One of my most difficult days teaching college anthropology happened in the spring of 2017. We were discussing political systems. Tensions were high. Two students, one liberal, one conservative, stood up and started screaming at one another in the middle of class. I had to take both outside, separate them, and deescalate. Classrooms were growing increasingly contentious, a reflection of the escalating political climate of the United States.
In the fall of 2019 I wrote the article, 17 Things I Have Learned Teaching Anthropology and Cultural Diversity. If you haven’t stumbled on it before, it’s about insights I gained in my early days of lecturing. In this difficult political climate, I knew that these conversations about diversity and culture were more important than ever. So, after that shouting match in 2017, I began experimenting with different methods to teach anthropology and diversity.
As I was writing that article in 2019, I discussed how contentious the classroom had become with my soon to be co-author, Kyra Wellstrom. Both of us had been teaching anthropology for more than five years at that point, and had seen firsthand the changes in our classrooms with each passing semester.
Rethinking Worldbuilding
It wasn’t just the classrooms Kyra and I discussed. Both of us were frustrated with the inaccurate worldbuilding in fiction, films, and games. There were two books contributing to this problem, Sapiens and Guns, Germs, and Steel. Anthropologists have debunked both books, though they remain popular. Both sell an overly simplistic narrative about culture and history that doesn’t hold up to any real scrutiny.
Why did we care so much? Well, what we imagine matters. If your culture is constantly creating stories based on inaccurate information and stereotypes, that becomes part of the public consciousness. So, bad worldbuilding can actually reinforce biases and in some cases, bigotry. On the other end of the spectrum, good worldbuilding can help people have greater empathy, source possible solutions to real-world problems, and deconstruct stereotypes. Fictional settings are ideal for playing with ideas, especially if you’re a creative.
As we began writing the book, we realized we could potentially help solve two problems at the same time. By writing an accessible text on anthropology for worldbuilding, we could help people write more accurate and immersive fiction. We also realized that we could use the book in our classrooms to approach contentious topics from a different direction.
Each of us took the model and experimented with it in different ways.
I tried several experiments in my classroom. The first was to have individuals build their own worlds. And while students seemed to enjoy this approach, it did nothing to address the tension in this classroom. If anything, students doubled down on their opinions. I quickly realized that having individual students do their own projects, isolated them from others. Unfortunately this further entrenched them in their own worldviews which was the opposite of my goal. It’s easy to become myopic when you’re in your own head.
What Changed Everything
After two semesters and some student surveys, I took a different approach. This time I tried group worldbuilding.
It changed everything.
Each student was assigned to a group of 3-5 people, and through three key projects throughout the term, they built fictional worlds together. Their final assignment was to present their fictional world creatively to teach the entire class. I encouraged them to use their own backgrounds, knowledge, and skills in their projects.
There were so many brilliant final projects. Some did plays (in full costumes), created videos, and built tabletop or board games. We had mock news reports and political campaigns, hilarious tourism brochures, original music, languages, recipes and so much more. Finals week became a space of play instead of stress.
While, no model is perfect, and there are some students who hate group work, it completely changed the conversations in class. Since I began the worldbuilding approach, I’ve never had another shouting match in my classroom. Instead, more students showed up to class ready to discuss. They understood that our in-class content and conversations helped them improve their fictional worlds. Instead of viewing a classmate with a different opinion as a challenge, suddenly their differences were fuel for building a more nuanced and holistic fictional world.
In these projects, they were practicing compromise and gaining experience finding common ground to work toward a mutual goal. They were rehearsing democracy, a skill we must always practice if we are to keep it.
But it wasn’t always easy. That’s kind of the point. Some groups had problems working together. One group project was derailed by a the collapse of a romantic relationship, and I had to work with the students to find a way to resolve things. Sometimes things didn’t get resolved, and a student dropped the class. Classrooms shouldn’t be uniform and tidy things. If they were, how could anyone learn? This whole human thing we do is complicated. That’s what anthropology is all about: trying to understand the complexity of the human experience.
The last 12 years, since I first began teaching, I’ve learned as much, if not more, than in all my coursework and field research in graduate school.
Watching our country lean more and more toward authoritarianism and away from democracy in the last decade, it’s been my classroom that’s given me hope. Because I saw firsthand that how you approach these contentious issues is almost as important as the topic itself. I’ve learned that no matter how difficult the discussion is, there is a way to get most people to learn to see humanity in one another.
If I were to add anything to my old 17 Things article, it would be this: You cannot find meaning out in the world, you have to create it. Sure, you can always let other people create meaning for you, but if you do that, you’ll be stuck in a life that’s not your own. If we want to build a better world for our descendants, if we want to be good ancestors to future generations, then we have to create meaning together to build a better world.
Are you experimenting with worldbuilding, pedagogy, or collaborative learning in your own work? I’m always interested in learning about different approaches or helping others to actualize theirs. Feel free to reach out with your thoughts or questions. I also occasionally host worldbuilding Q&A sessions over on YouTube for creatives.
How do we create identities? How do we decide what kinds of things are taboo in society? How do we know what is clean or dirty? Have you ever thought about the fact that sometimes, we reinforce our choices and values through rebellion and/or opposition?
It might be obvious why some things are taboo, or at least there is some sense of rationalism surrounding those ideas. It’s taboo to eat out of the garbage, since the likelihood you will get sick is high and that’s where we put the things we wish to discard. But why are there taboos surrounding colors of clothing or beards, or types of clothing or lack of clothing? Is there a rational reason a man can’t wear a bright pink bikini on a hot summer day in American society? Why does this make us uncomfortable? Is there a reason that it’s not considered manly? Keep in mind, by reason, I mean an objective scientific one. Don’t worry, you’re not going to find a picture of me in a bright pink bikini below, I promise. But when you’re building a fictional world, understanding why a society formulates taboos and norms can be really useful.
