Cultural Appropriation and Campaign Settings

[Agénor]

- In case this needs to be said, the profound and wise thoughts I have read here make me like this community even more. Keep up fighting the good fight! -

[Quixote]

I know this thread's been in the ground a while,
but please know I wouldn't animate this corpse unnecessarily.

I recently stumbled upon an article about skinwalker stories. Here's a brief of the part that I think matters most in this context:

"It's all too easy to look at another culture's folkloric traditions the same way you'd regard, say, a monster from Greek myth or a demon from medieval literature - creatures for which vibrant belief has long subsided and whose attributes are readily cataloged and canonized in Western tomes. But the skinwalker, as with many other folkloric creatures, does not reside in a text— no matter how many Western chroniclers have attempted to sequester them in one.
...where does all of this leave us concerning the mysterious skinwalker? Many contemporary Native Americans would argue that its place is in the living beliefs and customs of the Navajo – and that, as such, it is not necessarily open to interpretation and reinvention by those outside of it. Leave the skinwalker to the night."

I think that hits upon something haven't really been able to articulate before. European knights and all the trappings of standard S&S fantasy, as much as I can claim them to be a part of my culture's history, are not a part of my living day-to-day. The only changing and growing they do are through media like ttrpg's; they have passed from folklore into true myth.

I don't think a lot of the stuff you'd want to use to create a setting would fall into this category, but it would bear looking into. If people still carry a "vibrant belief" in the elements you're looking at, then changing them/reducing them is probably not the best option.

The article was very well-written and definitely open to the complexity of situations like these:

https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/strange-creatures/skinwal ker.htm

[Thread Necromancers' Guild]

You know the slogan! All Necromancy is acceptable.

[Sysryke]

As long as we're re-opening this particular can of worms (which I have mostly enjoyed, if not always agreed with), I'll just point out that there are still practicing Greek pagans in the world. They may be few in number, scattered, and/or not very vocal, but they still exist. So again, who gets to determine what is and isn't a "vibrant belief"?

To shift the example to something less rare/esoteric, what about angels? These being exist in numerous world religions both contemporary and ancient. Many practicing Christians, Muslims, Jews, and others believe in and hold some reverence/respect for angels. So, how do we handle those?

Can we no longer use the term witch as a class for the game, because there are those who use that word for their faith (my husband included btw)?

Not trying to be snarky, sarcastic, or combative; just food for thought.

[avr]

My thoughts on modern cultures - Wiccans/witches would hardly be able to claim exclusive ownership of say Grimm's fairy tales. It belongs to a wider culture which includes them, but not just to them. If you were going to write about modern Wiccans though in an urban fantasy or something I'd recommend at least talking to one of them first about whether it was OK to include elements from their culture, and also not writing something up which justifies wholesale slaughter of witches...similarly for other reconstructed religions.

As I understand it the Navajo do object to people appropriating their culture and have said so clearly. You can skip the part where you ask them whether it's OK to use their culture because they've said no already.

OTOH appropriating your own culture isn't a thing. You can write about angels if you come from any culture with a lot of Christian, Jewish or Muslim influence. If you don't then horrible missteps when writing about angels aren't unlikely and you probably should talk to someone who does come from such a culture before committing to print.

No, I'm not some kind of authority. Just my thoughts.

[Anguish]

Thread Necromancers' Guild wrote:

You know the slogan! All Necromancy is acceptable.

At less than three months, this thread wasn't dead. It was just resting.

[thorin001]

Anguish wrote:

Thread Necromancers' Guild wrote:

You know the slogan! All Necromancy is acceptable.

At less than three months, this thread wasn't dead. It was just resting.

Beautiful plumage, isn't it?

[Sysryke]

thorin001 wrote:

Anguish wrote:

Thread Necromancers' Guild wrote:

You know the slogan! All Necromancy is acceptable.

At less than three months, this thread wasn't dead. It was just resting.

Beautiful plumage, isn't it?

"The plumage don't enter into it. It's dead! Deceased! Gone to meet its bloody maker! This is an ex-" ... thread. :p

[Quixote]

avr wrote:

...appropriating your own culture isn't a thing. You can write about angels if you come from any culture with a lot of Christian, Jewish or Muslim influence.

But then, there are people like me, who were sorta-kinda-maybe raised Christian, but have never really studied it, never considered it a big part of my identity, etc. I would say that it's part of my...people's culture? But not mine.

Sysryke wrote:

...who gets to determine what is and isn't a "vibrant belief"?

I think looking for a concrete line that should not be crossed is a mistake in situations like these. I think it's more about intent and judgement and caution.

