Search Posts
I was bumping around Paizo forums today and I stumbled on something that made me pause and think. ...perhaps it was made to make the juju concept actually be more like the real-world vodun religion that inspired it, instead of the intended-only-for-NPCs version in City of Seven Spears. For those who aren't familiar with the religion, Vodun is an organized West African religion still practiced today. As Reynolds states above, the Juju Oracle is based off this modern religion. What I am interested in this tread is to use Edwards Said's concept of Orientalism to understand what it means to represent non-western cultures and ideas. For those unfamiliar with the concept, the below quote is from Said's book Orientalism, and does a good job expounding on the contents of the term. [Orientalism is] a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of "interests" which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what "we" do and what "they" cannot do or understand as "we" do). Said used his concept to investigate artistic and scholarly work on the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Contemporary postcolonial scholarship has expanded some of the ideas in Orientalism to come to understand western knowledge on Latin America, and Oceania. I am interested in using Orientalism to enrich role-playing by understanding how we represent non-western cultures and ideas. I think to a certain extent drawing on other cultures and foreign ideas provides something interesting for role-playing campaigns, I also am interested in how the "knowledge production" that takes place to understand these other cultures and foreign ideas are connected to the real-world "Orient and Occident." How do we proceed with drawing inspiration from cultures? It is obvious that rich role-playing settings require diversity in culture, but what kind of challenges do we as game designers, GMs, and players face when selecting real-world cultures as source material? There are obvious differences between drawing own our own culture and drawing on the cultures of others. In what ways do we recognize this and how does it impact our game designing and roleplaying decisions? |