In this entry on worldbuilding, we are going to examine a way to think about how people form their identities and cultures using the concept of schismogenesis.
Coined by Anthropologist Gregory Bateson in the 1930s, the term schismogenesis means essentially creation through division. By looking at your identity and behavior, I acknowledge how we are different, and thus solidify who I am. This often manifests as opposition. The most obvious form of schismogenesis is the rebellion of teenagers, who form their identity based on challenging acceptable behavior. Through opposition, they create identity. But this isn’t just a teenager thing, cultures and people do this all the time. It’s why suppressing differences, can actually make them stronger. The identity becomes more legitimate, more solid, because you fight against it.
Let’s return to bikinis.
I (apparently) am the kind of man who wears a bright pink bikini in public, and you, (assuming you’re a male in this example and of the status quo in American society) do not. Thus, I am behaving inappropriately in society, and you are not. You, will try to get me to conform. You will probably mock me for my strange behavior. You may seek to make me feel ashamed of wearing my bright pink bikini out in public. I will do one of two things. Either, I will capitulate, and take off my bikini and switch to the culturally acceptable norm of swimming trunks, or I will continue my rebellion and seek to recruit others who think like me. Thus, I will form my identity through opposition.
These kinds of things happen every moment of every day across every culture. Power and resistance are constantly in play on every level. Think of all the debates going on right now in your culture about what people should and should not do. There are hundreds of topics to choose from.
Let’s look at a more serious example. Take the pork taboo. Lots of people speculate why both Jews and Muslims have a pork taboo. People have puzzled over this idea for centuries. This isn’t just limited to Jews or Muslims either. Why do some cultures say that certain foods are clean, and others are dirty? There are entire lists of foods that people eat in one location in the world, but gag just thinking about them in another.
(Note: If you want to read a whole book on this topic and you are an anthropology nerd, consider Mary Douglas’s award winning 1966 book Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo)
But why pork? Well, if you ask a Jew or a Muslim, the answer you’ll likely get is that pigs are filthy animals. They are living garbage disposals and love to live in their own shit and piss and eat whatever you put in front of them. Why, they ask, would you eat such a creature as this?
The reality though, is that pigs are not like this out in the wild. In fact, when I was doing research in a rural village in Mexico in the northern state of Nueve Leon back in 2008, the pigs they had in those villages were far from disgusting or dirty. They grazed in fields alongside the other animals and ate similar things. They didn’t live in mud, they lived alongside all the other animals. So the filthy ‘nature’ of the pig that is the central complaint of the taboo is something artificially created by human action, not nature. Often cultures and people will come up with logical explanations for their taboos to justify their practices.
That doesn’t mean we should disrespect our Jewish or Muslim friends by forcing pork on them. Every culture has things it forbids that defy rationality or reason. We all have superstitions and traditions that aren’t based on evidence. The point here is not to judge, but to understand how this works to better assist you in building fictional worlds.
One possible explanation for the pork taboo is schismogenesis. In the ancient world, there was a period for the Jewish people known as the Babylonian Captivity or the Babylonian Exile. Many Jews were forced to live under the control of the Babylonian empire after the Babylonians conquered the Kingdom of Judah beginning first around 598 BCE. The Babylonians captured and enslaved many of the Jewish people.
There were two large staples of the Babylonian diet that both became taboo under the Kashrut, the dietary restrictions of the Jewish people. The first was pork, and the second was horse. Both foods were common in Babylon at the time. The enslaved Jews did not consume this food previously. Thus, as their enslavement continued, they ate foods similar to that of their homeland, and not of those who enslaved them. This certainly contributed in at least some way to the prohibition, though it may not have been the only cause.
But here we see, at least in part, schismogenesis in action. The Jews, under the yoke of an oppressor, didn’t want to partake in the food of those who had enslaved them, hence, their identity surrounding their food taboo. Several generations lived under these conditions, then, when the Persians conquered the Babylonians and allowed Jews to return to Palestine, many of those ideas circulated into the wider culture. Food is common as an important identity marker in many cultures, this is especially true in populations that have been historically oppressed.
Now again, there are many debates on the pork taboo, and this is only one possible explanation. In fact, most cultural taboos and restrictions can come from several causes at once. But, schismogenesis is useful because it helps clear up confusion in a culture. If the enemy other is doing something, and you don’t want to be like the enemy, then you can avoid doing that thing. This solidifies who you are as a culture and with it, identity. In our case, it helps create more complex fictional characters.
Here are few things to consider if you want to employ the concept of schismogenesis in your fictional world.
1. What are the core values of each of the fictional cultures you are building?
If you’re setting up a world where multiple major cultures will fight for control, then the first place to begin is where their core values lie.
– What kinds of things are important to your culture?
– What taboos do they have?
– What things to they exaggerate or emphasize about their adversaries?
– What qualities do they wish to cultivate in individuals on an ideal level?
If you take these things and sketch out what each culture is doing in these worlds, you will have a good place to see potential conflict between the different ideas of morality and/or taboo in the cultures.
This is especially true if you have a culture that has been conquered by another. Acts of rebellion don’t end at violence or protest. They can manifest in everyday experiences. In fact, when you stress a culture out, there is always a core group of people who will try to preserve important elements of their culture, hence, the rise of fundamentalists. They want to go back to the way things were before the changes came. It doesn’t matter that you can never truly return to the way things were, people want that old sense of safety and security of their cultural norms.
