MapMaking and Phenomenology

From: Derek & Barbara Butterfield <butte_at_spirit.com.au>
Date: Sat, 06 Feb 1999 15:47:28 +1100


Heys folks,

John Hughes here, posting from a friend's account.

MAPMAKING AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL CULTURES Ahh, the great mapmaking debate, latest (subtle) incarnation of the eternal genre-vs-game controversy. Personally I don=92t think accurate maps are important or even an issue, but hey, it=92s a big multiverse. My own reasoning follows :

Most Orlanthi in Sartar and the Far Place will rarely leave their own tulas: birth, life and death unwind on the sheltering heart-earth of clan or tribal lands. (An Orlanthi women will usually come into a new tula upon marriage of course). For most of the population, their cognitive mind maps will only extend 20 or 30 km in any direction. Beyond this lies the unknown: Chaos, raiders, enemies, people you do not marry, all somewhat less than human. If you are a hunter or a herder, you will know your lands in amazingly complex detail, quite literally every tree and stone and spirit, overlaid with a wealth of plant, animal and mythological detail.

There is also the question of literacy: my own intuition is that literacy rates are around 15% for cities and 5% for rural areas.
(Numeracy is much higher, but unlike the Dara Happans, the Orlanthi do
not possess zero, and their pictographic cut stick number system makes even simple multiplication and division a mind-boggling task.)

I believe Orlanthi culture to be essentially pre-literate and phenomenological. By "phenomenological", I mean that Orlanthi thinking is relatively untroubled by technical apparatus or abstract theories. Orlanthi experience their own inner and outer worlds in terms of the phenomena itself. There is a general disdain for any knowledge removed from the context of direct experience. This is so basic to understanding the Orlanthi experience, yet our own western cultures are so entangled in abstraction and classification that it can be major hurdle to our understanding.=20

Our conception of mapping is part of this abstraction, and I believe, foreign to the Orlanthi mind-set. I=92m excepting the wisdom cults of course; to my own thinking much of what they supposedly possess is better understood as game resource and expository device rather than cultural reality. Though maps often appear in our games and articles, I often regard them as translation devices rather than native artifacts. What is presented for convenience to players as a map may in reality be a vision-poem, a riddle, a hymn fragment, a melody, a piece of pottery or a carved stick.

There are alternative mapping structures for oral cultures, for even the wise may occasionally have reason to leave their tulas. Ancestral poems
("Great Uncle Herringbane=92s Journey to the Bold Home on the World=92s V=
ery
Edge"), hero tales or hunting chants may encode landscape and geographical information in surprisingly complex ways. (In our world, for example, Centralian song cycles use the rise and fall of the melody, tempo and other musical devices to encode information about the rise and fall of the land, the type of terrain, the location of food and hunting resources.) And if the information proves to be a generation or two out of date, well, we=92re Orlanthi, we=92ll have it fixed for next time.)

An Orlanthi trader maps a journey the hard way: with her boots and with her head. Such knowledge constitutes her commercial advantage; it is a valuable resource not to be readily shared. For hunters, detailed local knowledge is cultic, and therefore sacred and secret. Most Orlanthi journeys are either trade or pilgrimage: for trade you follow the roads and for pilgrimage you know the sacred gnosis, the hero songs and hymns that describe your journey.=20

Maps may be important to armies perhaps, though I suspect that carefully planned campaigns (in our modern understanding of the word) are somewhat of a rarity in Glorantha. (Lunars being the major exception). Most "invasions" are simply raids by more people than usual. If you do need detailed knowledge of area, well people are better than maps, and the Lozenge is untroubled by embarrassing constraints such as the Geneva Convention or the International Declaration of Human Rights. Or you could forcefully incarnate a (recently deceased) enemy ancestor, and use their local knowledge. Slow movement and the need to forage limit large armies, and despite magical and flying units the majority of any armed force will only be able to travel a few kilometres a day. Spirits capable of perceiving the mundane landscape can travel much faster, and provide up-to-date reconnaissance. And of course, any action against a traditional enemy will almost certainly be a form of heroquest, with all the attendant descriptive myths and rituals.   =20
Roads have a sacred and magical character, for they pierce the unknown and bind a kingdom together. Sacrifice to the Lord of Roads (Issaries) is an important prequel to any journey.=20

I guess I=92m drawing attention to the fact that one person=92s symbolism=  is
another person=92s technology, and vice versa. Cultural mindsets and magical alternatives need to be taken seriously in any exercise of technological =91translation=92 between our world and the Curious Cube.=20

Half the fun really. :)

John

nysalor_at_yahoo.com
john.hughes2_at_dva.gov.au


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