans such overwhelming power for a time?​

It is certainly one of the most profound questions one might ask about the history of the last 500 years or so. My personal opinion is that many areas of world have been at pretty similar points in their overall development all along. Certainly Eurasia. I would expect a lot of the reason IS cultural diffusion, any really significant advance in technology, society, politics, finance, etc. spread west or east within a few centuries at most. T'ang China had things like letters of credit, paper money, printing, etc. in the 9th and 10th Centuries. All of those things reached Europe by the 12th Century in some form. Likewise 11th Century Song China had gunpowder and blast furnaces, and these showed up in Europe too within 3-5 centuries.

So, really what we see is that probably there was just some fairly minor variance in terms of exactly when each region might trip past the phase change to a post-agrarian state. The question then simply becomes analysis of the specific historical details of the period from around 1200 to 1600 when this transition was beginning. You may advance many hypotheses of course. China famously was more centralized, and its rulers had greater influence. They chose to quash certain advances, such as exploration and colonization, etc. but there are other pretty good possible reasons as well. None of them involve supposed 'primitiveness' or 'inferiority' in any practical sense. At least not any serious theories.

The rise of 21st Century China, like 20th Century Japan, should really be no surprise to intelligent people. I guess Nixon certainly figured it out...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Then you might want to check the dictionary again.
of or denoting a simple, naive style of art that deliberately rejects sophisticated artistic techniques.

So again, the world primitive fits with how the word is used as a neutral description of the art style.
That the editor changed something, that happens. See the example I have posted here from Enworld where the edits completely changed the meaning of an article and were neither discussed with the author nor was he even informed about them. The change to primitive could simply have happened to give players a clearer image of how their art looks like as "meaningful and important, but different" is very nondescriptive.
That the author does not want his name added to the work is his right but its not evidence for anything.

Nonsense. This usage of 'primitive', actually 'primitivism' is a very specific art historical term denoting a specific artistic style. Now, obviously people have used it to denote the artwork of non-western/non-industrial peoples working in a traditional style, but this use is highly controversial and usually denigrated, and considered offensive! Even Wikipedia notes this in the article which comes up when you search for 'primitive art', in the first sentence. The point being, there are vastly better terms to use, and serious editors in this day and age working in, for example the RPG industry, probably should be getting clued on that real soon now, like years ago.

Anyway, this kind of usage of the term 'primitive art' is not really descriptive of anything at all. Much of what would fall under that definition is extremely fine art and craftwork of a sophistication and quality that is the equal of anything produced anywhere on Earth at any time period. It tells us nothing except the prejudices of the word's user in that context. This is why the author objects to strongly, and I am 100% on his side. Kim Mohan seems like a decent guy, but he goofed up on that one. I don't know if he's just old and out of touch, or simply had a bad editorial day, but I'm guessing it won't happen again!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think that this is where Western perspectives use a selection of other pejorative terms to describe non-Western nations: e.g., Byzantine, decadent, despotic, oppressive, etc.


I think that there is also the issue of "essentialism" when it comes to Grippli. It's not just that they are described as "primitive" when living near Cormyr, but, rather, that they are commonly depicted as "primitive" regardless of geography, history, or circumstances. They are stuck in their primitive depictions as if their primitiveness is somehow an essential quality to their species.

I think there's a sort of weird speciesism too. I'm not sure where exactly it comes from, but I've seen it a few times. For example, we played a 5e campaign in the faux Egyptian setting that is popular (whatever its called, I forget). There are civilized gnolls, catfolk, and IIRC a few other races. When I suggested it might be interesting to play a 'frog folk' it was immediately determined that, unlike catfolk, they would have to be somehow primitives. All these races could live together in the city, but I guess frogs are 'lower life forms' and 'must be primitive'.

I would opine that this seeming default attitude can be easily traced to associations created in the process of erecting the edifice of colonial cultural hegemony and domination we have been discussing. I don't think Grippli particularly represent some specific social group, or that they are a stand-in for any particular race or people real world history. It is just that these ideas of 'primitiveness' and a 'hierarchy of being' have been so strongly ingrained that people cannot even see it in their own basic default assumptions. This is really what the whole point of what 'CRT' is.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Right. I was hoping for free labor in coming up with some good words for examples like those to.

