Design Documentation - Creating a Culture

A Top-Down Approach to Anthropology and Ethnography
I did a massive info-dump on Reddit in collaboration with some other fine folk so I figured I might as well reformat it for use by you guys! First off, these are guidelines, so feel free to ignore whatever doesn’t suit your narrative. These are just a few ways to framework a humanoid culture as we’ve seen them form on Earth (as we don’t have another frame of reference – yet!) but most of these things should hold over no matter what weird circumstances you throw at them. Warforged, for example, could skip the entry on food… or maybe food is still important in a symbolic way, or is actually a very well-studied subject so that they better understand how us fleshy things use it as a frame of reference. Like that.

Cultural Iceberg – In and Out of Awareness
Culture can be partitioned into two broad categories; Material (things you interact with like food, clothes, toys, architecture, weapons, currency, etc.) and Non-Material (thoughts, language, ideas, behaviors, religion, traditions, etc.) expressions of culture. When looking at a culture from a distance, you will usually only see a minuscule section unless you probe deeper. This is called the “iceberg concept”, and can be taken into account when you want to either slap together something for your world or take a longer look to flesh out nations and peoples that will have a central focus in the story you intend to tell.

Some examples of a typical glance at a country would include (if you wanna go checklist style):

In Awareness - Fine arts, literature, drama, classical music, popular music, folk-dancing, games, cooking, clothing, language

Out of Awareness - Modesty, concept of beauty, child rearing, cosmology, relationship to animals, superior/subordinate relations, sin, courtship, justice, leadership, work habits, group decision-making methods, cleanliness standards, attitudes towards dependents, theory of disease, approaching a problem, status mobility, roles in relation to gender/class/age/occupation/family, insanity, facial expressions, logic and validity, patterns of visual perception, body language, friendship, concept of self, handling emotions, conversational patterns (aka aisatsu), concept of past and future, time, competition vs cooperation, social interaction levels, adolescence and coming of age, personal space.

As you can see, there’s a bit of correlation between Material things and things that also fall under In Awareness vs Non-Material and Out of Awareness. However! What is readily apparent about one culture does not necessarily carry over to the next. For example, the traditional Silver Flame is very well known for the Out of Awareness concepts of Sin, Cosmology, and Justice. These things being shuffled around help create a more unique culture. In short – what do people see when they look at your culture? What is the tl;dr?

The Environment
Culture is built heavily around environment first, aka, what people have access to. For example, the search for food or shelter might drive a people to become or stay nomadic, while the desire to exploit abundant resources or begin mass-producing something could cause a wandering folk to put down roots. This study is called cultural geography, a sub-field of human geography (as opposed to environmental determinism, which dictates that we are forced to move down certain trajectories as a result of our geography up to and including political strategy and potential intelligence… and then quickly ran down the path of racist pro-colonization bullshittery, as I’m sure you can imagine).

Topography, climate, and raw materials are the three factors of environmental influence on culture.

Topography example: Fishing near sea and lakes vs farming and herding in prairies

Climate example: Colder = thicker clothing and more reliance on animals over crops vs warmer climates (excepting deserts, clearly)

Raw materials example: Lots of trees might mean many things will be made of wood instead of stone, good ore = better metalworking

Now. Caveat time. Just because a place has the factors in place to push it towards something doesn’t determine that the culture will take that path. What the fuck, you think to yourself, you just told me that the above factors influence culture. Well yes they do but the key word here is influence. We’re heading into environmental determinism territory if we take things at surface value. "“If, for instance, one classifies the cultures of a number of tribes according to the materials utilized by them in their industries and for food, the resulting grouping will not represent the [shared] cultures of the tribes but the flora and fauna of the different regions; for there is more to a house or canoe or garment that the material it is made of, more to food than the animal or vegetable substance it contains.” – Culture and Environment, Goldenweiser, A. A. Vol. 21, No. 5 (Ma., 1916), pp. 630, American Journal of Sociology,"

Example: Northwest coast natives had one hell of a wood-based industry going on with log cabins and boats and totem poles all that good stuff. But. The natives of California have amazing forests as well but didn’t do much of that at all. They preferred weaving baskets and basically left the rest well-enough alone.

