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The concept itself of cultural appropriation is nebulous at least. This thread has already pointed at how difficult (impossible, I say) it is to define what a culture is, who can claim to belong to it, who has the right to decide if a thing is or is not allowed to be 'used' by others, and which are the elements that are really typical of that culture and that one only.
Let's take pizza, for example. Officially, it was invented in Naples: that's most probably not the whole story, since it's got a rather simple recipe that was around in a lot of variations long before then (pinsa, a similar preparation, dates back to at least ancient Rome). But let's assume that it's true, and that Raffaele Esposito in 1889 really created something entirely new.
So now, who has the right to cook (or even eat!) pizza? Is it Italians? Is it Neapolitans? Is it only Esposito's direct descendants?
I can assure you that pizza you eat in Naples is quite different from the one you usually find in other Italian cities. I have seen more than several Neapolitans raising their eyebrows when seeing pizza cooked elsewhere, and saying: "That's not pizza, that's a focaccia!"
Pizza is important to many Neapolitans, they are very proud of their way to cook it. At the same time, I think that no one ever thought that people in Milan don't have the right to cook some.
And of course, pizza you can find in the USA, for example, is even more different when compared to the original recipe. Neapolitans (and most Italians) surely have a good laugh when they see what kind of things (and how many of them) Americans put on their pizza, and let's not even talk about the dough, but I have yet to find one who would dream of prohibiting Americans from cooking pizza, or from cooking it the way they like it.
That is because, since homo sapiens exists, all progress has been made by mixing and matching each other's experiences. No one owns culture. When you listen to music, you are influenced by that; even if you don't do it on purpose, any other music you may write since then will bring a little bit of what you have heard in your life. So, can you really accuse a musician to 'steal' from some kind of traditional music, for example?
Legends and stories have travelled and transformed across the world since millennia ago. Architectural styles. Numbers: should we stop using them, do they belong to the Arabs and Indians? Have they 'stole' them from someone else? Should Greece be the only democracy in the world?
That's a rabbit hole you can't get out of, and in my opinion one you shouldn't even try to get into, because separating cultures means halting progress.
Now let's talk about sacredness, taboos and such.
We all should respect other people's beliefs, that's sure. What we don't have to do is considering sacred what others consider to.
Your taboo isn't my taboo. If I'm sensible enough, I won't talk about it in front of you; but you can't demand that I never do at all.
The assault at Charlie Hebdo happened only 5 years ago, and I'm pretty sure we all remember the choir of 'Je suis Charlie'.
Now it seems that the world has changed very fast, as I read about people whose business or personal life has been ruined by social pressure because they did not conform to some sensitivity standards.
I maintain the same position, firmly believing that while people at Charlie Hebdo were rude indeed, they had the right to publish whatever they wanted to without being killed, or forced to shut down by anything else than low sales.
I will sum it all up, and go back to the topic.
Sensitivity is a personal thing. Paizo's authors make their own choices about it, and we can agree or disagree, like or dislike, and of course point at things and discuss about them.
But we draw our own line, and we can't force others to keep the same position we have, be it by the mean of laws, social pressure, least of all violence. That's fascist, regardless of how righteous we think we are.
Well said, Megistone!
Social pressure isn't fascist. Social pressure is just people discussing things and then making their own decisions and acting on them. We all do it all the time. We even make laws about culturally sensitive issues all the time - we just usually do so from the majority perspective, so it's invisible to us when we're in that majority and see things from that perspective.
What's different now is that our standards are changing and we're being more considerate of different cultural standards or of subgroups whose perspectives weren't generally considered. We see those as "sensitivity standards" imposed on us and as something completely different from our own social taboos that completely make sense and obviously should be enforced.
For cultural appropriation specifically, it is a complicated subject with lots of nuance, which means it isn't a good place for simplistic hard and fast rules. Obviously there's a lot to learn from other cultures and little harm in art, music, architecture and all that - though acknowledging those influences is a good thing and one not always applied.
For sacred taboos, which is where this thread started out: "If I'm sensible enough, I won't talk about it in front of you" isn't a bad approach for private life, but when it comes to incorporating something in a larger publication, like an RPG, it's all "in front of you" and a little more care needs to be taken. Especially when it's not a general taboo that one might run afoul of without any reference to a particular culture, but something taken from the culture that considers it taboo.