This is why we see groups like the Amish, whose very existence is in opposition to the changes wrought by modern technology. I grew up in part on the east coast, and not far outside of Philadelphia, it was common to see the Amish on the road in their horse and buggy, slowing down traffic. The way they choose to live is a form of schismogenesis. It might not feel subversive to us to live in that way, but to them, it is.
Which brings me to another point. Cultures aren’t homogeneous. There are all kinds of diverse approaches and ways to live within cultures. Be sure to consider that as you highlight the values and taboos of the larger culture above. You will want some wiggle room for resistance, for factionalism, even as larger conflicts between nations are happening. People disagree on pretty much everything, and sometimes that disagreement is a huge part of their identity.
2. The minor differences matter
Yes, your cultures will argue over the big stuff. But the minor differences matter too. Every culture has a different protocol for body language, for dress, for the kinds of sounds and colors they like and dislike, and so on. Every little thing you do comes from making comparisons against others. While we focus on the things we like and enjoy, we often spend even more time on the things we don’t like or find disgusting as ways of acknowledging who we are.
Small things like how a culture eats can mark identity. Much of Europe didn’t adopt forks until the 17th or 18th century (depending on what region) because they were considered either unmanly or excessive. Just imagine, someone, at some point, was complaining about how feminine it was to use a fork. Yes, that really happened. Someone else decided to use a fork anyway, probably a teenager.
Even generations within cultures employ schismogenesis. Think about what different generations say about each other. I’m a millennial and hear constant complaints from older generations about us. I’m almost forty now, so obviously millennials aren’t that young anymore. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of complaints among my fellow millennials about Zoomers already. We make constant comparisons about all the little things we do differently.
You don’t have to pick big things for schismogenesis, in fact, sometimes a lot of little things add up to create stark differences. Remember, as I’ve said repeatedly in these entries, and in my book Build Better Worlds, culture is a performance. It’s a way of enacting practices to mark who you are and what you value. That isn’t just the big stuff, it’s all the little things too.
3. Living within a cultural script
Every culture has a kind of script, a set of rules to live by that are both formal (laws) or informal (norms). Some cultures (like our own) make the concepts of choice and freedom paramount to their core values. But if you step outside the bounds of their norms, there are still all kinds of ways you can be disenfranchised. Think of the debates surrounding the right way to be a man in our own society. Forks and pink bikinis aside, these discussions aren’t about objective truth.
In fact, the irony of this discussion is that if choice and freedom were truly at the center of the debate, there wouldn’t be arguments about what makes a “real man”. Men would just go out and do whatever they wanted and that would be manly. These same scripts that proscribe masculinity limit agency (freedom of movement within a culture). There’s no freedom by living up to the expectations of a cultural script, but there is a sense of unity, an imagined comradery. (Note: See Benedict Anderson’s 1990 book Imagined Communities for the Anthropology Nerds out there) Though we may never meet most other Americans, there are certain behaviors and identity markers that are expected to establish a sense of unity across the culture.
This isn’t about good or bad, this is what cultures do. How a culture maintains itself, or how it changes, is an endless conversation taking form in every arena of every culture. These masculine norms aren’t about freedom, it is about expectations, about clearing up confusion to make identifying what is male and what is female in clear terms. Humans in general like things simple. Unfortunately, very little about humans is simple. We might idealize certain behaviors or how many genders we think we are, but of course, certain behaviors that are beneficial and unifying to one group will naturally be oppressive and divisive for another. This is exactly why, opposition can be a core part of identity.
With all that in mind, take a moment to consider, what kind of cultural scripts are used in your fictional world. There are certainly trends among humans. Male domination, though not universal, is common in the modern world. There are still matriarchies out there, but they are few and far between because of the larger patterns of empire and conquest.
– Different political systems, like the matriarchy mentioned above, would have different scripts
– Different economic systems, like a gift economy, or a system that uses potlatching, would have different scripts about what wealth and power look like
– Different religions, for example, one without deities, are going to focus on different scripts.
– Remember that culture is holistic, that every part of culture connects into every other part of culture, the scripts about behavior and identity will mirror all these elements put together
4. Enforcing identity and Solidifying Resistance
In order for a cultural script to be useful, it has to be enforced. In some societies, there are laws about how people dress. They enforce what activities different groups can participate in, how they should appear in public, and so on. In addition to these formal laws, or in a situation where there isn’t written law, rumors and gossip act as a kind of social surveillance to enforce expected behavior. Gossip is likely the oldest form of surveillance and uses shame and guilt as a weapon against anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into cultural scripts. If that sounds like high school, you’re not wrong. Humans have been doing this to each other since we were… well, humans.
Remember, these scripts are also created in part because a culture doesn’t want to behave like the other. They want to mark themselves as distinct and different. They don’t want to engage in the behaviors of the enemy other, dress like the enemy, eat like the enemy, or even talk like the enemy. Groups that are focused on differences will often advocate for exclusionary rules or policies that limit the kinds of diversity possible. They will shame and embarrass those who don’t fit in the mold. Often, they have a fear that this other, this adversary, will creep in and take their culture away from them by changing things or forcing them to change.
We even do this on a large scale. The 1978 book, Orientalism, by Edwards Said, highlights the perceptions of Europe and its false dichotomy of the Eastern world vs Western world. The book is an attempt to critique our stereotypes of the Eastern world, and how empire, colonialism, and bias played a role in our understanding of world history and cultural analysis.