If you want to ignore nuance and just run down the determinism route instead for the most part (because it’s easier, like most things that are black/white) by all means go ahead. You can still subvert your own writing whenever you want – that’s the glory of it. But coming up with the “why” behind a lot of stuff can be fun if you have the time to sink into it.

Linguistics and Culture:
This is a huge one, and one I’ll try not to make as dry as the last bit.

Language has an almost incalculable effect on the Non-Material aspects of our cultures, helping to subtly shape how we think about things by the words we have to describe them. This is the called the principle of linguistic relativity (also known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, or Whorfianism). There’s a dangerous trap though – it’s hard to analyze this stuff without falling into our own preconceived biases and correlation/causation issues. But hey, since we’re the authors, we don’t have to worry about the same issues that people studying existing cultures have to worry about and we can make things affect as much or as little as we feel like.

As the anthropologists say; fuck it.

The effects of language on people is something that has held humans fascinated for years and years, and has even been applied to programming languages – the creator of Ruby cited the sci-fi book Babel-17 as inspiration for his invention. That book featured the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis as a huge plot point. The framework that you give people to describe, or in Ruby’s case create, dictates the output you receive.

Or, perhaps you’ve read George Orwell’s book 1984, where a language called Newspeak is invented to reduce the citizen's capacity for critical thought?

Point is, it’s about as big of a deal as you make of it but it can be super fun if you’re playing around and not taking shit too seriously. I’ve compiled some points to keep in mind regarding culture and language, but this is presuming you want not to think about this stuff too carefully and don’t want to be arsed to write out a whole language of your own. We’re working in the D&D universe after all, so we have some “framework” languages even though (to the best of my knowledge) only Elven has been detailed anywhere and that’s only one-off words… without the benefit of grammatical structure, conjugation, tenses, or any of that important stuff.

Suffice it to say, claiming “they speak Aquan, which groups objects by material instead of shape as a default” or “they speak Deep Speech, which doesn’t have words pertaining to an individual’s point of view and instead speaks from a collective perspective” is fuckin’ fine so long as you define it first and want to bother with this. Otherwise, collaborate with your peers, you filthy animals, or ignore this section entirely.

Questions for funsies and the linguistic determinists:

 * Are there gendered words for objects in this language? Do those gendered objects have an influence on what is acceptable for each gender to do/not do? How about masculine/feminine/other verbs? Adjectives?
 * Does the language group by shape, colour, location, animus, etc? Does this affect how they communicate with other creatures? For example, the request “can you get me three green rocks” could result in beetles, gemstones, actual rocks, steel balls, eggs, or variants thereof depending on how “green” and “rock” were defined. Or a response of “I don’t know, can I?” from a pedantic English teacher.
 * What words are grouped by connotation and how does that affect perception? In English we have multiple words with the same direct meaning, but with different feeling associated with them beyond simple added nuance. We also use certain nouns as shorthand for a set of descriptors, e.g calling someone a “snake” has a negative connotation to us but would mean something entirely different to a Yuan-ti. See point one in relation to a Thayan, and then in relation to a Drow in terms of perception.
 * Counting! Do they count in base ten? Does this affect their conception of “few” vs “many”?
 * How does the language affect things like poetry or music? How many descriptive words are there? Are they a poetic people with 500 words for “beautiful”, used in various contexts? Do they not have words for aesthetic attractiveness at all, and if not, does this affect their standards for comeliness in mates? Maybe the highest praise isn’t based on looks, but strictly utility and compatibility?
 * Do they have senses/organs/appendages anything we don’t have that they would base descriptive words or concepts around? It could mean a lot of words there simply aren’t translations for. It can make a character seem more alien, which can be great depending on how it’s handled. Hint: sparingly and politely