That cultural appropriation is a hard problem doesn't mean give up on worrying about it completely. It means grapple with it, try to be sensitive without censoring yourself completely. Screw up. Try again. Fail better next time. That's how we progress.
I'm not sure that's true, we make a lot of bones today about how its fine so long as it isn't the government that does it. But we know that's false because we don't accept that argument when it comes to discrimination, and for a similar reason: It has the same outcome, where coercive power is used to silence and oppress, and reinforce power structures. I interpret borders, cultural and otherwise, as one such power structure, one that isn't being properly questioned by today's progressives, influenced as they are by it's prevalence-- the way progressives of yesterday might not have been up on gender equality (even those who promoted suffrage), we are still disturbingly conservative in this regard.
One thing we're bad at (especially in America) is the acknowledgement of secondary power structures and their role in society. In the french revolution, we had the First (Aristocracy), Second (The Church), and Third (The People) estates. But I would propose that the identity of the Second Estate, is in reality, any institution that is not the government that has a great deal of power over the people-- e.g. in America, the corporate class could be considered a second estate. Our democratic government in its capitalist mode then, can be best understood as positioning the first estate to be a battlefield for the Second and Third estates.
But I would say that the 'social pressure can't be fascist' take is primarily the privilege of the people who gain power from social pressure at any given time. Surely a society where it is entirely legal to be gay, but where constant social pressure threatens to persecute people who are, would still be considered fascistic in some regard. We've seen this in many places in America, especially in regards to civil rights, where 'decorum' was molded to reinforce the oppression of Blacks in the United States, even after that oppression became illegal. Similarly, there's no question that the public push to bury dissenters during war time beneath a mountain of "Support Our Troops!" was fascistic.
It's one of the primary tools of fascism to inspire nationalism and to paint dissenters as unpatriotic to make them targets of social pressure, we saw similar behavior from communist revolutions, and the "5 minute hate" is one of the most poignant scenes in 1984.
Social pressure isn't fascist. Social pressure is just people discussing things and then making their own decisions and acting on them.
In theory you're right. In practice, the amount of people who lost their jobs and livelyhood because someone was offended is too damn high. We live in a time where sensitivity is at an all high, and many in fact seem to professionally get offended for a living, this has just become more clear now that gaming and comics are a mainstream thing.
A lot of things are same as before, but it wasn't until 5e made roleplay more mainstream that a lot of these concerns came up, least that's my perception. On one hand, I can understand this monster's taboo, but on other hand, it seems a little wrong to edit and censor it worldwide because someone believes in it more than others. I grew up catholic in poland, I'd have the same stance on angels, demons or the fact that roleplay offers more than one god even though households I grew up around would have a stroke at the thought of such things being treated so casually.
Social media has weaponized social pressure these days, it's not far fetched to think of it as fascism when some people play by "rules for thee but not for me." as aggressively as can be seen today.
Megistone nailed it pretty much perfectly. As long as authors aren't intentionally crude and disrespectful, people need to decide for themselves, not make others change for them, because there's too many different people and we can't please everyone. If I don't like a product, I don't get it. I don't tell the devs to change it. More people should practice that. If enough do, the devs might close down or change if they don't get customers.
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The thing about the "christianity" tangent is that when we're taking things from folklore, mythology, etc. for use in our fun times game, you can be much less careful about things that have hegemonic control of their society than things which are marginalized.
Like there's all sorts of art that is outright hostile towards at least certain sects of Christianity (Dogma, Jesus Camp, Footloose, Carrie, etc.) and while the usual suspects will get angry about how Harry Potter is inducting kids into Satanism, or whatever, they don't actualy move the needle much. I mean, compare the effects of Rowling's recent foray into bigotry on her sales to all the "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" stuff.
But when we're talking about marginalized peoples, since a significant portion of your audience will only learn about these people and what they're like via fiction, it's important to be much, much more careful.
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I think one problem is, all the people here advocating for "just keep trying and you'll screw up and correct" seem to be missing that it's the idea their position fundamentally represents an improvement that's being challenged.