And I think that, if you tread a path like this, you're going to piss some people off. I think that's unavoidable. Everyone has a different level of tolerance, a different threshold for offense. Some people are more defensive than others. I don't think that means you can never walk the (amorphous, blurry, shifting) line at all. That would be the death of fantasy, I think. But I think, when you're world-building, it's something to keep in mind and try to avoid as much as possible.

Greek pagans, angels and witches. Yeah, I don't know. The only one I have experienced firsthand is angels, but...I guess I wouldn't call my grandmother or aunt's belief a vibrant one. It was always very vague, very half-formed. They would talk about them, but in this subtle, barely-there way that was totally absent when they talked about the (less mystical?) parts of their religion.

I guess my main point is still: I can absolutely see why some cultures are like "hey, can you please stop using our very real and serious spiritual belief systems as garnish for your entertainment? It is offensive to us and in some cases, a threat to our very way of life."

So. With all that said. I want to run a modern game that features the skinwalker.
I've done a fairly decent amount of research so far. I've learned that the nature and abilities of the skinwalkers tends to change from story to story and from storyteller to storyteller. And that, yes, the Ute and the Dine'é don't generally care to share their stories with others.
But--BUT--I would be aiming to hold true to that concept. The characters would be trying to uncover the information about this figure, and they'd be met with seemingly conflicted sources of material as well as the fact that their curiosity does not entitle them to information. I would avoid any concrete claims. At the end of the story, I want them doubting whether or not what they were dealing with was a skinwalker or anything paranormal at all.

The thing is, these players are very young. This would be their first exposure to the concept of the skinwalker. But it's a story that's told right in their own backyard, and it's one that a lot of people have told recently (see: all the shows about Skinwalker Ranch), and there are a not-insignificant number of creative liberties or misrepresentations in those. And let's face it, in this Age of Misinformation, not many people are fact-checking stuff like this when there's just so much Tik-Tok and YouTube to consume. If they heard about the skinwalker from any of these other stories, I'm confident that they'd accept it as a (crypto?) fact and never think twice about it.
So I'm hoping to beat these other stories to the punch and instill in them this sense of mystery, fluidity and...sanctity? I don't know. I'm confident I can tell this story in a respectful manner, because I'm not trying to say anything specific about skinwalkers. I'll mention a dozen supposed "facts", but none of them will ever be confirmed. I'm not saying skinwalkers are just Native werewolves or the offspring of shapeshifters or anything so trite and reductionist as that. I'll be saying that this is a story that exists in our world, that it's not our story, and that, in the end, everything they've learned or even seen is suspect.

[Davor Firetusk]

Quixote wrote:

avr wrote:

...appropriating your own culture isn't a thing. You can write about angels if you come from any culture with a lot of Christian, Jewish or Muslim influence.

But then, there are people like me, who were sorta-kinda-maybe raised Christian, but have never really studied it, never considered it a big part of my identity, etc. I would say that it's part of my...people's culture? But not mine.

This is really pointing in a direction of why this concept is not useful in how to handle cultural interaction. Trying to diagram who owns what cultural concepts that have been passed around the Mediterranean Sea+ area for the last 2000+ years? Inevitably that bleeds into concepts shared at a much deeper level across Eurasia and North Africa related to the expansion of Indo-European languages and agriculture out of the Near East. In your particular case Quixote given the patterns of prehistoric human population mixing I am not aware of anything that would rule out a shared heritage for skinwalker and werewolf myths.

[Quixote]

Oh, absolutely. Werewolves, skinwalkers-- all the therianthropes come from, at the very least, a common theme of blurring the line between man and beast; they're stories about the enemy that wears the face of a friend, of the outsider invading your circle of firelight and plotting your ruin from within.

...but the number of people who believe in werewolves, who carry significant belief that involves such things...well. I think they are pretty few and far between. I mean, a lot people I've interacted with associated werewolves with vampires, thanks to the Underworld films and the like. It's an icon of horror and Hollywood, not actual spiritual significance.
So when the skinwalker gets lumped in with the werewolf, when it gets reduced, simplified, watered-down and *changed*...I mean. Yeah. I can see how that would be at least a little upsetting. Especially to a people that has experienced both cultural and literal genocide in the fairly recent past.

[Davor Firetusk]

My thesis is that what your describing is already covered under the simple category of show respect to someone else's religion. Very much the same as strongly consider whether or not your free speech right means you need to visually depict certain religious figures. There is still potential for gray area, but it is robust to many important cases, is clearly and repeatable definable, and also cleanly identifies that the gray area exists because there are 2 competing values.

[thejeff]

Quixote wrote:

Oh, absolutely. Werewolves, skinwalkers-- all the therianthropes come from, at the very least, a common theme of blurring the line between man and beast; they're stories about the enemy that wears the face of a friend, of the outsider invading your circle of firelight and plotting your ruin from within

A common psychological impulse perhaps, since we're all human.