According to Said, men of the Orient were portrayed as culturally backward, physically weak, and feminine. This reinforced the ideas of Western masculinity. Of course, perceptions of the men of the Orient were just stereotypes. And nothing robs people of their freedom quite like a stereotype. Raj from The Big Bang Theory, and Fez from That 70s Show, are stereotypical examples of Orientalism in action. Both the characters struggle to understand Western culture and are awkward. Both characters spend a lot more time with the women of the group and struggle to relate to the men in the same way. Both characters are mocked for their physical weakness.
Cultures will often create assumed cultural scripts for their enemy. We know these scripts as stereotypes. We expect the enemy to fit only within these boxes, and are often surprised when they don’t. This is not a product of only one culture, all cultures do this. We use our norms and rules to compare ourselves to the cultures we don’t like because they are a direct enemy, or because we consider them less civilized. But it works in a paternal dimension too. Paternalism in this case is the notion that we are more rational or advanced and must help civilize the “savage”.
What are the benefits of using Schismogenesis in fiction?
Employing schismogenesis creates all kinds of fertile ground for storytelling. There will be characters who highlight the differences between each group and hold conservative views about the way things have always been. There will be characters who think that some of these arbitrary things are well… arbitrary. They will accuse the conservatives of living in the past and highlight the ways that the past was ugly. These are the progressives of your society. They often advocate against these kinds of differences. However, they will also employ schismogenesis against those who they disagree with too, often the conservatives of their culture.
Just because you are liberal or progressive doesn’t mean you’re free of bias. No one is free of bias and oversimplistic thinking. We all generalize the people we disagree with. I catch myself doing it all the time. After all, it’s much easier to disagree with someone if you take away the nuance and complexity of their argument and create strawmen that are easy to knock down. We all have things we are bias about and we even know that some of them are arbitrary. Your characters absolutely should too.
There’s a third group in a mix, the ones who stand in the middle. These bicultural individuals (they can certainly have more than two cultural backgrounds) don’t have a specific set of rules or scripts to follow for their identity or they have more than one. Individuals like this are born in the middle of multiple scripts, being forced to discern how to move through the world. They could be mixed ethnicities and thus get culture from each parent, or perhaps they are an immigrant or refugee born in one culture, but now living in another. Every person who stands in the middle will take unique positions on different aspects of their identity and culture. Immigrants should be just as diverse and complex in their approach to the world as characters who are monocultural. Some immigrants may take on the dominant norms as an act of rebellion to their parents. Others may take on the traditions of their homeland to resist assimilation. Schismogenesis in the real world creates all kinds of diverse identities and experiences and in fiction, richer characters, backstories, and worldbuilding.
Consider:
– How do your characters compare themselves to other cultures and individuals?
– Why do they make that comparison? Are they jealous? Are they fascinated? Is the grass greener? Is the other more barbaric?
– Do they see some good things and some bad things about the other?
– What generation are they a part of? Are there changes in technology for that culture or maybe some new cultural practice or experience has arrived?
– Has contact with another culture happened recently?
– Has there been a change in the political or economic structure?
Some Final Thoughts
Norms change. We don’t consider forks unmanly anymore. Though I guess the jury is still out on men in pink bikinis. Every generation gains new ideas, and loses some old ones. Maybe in the era of social media things are changing faster than before, but we need a much longer view, in terms of decades, to really understand what social media is doing to us. Sometimes, changes that appear bad in the beginning create really interesting changes in the long term.
In building your world you could start out with one group of norms and rules for a society and then change the power dynamics of the situation to suddenly force those norms out. Brandon Sanderson does this masterfully in the Stormlight archives. At the beginning of the series, having light-colored eyes automatically means you are a person of rank and privilege. Being a poor light eyes is far better than being a wealthy dark eyes. Light eyes or dark, both groups have their own internal hierarchies as well. But, as the series goes on, and the return of old magic changes the colors of some people’s eyes, the power dynamic of eye color changes, and many of the characters are forced to confront the arbitrary nature of the light eye, dark eye, dichotomy, each in their own way.
The best stories are ones that show truth. The truth about most of what we do as humans is that it’s arbitrary. We have certain standards and taboos that do serve purposes. Some help protect people from harm in both short-term and long-term situations. Eating garbage or marrying your sibling are not wise moves and thus those taboos are useful.
However, many things we hold as important are really just cultural preferences. Loving your culture isn’t wrong. It’s just that these things don’t have any root in objective truth. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have value. There are many beautiful traditions the world over that some consider strange, while others find unity and comfort in them.
It’s all complicated. Wonderfully complicated. I think too often we look at complexity and throw up our arms and say, it’s too much effort to understand. But I think it’s better to be curious. But then, that is why I became an Anthropologist.
Writing honestly means to look at the world and understanding it for what it is. The world you create in fiction, is a reflection of who you are. Sometimes that means to create the best worlds, we have to step outside of what’s comfortable or easy. Good worldbuilding means you need to understand the cultures you’re creating. You need to hold what they see as sacred in your mind. Immerse yourself in their worlds. Live through your characters and embrace the wonderful complexity of the world you’re creating. Maybe try a little schismogenesis on for size.
A few weeks ago, my co-author Kyra Wellstrom and I recorded an episode with Indie Book Talk. The podcast episode was a lot of fun. We talked about worldbuilding, anthropology, and writing more generally. The episode is on the shorter side (only 24 minutes) so it’s a great discussion of the lot of the things we do in a quick and interesting episode. The episode came out this morning!
Why Your Narrative Design Team Needs an Anthropologist
By Michael Kilman, M.S. Applied Anthropology
I’m an avid gamer and science fiction author. I’m also an anthropologist with over a decade of teaching, fieldwork, and consulting experience. So for me, worldbuilding is everything. A bad worldbuild kills my immersion immediately. And as audiences grow more sophisticated, I hear this more and more from gamers, readers, and filmmakers too.