Food – You are what you eat:
Food is awesome and important and wonderful and above all else, cultural. It is a giver of life, and is therefore intrinsically tied to the cultures of all who need to consume it. What we eat is part of how we identify “us” vs “other” as well; for example us, Westerners eat hamburgers, our Vietnamese cousins devour Pho, and our Scandinavian cousins ferment goddamn everything they can get their hands on. What “we” eat is by default assumed to be normal, good, wholesome, while what “they” eat is strange, unclean, suspicious – this is a common trope, and a good one to build on or subvert.

What is eaten, how it’s prepared and consumed, when it’s appropriate to do so, and by whom it is eaten are ways to show wealth, class, and status. Who prepares the food is also important! If someone else is making it for you, does that that show that they are taking care of you because you can’t do it yourself, because you’re important or wealthy enough not to need to do it anymore, or because it’s a gift or a token of respect/affection/fear? Are you letting someone else do it as a show of courage, such as having an enemy prepare it for you? There are many implications you can take away from each aspect, and each is open to positive or negative connotation and reasoning.

Speaking of preparation and consumption, eating utensils can be contentious little things! In England for example, forks used to be seen as womanly as they were a conspicuous display of wealth and we have perfectly good fingers. Some people even thought that using them was an affront to God, as in Christianity the sin of “gluttony” also included eating too daintily as well as too greedily, what with forks slowing down the process of shoveling food in your face-hole and all. This was flipped in Victorian times when the nouveau-riche (middle class) were emerging and people suddenly had money to burn to prove how civilized they were. The Victorians decided that we needed more ceremony around food and promptly invented 500 (gross exaggeration) types of bloody forks to confuse all the fresh families in high society. It quickly came about that providing all of the proper flatware at a dinner party was a sign of wealth and good breeding, since all the utensils were cast in silver and effectively gate-kept all the up and comers from being able to afford what the generational aristocrats could. If you screwed up which fork to use for what course, or hell, even what specific food (berries? Ice-cream? Olives? Fish? Go fuck yourself?) there would be much tittering behind silk napkins and your whole family cast into shame and poverty. Well not really, but there would be much backroom shit-talking until the next unfortunate person caused a scandal.

Take chopsticks as another example. Have you ever heard someone complain about how hard it is to eat rice with chopsticks, as if the Asians couldn’t be arsed to figure out a better way to eat a major regional staple food? Yeah. We all have and it’s annoying (hint: you hold the bowl up to your face and shovel the rice in with the chopsticks, unless it’s Korea, where you use the paired spoon). Chopsticks started out, much like forks, as cooking or serving implements rather than utensils. Because the lacquerware traditionally used to serve is so delicate, sharp objects like knives or forks were avoided and serving chopsticks were shorted and tapered to function as a way to keep the pieces safe, food eaten, and fingers clean. Silver, silver-tipped, bone/ivory, jade, or gold chopsticks were all common. Silver or silver-tipped were the most popular among those who could afford them as there was a superstition at the time that contact with poison would cause the silver to turn black.

Question break for foodies
Heck, maybe there’s another metric, like the deepest swimmer of the Tritons getting to use a better ceremonial “trident” (fork) for their food? Like with the silver-tipped chopsticks, are any types of utensils or preparation methods in your culture useful for things other than eating? One might ward off Fey by drinking tea prepared in an iron teapot, for example (no fuck off that’s mine make your own!). Culinary traditions can be a way to preserve heritage in the case of oppressed people; you might not be able to write down your history if you’re under the boot, but you can pass down recipes, food preparation methods, and the meaning of special ingredients (like only consuming certain foods on certain days). Eating foods that your ancestors prepared while under occupation might be a subtle sign of rebellion in your culture, perhaps.
 * How do your cultures deal with eating utensils and presentation? 
 * What foods have specific eating utensils, if any? 
 * Are there any utensils or styles of utensils identified with childhood, masculinity/femininity, religious roles, or aristocracy?