Suggesting any other actual shared heritage for specific legends in cultures separated for 10s of thousands of years is pretty sketchy.

[thejeff]

Davor Firetusk wrote:

My thesis is that what your describing is already covered under the simple category of show respect to someone else's religion. Very much the same as strongly consider whether or not your free speech right means you need to visually depict certain religious figures. There is still potential for gray area, but it is robust to many important cases, is clearly and repeatable definable, and also cleanly identifies that the gray area exists because there are 2 competing values.

You certainly have free speech rights* to use skinwalkers or any other cultural things you may wish to appropriate. In general, you have the free speech right to be a jerk. It's just that other people are likely to use their free speech rights to criticize you for it. Perhaps free speech isn't a good framework for cultural appropriation.

*At least in the US and likely throughout most liberal democracies. Some places don't grant much in the way of free speech at all, though there it's liberties with their own cultures you're likely to get in trouble for.

[Quixote]

Davor Firetusk wrote:

...what your describing is already covered under the simple category of show respect to someone else's religion.

I guess. But at that point, you could also say it's covered by showing respect in general, or the Golden Rule.

But I think the issues around cultural appropriation are more complex than that. Like, it's not just about being offensive. It's about spreading WRONG information out into the world, to people who don't know it's wrong, and then the number of the people who heard it from you outnumbered the people who know the truth, and aspects of someone's culture can be warped and changed without their involvement at all.

[Coidzor]

Quixote wrote:

Davor Firetusk wrote:

...what your describing is already covered under the simple category of show respect to someone else's religion.

I guess. But at that point, you could also say it's covered by showing respect in general, or the Golden Rule.

But I think the issues around cultural appropriation are more complex than that. Like, it's not just about being offensive. It's about spreading WRONG information out into the world, to people who don't know it's wrong, and then the number of the people who heard it from you outnumbered the people who know the truth, and aspects of someone's culture can be warped and changed without their involvement at all.

If kids are learning more wrong information about their culture from someone's homebrew campaign setting they posted online, or even a published one with a following and history like the Forgotten Realms, than they're learning correct information from their families and communities, there's already a much bigger, deeper problem in play that goes beyond any individual content creator or perhaps even content creators as a whole.

[Quixote]

I don't think the issue is that people within a culture are being misled, but that people outside of it are.

Like during the Satantic Panic of the 80's and 90's in the U.S.A. Some people got the idea that games like D&D were blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, awakening homicidal tendencies, were laced with secret rituals to summon demons, etc. The media ran with it and created mass hysteria. Some people are are still serving prison sentences for bogus charges, apparently.
I can tell you, I've met some people who's last interaction with ttrpg's was through these news stories, and they still strongly believe that playing games like this will turn you into an apostate of Lucifer/serial killer.

I think the intensity of the reaction made it unsustainable. When people calmed down, they had some questions. Plus, a globally available hobby is a lot harder to obfuscate than a somewhat isolated culture. And as unpleasant as dealing with those (very few) people has been for me, ttrpg's and works of fantasy are not my religious beliefs. They're my hobbies. So. I would assume that misinformation about these other issues would be substantially more troubling.

Also, I'd just like to address the "if what you're saying is true, then there are bigger issues we need to address than your argument" approach. That feels like a cop-out to me. I mean, that can ALWAYS be a response (see above: everything pretty much boils down to the Golden Rule). Climate change. Political corruption. The time they got my order wrong at the drive thru. You can simplify and broaden everything. But I don't think that means "give up" or "don't sweat the small stuff". I think it means, try to fix those broader issues, and address some of these more specific, immediate ones where you can.

[Davor Firetusk]

There is certainly a danger in overly broad concepts, and I am certainly temperamentally biased towards few ideas of general use vs. a lot of special cases. But at a minimum a new potential concept should at least be helpful in making judgements when older approaches weren't. In this case the definition originally posted by Sara Marie would include St. Patrick's day among the more gratuitous examples of appropriation. Which is suspect doesn't feel right to most people. Other things also come to mind that fit that definition that I suspect people would also object. At the same time I've seen purported experts on local media claim things to be examples of appropriation that don't come close to meeting that definition.

Your focus seems to have shifted towards accuracy in representation of other ideas, which I can absolutely understand as a criteria in considering how to borrow or interact. It aligns well with the idea of sacred values I saw in the book Behave. Basically different cultures have ideas of one type or another that are just plain fundamental to their entire cultural construction. Those are directions that I think have actual promise in helping make these judgements and in communicating across groups about why some types of borrowing aren't cool.