>From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_cs.ucc.ie>
>Ian Cooper:
>> But surely this is how economic specialisation always
>> works. You relieve me of day-to-day stead work so that
>> I can concentrate on what I am really good at being an
>> 'expert farmer'. My role involves devotion to Barntar,
>> which gives me useful magic to oversome difficult
>> problems and increase our yields. Overall productivity
>> rises as a result of my magic, but to get that magic
>> you have to support me while I forge close links with
>> my god.
>
>Right: the 'model' Barntar Devotee (Disciple Wannabe) would be who
>_only_ does work that in B's idiom, plus the purely ritual stuff that
>accounts for some of the now-notoriopus 60%. You'd eliminate as
>much of the child-minding, turnip-growing, etc, etc, that obviously
>is just as much a necessity in the stead in practice. This other
>work would obviously have to be done by others, whether they be other
>devotees in some other niche, or more likely less emulatorily-
>specific individuals.
Isn't this 60% of a devotee's time spent on cult business primarily a gaming mechanic? To avoid players taking the benefits and ignoring the obligations of the status.
I don't see a Barntar devotee spending hours communing with Barntar while sitting in the middle of a field. He will be in contact with the god while ploughing, weeding, reaping and that contact will enhance the work he is doing so that his efforts are more productive. Secondly he will be in demand from Barntar initiates for advice and help with their crops (training in RQ game terms). Then there's teaching children and identifying those with leanings towards Barntar - no good all the kids going off to those exciting gods if there's no one who can grow a decent crop.
Now to my mind all those activities count towards cult business and in practice it is not going to be 60% but 90% - we're talking dedicated farmers here. As far as numbers go, I would expect at least 5% of the average clan are devotees of Barntar with at least a similar percentage as devotees of Ernalda. That's on the basis of one supervisor/leader in every group of ten people doing a job. This works because the devotee is someone who produces food and enhances the productivity of others who are producing food. That's quite different from the RW priest who mumbles a few incantations over the field and goes back home. Just as the Humakti fights in the front rank as well as training the militia the Barntari ploughs his own field as well as helping everyone else farm.
>As has been pointed out In Another Place, such "specialists" are not
>a net economic cost, though, if their skills are actually being fully
>utilised. (i.e., there are enough Pure Barntar Chores around the stead
>to keep a Barntar Chap occuppied full-time.) I suspect the limiting
>factor isn't economic at all, though: rather it's that only a modest
>fraction of people have the "vocation" to become a devotee, of any diety.
>If it were simply a matter of choice, a sufficiently Fordian divsision
>of labour would give you a brilliantly efficient clan where _everyone_
>was a devotee... (Well, unless they all wanted to be Humakti...)
I wonder if this isn't a reason for the lack of Orlanthi economic success. The majority of young males imagine themselves as devotees of Orlanth Adventurous and then find that in between the raiding they have to learn to farm. Only those lucky and skilled enough to get noticed by Orlanth actually get to be devotees while the rest find that farming takes up too much of their time and they end up as initiates of both Orlanth and Barntar without the posibility of going further in either cult.
-- Donald Oddy http://www.grove.demon.co.uk/ --__--__--
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