Religions tend to have food become a part of their customs as well, due in part to the all-encompassing nature of “sustenance and community” that most promote to bring everyone together as a unified whole. Symbolically drinking the blood or eating the flesh of gods (OI CHRISTIANITY) being an example that sometimes goes farther into literally drinking the life from other creatures, or hey, maybe your people literally eat their gods. Who knows. They probably regenerate, right? Having foods that you are not allowed to eat (Judaism), only eat on certain days, or perhaps only in specific ways after a ritual has taken place are things that could be looked at with disbelief or reverence depending on the people in question, but controlling what people eat and therefore how they sustain themselves is usually tied to religious or secular authority figures.

Food has traditionally been used to strengthen the bonds between people or to show caring or protection; bringing food over to the home of a widow/er, making soup for the sick, bringing over a bathtub full of ice-cream to cheer someone up after a breakup, humans have done these things for ages. How does your culture treat bond-building in this regard? Are there certain rituals or times when it is appropriate to give food to show a bond (such as our Valentine’s Day), or maybe it’s considered an insult that implies they are unable to fend for themselves?

On Earth we have used food as currency frequently – during times of financial instability it was always better to barter with food than bring money, for example it took a wheelbarrow full of money to buy a loaf of bread in Germany after the war. Might as well trade the bread for eggs instead. Some spices, such as saffron, have always carried a significant value. The longer that the food could stay preserved the higher value it carried, so things like pepper and salt have always been high up on the list of food used as cash. Salt is rumored (rather persistently for something that we have found no actual evidence for other than a shared root spelling) to be the word that “salary” came from in that salarium is claimed by some to reference the salt rations that a solider of Rome would receive for service, much as sugar and chocolate were given out via ration tickets during our more modern wartimes. The Japanese used rice as commodity money, the Jewish people used barley, and Mesoamericans used the cocoa bean. Does your culture value spices as much as gold, or perhaps more? Is there something endemic to the area that they value even more, or perhaps another culture prizes very much? Rome used to pay a premium for pepper back in the day."“There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy” - Henry Lewis, Alfred. (1906). March issue of Cosmopolitan Magazine."

Preservation techniques help shape a culture as well; if you can’t preserve your food you’re likely not planning for the long term or engaging in costly wars. Drying/salting/pickling/canning/however else you want to do it will keep your people alive through times of scarcity; are there any rituals around these methods? How did they come about them in the first place?

Partner animals usually also have a place of esteem because they help us find food, like piggies with truffles or the honeyguide with… well… honey. Does your culture have any sort of symbiotic relationship with wildlife centered around food?

After some thought, you now have a baseline
Cultures have almost infinite facets, but focusing on what is readily apparent to outsiders (In Awareness aspects) will save you a lot of time and headache. At the bottom of the page is a tool popular among worldbuilders that was built out of an ethnographic questionnaire. Use it to generate a framework for your culture and dive into further detail as necessitated by the story you want to tell.

"“Ontologically, anthropological ethnographers have long criticized positivist approaches to social research because of their lack of attention to meaning systems, and the fact that humans, as the primary object of study, construct multiple realities that are complex, multifaceted, differently expressed in specific situations (context), and continually undergoing change (process). Epistemologically, to grasp an understanding of such realities, the classic ethnographic enterprise does not begin with predetermined hypotheses to be proved or disproved as objective social fact, but begins with open ended exploratory attempts to learn as much as possible about those realities.” Whitehead, Tony L. Ph.D MS.Hyg. (2005). Basic Classical Ethnographic Research Methods, July 17th."

As the creators, we are unable to be wrong with how we interpret the realities of the culture we create; we aren’t observers, we are literally playing god. It’s a good position to be in (but it throws traditional methods of cultural study, which one would normally reverse-engineer for creation, out the damn window).

Grab a drink and some nibbles before filling out this time-consuming cultural questionnaire