Personally, I don't think that listening to a minority within a culture that polices cultural boundaries, in a way that would reduce representation for others is actually positive.
Removing Wendigo from the game, would not make Pathfinder more inclusive, full stop. I'm even willing to bet some gamers of American Indian descent would feel upset their heritage is being whitewashed out of this syncretic blending of fantasy and mythology.
Some people want isolation, to repel foreign influence and 'safeguard' culture, other people want a seat at the table and to see their heritage represented, even imperfectly. The first group has traditionally erased the second's authenticity.
Beyond all of this I haven't seen anyone from the community in question have a problem with it, only white people, and some people who haven't identified themselves.
Organized Play Developer
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Navajo are in the southwestern United States.
Algonquian are eastern Canada.
Algonquian are actually a huge language grouping of First Nations that include a significant amount of eastern and central Canada, New England, Wisconsin, and down into Illinois. They include the Blackfoot, Cree, Mahican, Mi'kmaq, Ojibwe, and Cheyenne, as well as quite a few other tribal and clan groupings that I'm not remembering at this moment.
Which is another area where the wendigo becomes a fairly interesting point; it's not just part of one culture, as each subgroup of Algonquian have their own version of the wendigo (with largely similar themes but a variety of cultural and regional variations). And it wouldn't even be accurate to say that e.g. Cree have their own variant, since Cree is also a further subgrouping of at least eight distinct subcultures.
So another way to look at wendigo are as the American analogue to vampires, where the lore is shared across many interconnected cultures with strong main themes but many regional variants in minor details. And the Algonquian peoples would be similar to the European countries who have distinct but related cultures and whose languages share a common root. Algonquian is a root-language-based designation that is less like "British" (not a language but does describe a specific cultural grouping) and more like "Latin" (a classic language from which many distinct cultures share linguistic roots).
(Though, again, I'm not connected to any of those cultures personally and can't speak from more than a weak academic perspective based on a couple broad view college courses.)
I used to play Werewolf Apocalypse with a family of Native Americans. Didn't seem like a big deal.
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Navajo are in the southwestern United States.
Algonquian are eastern Canada.
Algonquian are actually a huge language grouping of First Nations that include a significant amount of eastern and central Canada, New England, Wisconsin, and down into Illinois. They include the Blackfoot, Cree, Mahican, Mi'kmaq, Ojibwe, and Cheyenne, as well as quite a few other tribal and clan groupings that I'm not remembering at this moment.
Which is another area where the wendigo becomes a fairly interesting point; it's not just part of one culture, as each subgroup of Algonquian have their own version of the wendigo (with largely similar themes but a variety of cultural and regional variations). And it wouldn't even be accurate to say that e.g. Cree have their own variant, since Cree is also a further subgrouping of at least eight distinct subcultures.
So another way to look at wendigo are as the American analogue to vampires, where the lore is shared across many interconnected cultures with strong main themes but many regional variants in minor details. And the Algonquian peoples would be similar to the European countries who have distinct but related cultures and whose languages share a common root. Algonquian is a root-language-based designation that is less like "British" (not a language but does describe a specific cultural grouping) and more like "Latin" (a classic language from which many distinct cultures share linguistic roots).
(Though, again, I'm not connected to any of those cultures personally and can't speak from more than a weak academic perspective based on a couple broad view college courses.)
Which also appears to be the rub in how they're represented, the name taboo brought up originally in the thread is only a regional tradition (speaking from my research on the subject, comparative mythology is part of my own expertise) which means that many tribes are happy to name them, while others aren't.
Interestingly, from the perspective that American Indians aren't a singular culture, but instead a tapestry of many cultures, many of these elements could probably be interpreted as "Multicultural" to begin with. Spreading and changing as they hit each group of 'foreign' people from wherever the story originally, in fact, it likely refers in aggregate to more than one creature, that have been syncretized together-- which is always super interesting.
I'm also not sure if there would be a definitive answer, even if you were connected with, or a part of any of these cultures-- identity is molded by a lot of factors beyond historical accuracy, particularly in colonialism. Someone might be happy to tell us something, that is more the result of a given political moment, or movement, or expedient revision, than truth.