Which raises a question: why do so many fictional worlds still feel hollow?
Part of the answer is that most narrative design teams are missing a specific skill set, someone trained to see culture as a living, integrated system. Characters across games aren’t just copies of western identity, there are distinct ways of knowing the world that don’t always translate easily across culture. That’s missing skill set is anthropology.
Below are six reasons why bringing anthropological thinking into your narrative design process can transform the worlds you build.
1. Holism: Everything Is Connected
One of anthropology’s foundational concepts is holism. It’s the idea that culture is an integrated system. If you change one facet of culture, you change everything. Think of chaos theory’s butterfly effect: small shifts ripple outward in unexpected ways.
Applied to worldbuilding, this means your fictional economic system, your family structures, your political arrangements, your religion, your ethnic identities, your people’s relationship to death, their biology, their environment, all of these are deeply interrelated. They shape systems of power, freedom, and oppression. When you’re building a fictional world, a holistic framework helps you understand how those relationships create meaning, consequence, and true complexity.
Anthropologists are trained to hold this complexity. We work at the intersection of biology, environment, social structure, language, and culture. This big-picture thinking is exactly what most narrative design processes are missing.
2. More Immersive and Realistic Cause-and-Effect
Creating a believable fictional world means thinking carefully about the causes and consequences of every major action. This isn’t just true for individual characters, but the culture as a whole. The most compelling games and narratives are often the ones that let player choices ripple outward in culturally coherent ways.
Imagine if your protagonist made an alliance early in a game with a faction. This alliance created real, culture-wide changes throughout the narrative. This isn’t just a change in character relationships, I’m talking about changing the religion, economics, political system, or maybe even language of your world later in the game. That’s where anthropology comes in. Anthropologists have more than a century of research on how cultural change actually works and how it manifests across cultures and generations.
When I’ve consulted on these kinds of questions, including with a major tech firm on post-pandemic cultural shifts, we’ve drawn on real historical examples. The 1918 flu pandemic, for instance, fundamentally shifted American standards of beauty. It made sunbathing fashionable, and altered building architecture toward open spaces and natural light. That’s the kind of layered, counterintuitive thinking that makes fictional worlds feel real.
3. Anthropologists Are Intercultural Communicators
Our job isn’t just to study cultures, it’s to help different cultures and subcultures understand one another. We are a kind of intercultural mediator. That’s why tech companies hire UX and Design Anthropologists, and why I’ve worked with clients ranging from Native American tribal governments to Samsung UK on cross-cultural research questions.
Intercultural communication is a fundamental part of narrative design. If your world has diverse factions, ethnic groups, or political coalitions, an anthropologist can help you think through how those groups would actually perceive and misread each other. In fieldwork you learn quickly that even the most positive, and well intentioned changes you might make to a community meets resistance. That’s because, no matter how benevolent the change, someone will always lose and in ways you may never expect. Building that friction into your narrative design is what makes a world feel inhabited rather than constructed.
4. Diversity Is a Craft Skill, Not Just a Political Position
There’s a lot of conversation right now about representation and diversity in games and media. Culture wars are near constant in the social media sphere. But here’s the thing, lack of diversity isn’t just ethically problematic, it’s bad storytelling. The world is complex. Fictional worlds that flatten that complexity feel wooden and vacant.
The challenge is that writing cultures unfamiliar to you requires more than good intentions. True inclusion requires research, consultation, and ideally collaboration. Anthropologists can help mediate that process. We’re trained to identify the blind spots in our own cultural assumptions.
Have you ever considered what you think of specific accents? Why do you think that? Where do your opinions on different kinds of accents come from? These biases don’t just come from personal experiences, they’re formed over time, and through history and conflict.
Anthropologists have also spent decades thinking about analogs and representations. If your fictional culture is standing in for a real one, you need to know what you’re doing. An anthropologist who has worked directly with those communities are ideal, they can help you navigate your own assumptions and open up your fictional world in a way you never considered before, a way that makes your story vastly more interesting and immersive.
5. The World Is Full of Untapped Source Material
Every culture is a dreamscape, a world made through symbols and imagination. One of the biggest missed opportunities in speculative fiction is that it only draws on a tiny sliver of possibility. The same alien invasion stories, the same European medieval settings, the same recycled mythologies, and gods, and political archetypes, and economic systems appear over and over. To be fair, it’s not that these traditions aren’t rich and wonderful on their own, it’s just that they’ve become predictable and stale, a singular worldview that no longer makes us question our own thinking with wonder. They just don’t stand out anymore.
The world contains thousands of distinct cultural traditions, belief systems, governance structures, and cosmologies that most Western narrative designers have never even thought about. I made this exact argument in my TEDx talk, because, what we imagine matters.
Consider the game Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa), made by and for Iñupiaq people, featuring the indigenous language and unlockable interviews with Iñupiaq elders. That game didn’t just tell a unique story, it expanded the possibilities of what games can do. It’s beautiful, and complex, and driven by the culture it comes from. There’s nothing else out there quite like it. It stands out because it offers another way of knowing/being in the world.
6. Anthropology Is a Toolkit, Not Just a Perspective
Everything I’ve described above isn’t abstract, it’s practical and in the era of AI, more necessary than ever. AI is capable of generating an incredible amount of mediocre and predicable media. Anthropology is an edge in worldbuilding and storytelling. It gives you concrete tools: frameworks for analyzing kinship and power, models for understanding how religion and economics interact, methods for identifying the cultural logic behind social norms that seem arbitrary.
