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Here's my Orientalism thoughts for the day:
Orientalism is, first, the belief that you can understand another people in their entirety. That you can write a guidebook to understanding them. Imagine writing a guidebook to explain the American people. It would go on forever.
Orientalism is, first, the belief that you can understand another people in their entirety. That you can write a guidebook to understanding them. Imagine writing a guidebook to explain the American people. It would go on forever.
So that's what I mean when I say D&D is so irredeemably Orientalist. Because sourcebook after sourcebook continues to posit this kind of knowability. Cultures in D&D are captured with paragraph descriptions. Monsters are authoritatively contained in tiny little boxes.
How do we produce knowledge about a fantasy world that avoids these limitations? How do we map our world while maintaining the heterogeneity and multiplicity of dynamic cultures? Rather than mapping behaviors, it is also possible for us to map ways of knowing and being.
This might sound like some social justice whatever. But it's more than that. It's honestly just a way of making your worlds more engaging. Map the ways in which people know and feel through the world, and the practices that emerge from and contribute to these ways of knowing.
So your bird people build houses in the trees. Okay. But what do they know to be true about this practice? Not their rational, keeping away from predators ideas. Sure. But also, in a world where the gods are real and divinities interrupt life on the daily, give them spirituality.
For example: These bird people know that the further they ascend, the greater their blessings. But they, too, have a version of the story of Icarus. And so life is this work of ascent without hubris. And this becomes a metaphor for their living. But there are other stories, too.
Like the story of the bird who lost his wings and learned to walk amongst the land animals. And how he discovered that we cannot fetishize the sky, for life begins down on the ground. So the people hold these conflicting ideas together. They work to understand them at once.
Already, simply by telling two stories that point towards the knowings and beings of these people I literally just made up right now, we already have a much better sense of who they are. They are people more than they are birds. They believe in something.
So when I talk about Orientalism, know that this is what I mean. Let your people tell stories, don't tell those stories for them. Let your people come to understand the world through living in that world, don't understand your people in advance.
This is a lot of work, yes. So what that means is that perhaps the nature of your games must change. Part of ending this Orientalist framework is shifting towards a style of deep immersion. One that necessitates worldbuilding as such. One that requires you work with depth.
And once you're in that immersive mode, again, you stop describing people, and let them describe themselves through the stories they tell and the relationships they form to one another, the land, and the structures of society that emerge from that telling.
This is very basic 101 stuff. And there's a lot more complexity and nuance when we start talking about positionality and colonialism and the subaltern and anthropology and fiction and language and ontology.
But for now, if you've never done this kind of work before, try it out.
But for now, if you've never done this kind of work before, try it out.