How are chimpanzees described compared to humans or monkeys in terms of intelligence?

Are non-metal working, oral (not written) traditions, local material/non-milled construction, wildlife inspired designs, and bartering economy all the kind of thing you'd recommend for my Gripy2 example?

I wasn't sure there was especially a LOT to distinguish them. I mean, obviously they are slightly different 'spins' on Grippli, but I would think any 'anthro' animal people are going to sort of look like 'a chimp crossed with an...' anyway. You could describe the 'elaborate' burrow systems of the underground living variant, and a tree-living variant can fairly obviously build interesting tree homes of some sort. I'd note that making them similar in various particulars to human habitations is a bit anthropocentric, but it may simply be a practical necessity, and if they are already 'anthro' animal people anyway it is kind of water under the bridge! Still, it might be interesting for tree frog people to travel on the undersides of gripping poles that run between platforms or something, and perhaps they build them at various angles, since they can walk anywhere and don't need horizontal surfaces, etc.

I was also thinking about more biomechanics WRT any sort of non-human race and how its tools are formed. We create ours largely to suit the particular range of motion and styles of grip humans have. Other intelligent creatures might favor somewhat different designs, like knives with handles at right angles to the blade, or other sorts of handles and grips, etc. Other common objects might well vary a good bit from human tools and utensils also.

While it is hard to really develop a conception of a really non-human mentality, some sci-fi authors have made a decent go of it. You might imagine how that would arise and what it would be like (I remember Larry Niven stating that Puppeteers for example are highly aggressive, being herd living grazing animals in origin and reacting to possible threats in a specific and not-very-human way.).

 

[pemerton]

It is certainly one of the most profound questions one might ask about the history of the last 500 years or so. My personal opinion is that many areas of world have been at pretty similar points in their overall development all along. Certainly Eurasia. I would expect a lot of the reason IS cultural diffusion, any really significant advance in technology, society, politics, finance, etc. spread west or east within a few centuries at most. T'ang China had things like letters of credit, paper money, printing, etc. in the 9th and 10th Centuries. All of those things reached Europe by the 12th Century in some form. Likewise 11th Century Song China had gunpowder and blast furnaces, and these showed up in Europe too within 3-5 centuries.

So, really what we see is that probably there was just some fairly minor variance in terms of exactly when each region might trip past the phase change to a post-agrarian state. The question then simply becomes analysis of the specific historical details of the period from around 1200 to 1600 when this transition was beginning.

Yes. This is the focus of the Hodgson essay I've cited upthread.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yes. This is the focus of the Hodgson essay I've cited upthread.

Well, obviously great minds think alike...

 

[aramis erak]

The traveller SRD at least has
TL 0-3 = Primitive
TL 4-6 = Industrial
TL 7-9 = Pre-Stellar
TL 10-11 = Early Stellar
etc...

And that's an error I may go fix. The proper 0-3 is "PreIndustrial" (excepting mayby in the travesty which is Mongoose's efforts.

0-3 are also more firmly labeled with anthropological/archaological labels. (MT ref's page 23? PDF page 25)
0 PreInd (Primitive) Stone Age
1 PreInd (Bronze, Iron) Middle Ages
2 PreInd (Printing Press) Circa 1600
3 PreInd (Basic Science) Circa 1800
4 Industrial (Int. Combustion) Circa 1900
5 Industrial (Mass Production) Circa 1930
6 Pre-Stellar (Nuclear Power) Circa 1950
7 Pre-Stellar (Mini Electronics) Circa 1970
8 Prestellar (Superconductors) Circa 1990
9 Early Stellar (Fusion) Circa 2010
A Early Stellar (Jump Drive) circa 2100
B Average Stellar (Large Starships)
C Average Stellar (Sophisticated Robots)
D Average Stellar (Holo Data)
E High Stellar (anti-grav ciities)
F High Stellar (Anagathics)
G High Stellar (Global terraforming)

 

[Carlsen Chris]

Lots of white privilege going on here.

 

[aramis erak]

Lots of white privilege going on here.

Not a terribly useful comment... care to explain?