On my YouTube channel I also host live Worldbuilding Q&As every month called, “Ask an Anthropologist.” I also bring on special guests. There you can also find my social science explainer series, Anthropology in 10 or Less, and soon my new series launching this spring, Anthropology Through Science Fiction. I’ve been translating these same ideas into free, accessible content for creators. And in my worldbuilding consulting practice, I bring this toolkit directly to projects.
Ready to Build a Better World?
I’ve spent 11 years teaching anthropology at the university level, published research on how worldbuilding works as a pedagogical tool, and consulted for clients ranging from indie fiction writers to major tech firms. My fiction, including the dystopian sci-fi Chronicles of the Great Migration series and my dark fantasy novel Shades & Shapes in the Dark are built on the same anthropological foundations I’m describing here.
If you or your team is serious about creating fictional cultures that feel authentic and immersive, I’d love to talk.
Or explore free worldbuilding resources, essays, and video content at loridianslaboratory.com.
Michael Kilman holds an M.S. in Applied Anthropology (focus: Media) from Portland State University. He is the author of the Chronicles of the Great Migration series, Shades & Shapes in the Dark, and Build Better Worlds. He is also known for his TEDx talk “Anthropology, Our Imagination, and How to Understand Difference.”
My Co-Author, Kyra Wellstrom and I had the great privilege of being asked on one of the coolest podcasts (well, for anthropologists anyway haha) around. This last summer we recorded a discussion with This Anthro Life. The episode is about worldbuilding and nerd culture.
This past weekend I had the good fortune of moderating two panels at Denver Fan Expo 2021. The whole event was fantastic with lots of amazing costumes, artist’s and authors.
With permission from each panelist, I recorded the discussions so that you can enjoy them here. Panelists are in order of introduction.
Below you will also find links to each of the panelists work. Definitely check out there websites by clicking on their names.
Looking at Myth, Religion, and Folklore in a New Light
Good morning everyone, Today, Kyra Wellstrom and I go live to read a sample chapter from our worldbuilding book and answer worldbuilding questions on YouTube at 11am MST. You can find the stream at https://youtu.be/QS3Yse-rv3g
The discussion will be recorded so if you miss it don’t fret! You will be able to find it at the same link. But if you can come live, we’d love to field your questions about worldbuilding and anthropology.
Monsters, Aliens, and Evil Androids an Exploration of Fear and Anxiety
What is a monster?
It has been stated by numerous philosophers and ethnographers that monsters are simply the embodiment of cultural fears; our anxieties made flesh and blood. We see these reflections and patterns across cultures and over again and for good reason. The monsters a culture believes in often shed light on the things they fear most, and monsters that emigrate to new cultures often change their form in their new surroundings. Monsters represent a fascinating blend of the familiar and the foreign; easily recognized but alien enough to terrify. Many monsters possess elements of humanity and exemplify the very worst elements of culture as a form of hyperbole. Their faces are what changes most easily. It is the bones, the marrow of the spirit of what a monster is, and the fears that they embody, that reflect the heart of what it means to be human.
Like our anxieties about death, monsters often follow patterns that reflect our collective fears as a species. Just like we see in every horror movie, monsters attack in lonely places, in the dark, and in our sleep. They reflect the anxieties we have about our natural environment and they come from the water or caves or the night sky. Demons and spirits come for us when we are weakened by illness, childbirth, or impending death. They target the isolated, the frail, and the young. They can often appear human to gain our trust, only to reveal their true forms when it’s too late to escape them. They can lure or entrap us through promises of food, or comfort, or money; playing upon our moral weakness and greed.
Think of how often a monster’s teeth are discussed. Monsters often feed off humans, either in a spiritual or a literal sense. Vampires suck blood, zombies eat brains, dragons and sea monsters devour virgins. Even in modern monster movies, monsters nearly always eat defenseless humans. Giant animals like sharks or snakes, aliens that feed us to their young, or giant kaiju that eat us like popcorn. They are discussed with terms like “fangs”, “razor-sharp teeth”, “drooling”, “sucking”, and “crunching”. Hell, even killer clowns from outer space cocoon us for later consumption.
When you consider our species, these fears appear logical. Imagine early humans, alone on the African plains, surrounded by frightening animals that lurked around every corner. These monsters were very much real, but this did nothing to lessen their terrors. We were small, between three and four feet tall, we had terrible night vision and no claws or fangs to help defend us. We were prey to birds and leopards that could drop from above. Snakes grabbed us from holes in the ground and lashed out with sharp poisonous fangs. Lions and hyenas slunk through the darkness just beyond the edge of vision, shadows out of the corner of our eyes, and crocodiles and hippos lurked in rivers and lakes making people disappear beneath the surface. Our only protection from the creatures that wanted to consume us lay in the light of day and our campfires, in our culture and its defenses, and in each other. The darkness, the water, and isolation became a natural reservoir for our terror.
Modern monsters
Most of the world now lives apart from these real monsters. The megafauna that hunted us like any other prey are gone and the remaining large predators are dwindling in number and range. The vast majority of humanity has nothing to fear from large beasts. However, our fears remain. A tremendous number of monsters are described as being “prehistoric” or pre large scale human civilization.. We find these descriptions from as far back as we have writing. Many monsters that haunt religions are described as being from the time before their deities created peace and order in the world or before the world was civilized. Writers of weird fiction and cosmic horror like H.P. Lovecraft write of “antediluvian terrors” and “prehistoric nightmares”. It’s as though we as a species have some lingering genetic terror of the time when we were small and vulnerable. Coupled with our gifts as a species to spin tales and exaggerate for the purpose of entertainment, many of these creatures became larger than life when they filled our nightmares.
