Benedict sets us thinking:
> morganconrad wrote:
> ...
> are there any scientific studies showing that native English speakers
> have different concepts of other people than say, the French, where
> "vous" and "tu" exist?
At the level of language probably not, though vocabulary obviously determines what you do or don't focus on, and structure reflects your conceptions of the world and the nature of agency. Some theorists still hold Sapir-Whorf to be weakly determinative. Most human metaphors and conceptual tools are build up from a few basic schemas that reflect the fact we have bodies (George Lakoff), so a spirit/god language like Stormspeech might contain radically different "bodiless" insights into reality, and everyone knows you have to be crazy to understand Wyrmish.
At the *cultural* level we enter the realm of kinship, which certainly affects your view of other people, and is strongly determinative. Like myth, kinship divides up the world in a seemingly arbitrary but meaningful way, and tells you such things as whether your brother is more important than your husband (in matrilineages, its the former) which groups of people you might be 'father' or 'son' to (regardless of biological relationship), why bandicoots hate hairy-nosed wombats but are always friends to wallabies, whether you can marry a dead man or woman, or why your father's sister's daughter is the perfect mate for you (the dreaded 'cross cousin' marriage).
Glorantha is light on language details, which I think is fine for a roleplaying-background world (Linguists among you may differ :). My working rule is always, if a GM can't remember it in game, its too complex. Neither has there been much imagination shown on alternatives to 'primitive' western family and kinship patterns for different Gloranthan cultures, but here the challenge is again to make such systems straightforward and intuitive in game terms. It depends naturally, on what you consider your roleplaying to be *about*, and whether you consider Glorantha to be a place to reflect your own cultural and personal ideas and worldview [western, male, urban, white, middle class], to challenge them in imaginative ways, or (for most of us), something in-between .
> HOWEVER, I maintain that if someone in the RW has had some theory about
> anthropology or history, however discredited it is now, then there
> should exist in Glorantha some people who confirm to that theory. Thus,
> we have noble savages (that's YOU, Heortlings) and structuralist
> mythology (the God Learners).
Noble? Haven't heard that before. Let me get the cow dung out of my hair and I'll boast you a bawdy riddle 'bout me sheep. :)
I'm not sure how the Godlearners are structuralists, and would be interested in an example. Structuralist approaches to myth got dumped in the real world because they tell absolutely *nothing* about the myth and its utility to the people who create, modify and preserve it. (Mind you, lack of real world utility hasn't stopped the Jungians, has it? :)). While the GL approach is similar to structuralism in this regard, it also had insights that allowed the myths to still *work*. In a cosmos where the myths and the godplane are in some sense real and external to societies and individuals, you need more than a litany of binary oppositions and a chant that we are all one in our mediations. Levi-Strauss left few followers: the idea had burned itself out in ten or fifteen years. The Godlearner approach seems to be part diffusionist/functionalist (Orlanth is Terminus is Jupiter is Zeus is Dias-Pitar), part memetics and part mostali concrete engineering).
Where I *do* find structuralism and binary oppositions useful in a Gloranthan context is as a myth-creation *tool*, external to the society in which the myth is based. For me, as a writer, creator, GM, its an elegant and simple shorthand and a neat way of conceptualising oppositions and social tensions.
To use a Heortling example:
Man:Woman :: Storm:Earth :: Above:Below :: Wet::Dry :: Violence:Negotiation
:: Spear:Rug ::
Loins:Head :: Raw:Cooked :: Action:Wisdom :: Wild:Tamed :: Cattle:Goods ::
Outside:Inside :: Instinct::Reflection :: Honey:Beef.
: = is to
:: = as
Mythemes, the basic structures, are just like heroquest stations.
John
nysalor_at_iprimus.com.au John HughesQuestlines: http://home.iprimus.com.au/pipnjim/questlines/
He gave man speech, and speech created thought, Which is the measure of the universe.
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End of Glorantha Digest
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