*Gives the 'European' Identity, the Side Eye*
...Navajo are in the southwestern United States.
Algonquian are eastern Canada.
Algonquian are actually a huge language grouping of First Nations that include a significant amount of eastern and central Canada, New England, Wisconsin, and down into Illinois. They include the Blackfoot, Cree, Mahican, Mi'kmaq, Ojibwe, and Cheyenne, as well as quite a few other tribal and clan groupings that I'm not remembering at this moment.
Which is another area where the wendigo becomes a fairly interesting point; it's not just part of one culture, as each subgroup of Algonquian have their own version of the wendigo (with largely similar themes but a variety of cultural and regional variations). And it wouldn't even be accurate to say that e.g. Cree have their own variant, since Cree is also a further subgrouping of at least eight distinct subcultures.
Which also appears to be the rub in how they're represented, the name taboo brought up originally in the thread is only a regional tradition (speaking from my research on the subject, comparative mythology is part of my own expertise) which means that many tribes are happy to name them, while others aren't.
Interestingly, from the perspective that American Indians aren't a singular culture, but instead a tapestry of many cultures, many of these elements could probably be interpreted as "Multicultural" to begin with. Spreading and changing as they hit each group of 'foreign' people from wherever the story originally, in fact, it likely refers in aggregate to more than one creature, that have been syncretized together-- which is always super interesting.
I'm also not sure if there would be a definitive answer, even if you were connected with, or a part of any of these cultures-- identity is molded by a lot of factors beyond historical accuracy, particularly in colonialism. Someone might be happy to tell us something, that is more the result of a given political moment, or
Only some tribes with the Wendigo as part of their culture consider it taboo to name it, and Sayre is pointing out that it isn't one monolithic culture it belongs to, but in reality a bunch of cultures that wouldn't have considered each other the same.
Also, not to point too fine a point on it, but even outside the context of native society, its been a part of popular culture long enough to not be regional. Which like, that's how things go from regional to not regional in the first place. It was a "foreign story" for most of the tribes we might now consider to have it as part of their culture at some point as well.
The correct term is the Dine.
The best definition I have heard about culutural appripriation is this: A person gets to enjoy the goodness of the culture without having to deal with the consequence of actually being a part of that culture. When the going gets tough they can pick up the old culture.
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Saying this as a Breton with a real pride in my specific culture : better an appropriated culture than a dead culture.
Now, I prefer the rendition of a myth in RPGs to be faithful to the original (for example the Ankou in PFRPG is not that). But even a missed rendition can still make people interested in the original myth thereby keeping it and its root culture relevant.
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I was speaking about a myth from my own culture, so first case. Sorry if that was not clear.
Now, I guess any Breton, or any person identifying with the Breton culture, would likely have their own opinions on this. Some might be more open-minded that I and others offended by things I do not give a damn about.
But then we just fall back on how we deal with offended human beings.
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I must confess that I have trouble imagining a whole culture of people willing to let their culture disappear utterly rather than be misrepresented. Which is why I stated my view concerning my own culture that I would rather see it kept alive, even in a faulty adaptation, rather than be completely forgotten.
Note that I am talking here about culture and not about religious beliefs.
I must confess that I have trouble imagining a whole culture of people willing to let their culture disappear utterly rather than be misrepresented. Which is why I stated my view concerning my own culture that I would rather see it kept alive, even in a faulty adaptation, rather than be completely forgotten.
Note that I am talking here about culture and not about religious beliefs.
The only reason we have Norse mythology is because 1-2 people decided to make nice with Christian dotrine.
People who study that history have so much trouble trying to know what is norse and what are Christian things. But without those 1-2 books there would absolutely no info.
Interesting. Do you have research to back that up?
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I really don't agree with the idea that the real mythology creatures that Paizo release are a disservice or harmful to the original source material or culture they are derived from. If anything, they expose a wealth of hidden culture, charm and knowledge to people who might never have been able to experience it.
It is the melting pot of world I love, multiculturalism is a beautiful thing, I want to see all that it has to offer and I never want to be stifled with boarders, let along imaginary ones under the false pretense of 'protection'.