Many monsters also reflect the fears we still face in the modern world, despite our cultural advances in the last 3 million years. We can still all too easily be carried off by disease or poison, by other people, or, worst of all, by unknown causes. These very real and very human fears are interpreted through a cultural lens. Numerous cultures speak of spirits that will steal a woman’s life away during childbirth if attracted by her cries. This is particularly common in foraging cultures where the margins for survival are slim and medical care is an at-home affair. Cultures with a focus on purity (Catholicism and Malaysia are good examples of this) have demons that possess the body and cause their vessel to break the laws of the society, causing bouts of violence, sin, and general bad behavior. Industrialized nations tend to have human monsters, serial killers, zombies, or criminals, that reflect the unease we feel when surrounded by strangers, as well as anxiety about dark crowded spaces.
To die, to sleep…
Sleep is one of the reservoirs of fear for humans. Sleep makes us vulnerable as we lay unawares in darkness for hours on end. Sleep also exposes us to the world of dreams, which are as likely to be horrifying as they are to be pleasant. Many cultures have tales of beings that can drain the life from a person while they sleep, often while the person is awake but trapped in a horrifying state of sleep paralysis. People’s sleep paralysis nightmares almost always follow patterns; in the US, sleep paralysis monsters have passed through different phases. In the 1990s, when the cultural zeitgeist had become fascinated with aliens, sufferers often reported little gray men with giant eyes performing tests on them. In the early 2000s, when there was a spate of demon-child films, people began to report nightmarish children crawling on to their beds as they slept. Suffers from southeast Asia tell stories of a horrible old hag with white skin who sits on their chest and slowly chokes the life out of the sleeping person while they lie awake and unable to move or cry out.
This monster, the dab tsog in the Hmong language, became widely known in the 1970s and 80s when there was a rash of deaths attributed to it in the United States and Thailand. More than 100 Hmong refugees in the U.S., almost exclusively men in their 30s, died in their sleep from unknown causes. Some men reported nightmares about the dab tsog at the time. Men became terrified of sleep and would try desperately to stay awake. The story so intrigued director Wes Craven that he went on to write A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984. Instead of the white-skinned hag, however, Craven changed the face of the monster to that of a disfigured homeless man who had chased him as a child and changed him from an evil spirit to the ghost of a murderer.
Stories of night hags may be so common in southeast Asia because of a very real genetic condition. Brugada syndrome causes electrical abnormalities in the heart that can lead to Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome (SUNDS)[1]. This syndrome is found most commonly in Southeast Asia, particularly Laos and Thailand, and predominantly affects men, with most deaths occurring between 30 and 40 years of age. A monster that kills men in their sleep is a much more palatable explanation, especially before the era of electrocardiograms, and no explanation at all. A night hag may be terrifying, but not nearly so terrifying as the unknown.
Sometimes monsters are used to explain myriad, nebulous fears; things we could hardly put into words. The wendigo is a perfect example of this. Territorially, the wendigo is one of the most widespread monsters in the world; it’s spoken of in the mythology of a collective of First Nations groups all across subarctic Canada, stretching from the Rockies to the Atlantic coast and down into the northern United States[2]. While there are slight variations in the story between the various groups, the stories all agree on the main features of the monster. The wendigo is a fascinating monster because it is a curious mix of a physical creature, a possessing spirit, and a culture bound syndrome (see chapter 10). The physical body of the wendigo is towering and lanky, with enormous clawed hind feet and paw-like hands. Its breath starts off howling, icy winds that blow with such force that they can blow down trees and even start tornados. Its heart, and sometimes its other organs too, are made of solid ice. Its most distinctive feature is its insatiable desire for human flesh; so strong that it eats off its own lips in its hunger, baring its pointed teeth.
Wendigos were once human. Once the wendigo gets hold of you it changes you into a monster like itself. This is where the wendigo begins to shift its mythological form. I can get hold of you in a number of ways: through dreams, visions, possession, physical force, or even through your own thoughts. If it catches you physically, it does so while you’re out hunting. Those who venture off into the forests in winter and never return are thought to have been taken by the creature. It captures you and transforms you into a monster like itself. If it catches you though your thoughts or dreams, it has worked its way into your head through your hunger and cold. When a person dreams of a wendigo, they begin to have cannibalistic desires towards their own family. Most cultures believe that a person in the early stages of wendigo madness can be stopped and cured, although often the cures are horrifying enough, but if the person actually consumes any part of another human being, they are done for. There’s no hope for a person who has gone wendigo and the only course of action is to kill them for the safety of the group. There are numerous recorded cases of wendigo killings in tribal and legal records throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. The diagnosis of “wendigo madness” is found in psychological papers throughout this time as well as a way to explain a temporary psychosis with a focus on cannibalism.
Look at the main features of the wendigo story: a monster of cold that lives in the wild spaces and feeds off hunger. It drives people to cannibalize their family and turns them into cold-hearted monsters. It will ultimately separate you forever from the people and civilization you love and strip you of your humanity, leaving you to wander alone in the freezing wilderness. These fears are easy enough to imagine in subarctic Canada, where temperatures that go well below freezing and isolation caused by snow and weather can lead to starvation and madness over the long winters. It’s the same set of vague fears that drive Stephen King’s The Shining or John W. Campbell Jr.s Who Goes There?. The wendigo is a single, corporeal manifestation of these fears. It groups them all into one grotesque form and gives them shape.
Fears of domination, experimentation, and colonization
In the pantheon of monsters, aliens are relatively new. In some ways, they are just a new face on the same stories people have been telling for millennia. Space, after all, is just a combination of those things we fear. It’s cold, dark, isolated, far older than our little planet, and almost completely unexplored. Aliens are often just monsters from this final frontier rather than our own backyard. Many aliens fit the mold of grotesque, slobbering, man-eaters, or shape-shifting deceivers. Even stories of alien abductions, lost time, and mysterious lights are nearly identical to stories that people have been telling for centuries about fairies, will-o-the-wisps, and the little people of the hills, all of which can lead you away and trap you in another world.
But aliens can embody fears that other monsters cannot. These fears, like all others, are reflections of the time and culture in which people live. Aliens as colonizers, as invaders, and as dispassionate scientists are all reflections of the fears that stalk people in the industrial age. H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (1895-97) was written after the author and his brother discussed the terrible disaster the Tasmanians suffered after their invasion by the British[3]. Wells was musing about what would happen if someone did to the British what they had done to the Tasmanians. In fact, there were many “invasion” stories written at that time, although Wells was the only one to use aliens as his aggressors. Britons were worried that their military might was waning and the increasing armament of Germany and France stoked anxieties that the British would face the same treatment they had given their colonies.
Throughout the Cold War, science fiction featured alien invaders, either working secretly or in open displays of aggression, trying to take over the Western World. Endless troupes of aliens landing on the White House lawn fill the fiction of the 1950s and 60s. Change “aliens” to “Russians” and you have a nearly exact mirror of what Americans feared happening at the time. Many aliens are often a gestalt consciousness, a shared mind, or can manifest as a kind of extreme conformity and the end of the individual as seen in the famous Star Trek villains, The Borg. We can also look at the protagonists in these films and see the kinds of qualities they embody and how they reflect the morals and values of our society like a modern myth or morality play.
Many science fiction stories from that time also reveal an uneasiness about the level of violence and aggression the world was experiencing. In the 1950s the 20th century was only half over and had already seen two world wars, half a dozen genocides, and the invention of weapons that could unleash destruction on a level we had never dreamt of. Many films in the 1940s and 50’s, perhaps most recognizably exemplified by The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), feature aliens as advanced beings, capable of great destruction but also of nearly miraculous feats of science and medicine, who come to Earth to warn us away from a path of violence. Klaatu, the alien emissary, warns all of Earth’s leaders that “Your choice is simple: join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration.” People around the world, after decades of violence, nationalism, and xenophobia, were afraid. They feared that the ever-mounting aggression would eventually lead to a conflict that no nation could win.
“I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen…”
The famous words of HAL 9000, the evil artificial intelligence that coldly murders it’s crew in the sci-fi book and film 2001, demonstrate another one of our fears made manifest, our fear of the dangers of technology.
On August 6th, 1945 the world entered a new age, an atomic age. After the first atomic bomb was used on a population in Hiroshima, our relationship with technology changed forever, and with it, came the rise of a new kind of monster, one of our own making. To be sure, humans have always had anxieties about new technology, and with the industrial revolution came literature about automatons (what we now call robots) and other technological wonders that sometimes turned against their masters. One of the earliest examples of modern science fiction, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, explored the potential and dangers, as well as the deep philosophical questions surrounding electricity. Shelly set off a wave of stories, that even to this day still discuss the idea of our technological creations getting the best of us.
As Anthropologist Willie Lempert explains in his article, Navajo’s on Mars [4] humans have developed countless films, like The Matrix, 2001, and Terminator, to highlight our fear of technology. Even the new Star Trek Series: Picard features a plotline surrounding evil ‘synths’ and questions about the humanity of artificial intelligence and it’s compatibility with organic life. Part of this has to do with our religious worldview, the idea that in most of western European based culture, there is only one kind of intelligence, humans. As we talked about in the religion chapter, other cultures have multiple kinds of intelligence. Further, our fear of AI may stem from the idea that only the Judeo/Christian God has the true power of creation. Ultimately though, fear of AI stems from the fear of what we do, to what we consider to be inferior species.
As we entered the 1980s and 90s, aliens changed slightly. No longer were they brazen colonists landing on our shores, they were shadowy and subversive, often entwined with the murkier branches of government. Aliens and the government branches that studied them would abduct people and experiment on them. They would implant people with tracking devices, create alien/human hybrids, and mutilate cattle in their ruthless quest for data. They were cold, unfeeling scientists that existed outside of human empathy or compassion. The declassification of wartime documents about Nazi scientists, exposure of government experiments like MK-Ultra, and a number of dubious psychological research projects like the Stanford Prison Experiment were increasingly making people uneasy about science and scientists. The perpetrators of the experiments seemed, to regular people, just like the inhuman aliens from another planet. Add this to a growing dissatisfaction with the government nearly everywhere in the world and the X-Files style alien/government conspiracy became not just a popular element in fiction, but also an integral part of the mythology of the time period.
When you are creating memorable monsters or antagonists in your world, it’s important to consider the core values of your fictional culture. Remember the chapter on Imagined Past, Myth and Cultural Purity? The core lessons of that chapter are essential to creating a creature that challenges the core values of your characters, and readers, world view.
Chapter Exercises
Things to consider when creating monstrous beings in your world:
– What are the most significant fears and anxieties of the culture?
What are some memorable features of your creature? What keeps people up at night?
How does your creature tie into the myth structure of your world? Sense of purity?
Is your monster/creature sentient? How are it’s goals similar or different to your main character?
What arenas of your culture does the monster most impact?
What’s at stake if your protagonist fails to subdue the creature?
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