New Worlds, Year Four

Marie Brennan

Description

Bathing and banking, animals and adultery: human culture contains a truly daunting array of elements. The fourth volume of the NEW WORLDS series takes readers on a tour of all-new topics, delving into everything from childbirth to dream interpretation to the importance of generosity, as award-winning fantasy author and former anthropologist Marie Brennan continues her in-depth exploration of worldbuilding in science fiction and fantasy.This volume collects essays from the fourth year of the New Worlds Patreon.

Sujets

• Anthropology

Informations

• Publié par: Book View Cafe
• Date de parution: 20 avril 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781636320076
• Langue: English

Extrait

New Worlds, Year Four
More Essays on the Art of Worldbuilding
Marie Brennan

Published by Book View Café
www.bookviewcafe.com
ISBN: 978-1-63632-007-6
Copyright © 2021 by Marie Brennan
All Rights Reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
Cover art by romansl
Cover design by Pati Nagle
Table of Contents
Foreword
Legal Systems
In the Courtroom
Other Kinds of Trial
Evidence
Why Punishment
Lock ’Em Up
Corporal Punishment
Social punishments
Before (and After) Money
Debt
Taxation
Banking
A Good Host(ess)
Ring-Givers and Potlatch Chieftains
Public and Private Charity
Gift-Giving
Livestock
Working Animals
Fluffy and Fido and Friends
Let’s Go to the Zoo!
More Types of Marriage
After Death Do Us Part
A Bit on the Side
The Wrong Side of the Blanket
It’s That Time of the Month
Birth Control
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
Childbirth
The Art and Science of Diagnosis
Anatomy
Surgery
Prostheses and Assistive Devices
Cleanliness Is Next to Godliness
Skin Deep
The Hairs on Your Head
A Trip to the Dentist
Sleepytime
Sleeping Arrangements
Dreams
The Magic of Dreams
What Makes a God
Polytheism
Types of God
Syncretism
Sacred Holidays
Secular Holidays
How to Celebrate
Let’s Have a Parade!
Cultural Spheres
Marked and Unmarked Categories
Essentialism
Culture Contact
Afterword
About Marie Brennan
Other Books by Marie Brennan
About Book View Cafe
Foreword
With every year that passes, it becomes more and more apparent to me why I could never figure out how to write “a book about worldbuilding.” It’s a fractal topic. If you look at other books on worldbuilding, they’ll often have a chapter on (say) religion. I’ve now written something like a dozen essays on religion, totaling over ten thousand words—more, depending on where you put the boundaries, like whether marriage or mourning customs are included—and there’s more I haven’t yet addressed, which I’ll get to in due course. But even at that, there are whole layers of detail and nuance I don’t go anywhere near, layers where a single one of those thousand-word essays could itself be ten thousand words, or even a hundred thousand.
So one of the challenges of this series has always been figuring out the balance point between going so general that it amounts to useless platitudes, and going so specific as to be useless from the other direction. (Not to mention losing my readers and never, ever finishing.) This especially becomes true when I’m tackling the Big Things, the major institutions of society. I’ve been nibbling away at religion for a while, and Year Three saw me starting to tackle government; in this volume the big new undertaking is the law, ranging from trials to punishments. The baseline principles for such things rarely allow for the kind of tasty, culture-specific detail I thrive on…but at the same time, it can be very important to recognize what those principles are . That way you don’t wind up defaulting to something that isn’t as universal as you think, like the adversarial structure of a trial many of us know through American TV.
But it’s like the proverb about how you eat an elephant: one bite at a time . The bites contained in this volume range from law systems, trials, and punishment; to money, debt, and taxation; to hospitality and charity; to the role of animals in human society; to adultery, menstruation, childbirth, and surgery; to personal care and customs surrounding sleep; and to polytheism and holidays, before winding up with the usual “theory essays” that are one of the bonus goals of the New Worlds Patreon, made possible by my generous supporters. This year those theory pieces focus particularly on anthropological concepts of use to writers. As for the rest of the essays, as usual I’ve done my best to arrange them in the most logical order possible—but since the actual subjects I write about during the course of the year are voted on by my patrons, some changes of track are inevitable.
If you’d like to become one of those supporters, check out my Patreon page ! All patrons receive a weekly photo from my travels (themed to that essay whenever possible), and at higher tiers there are rewards like ebooks, access to the topic polls, and bonus essays that give you a look behind the page at the worldbuilding decisions I make for my own books. Many of those essays of late have focused on the Rook and Rose trilogy, the epic fantasy series I’m writing with my friend Alyc Helms under the name M.A. Carrick—a trilogy I sometimes fondly refer to as “When Anthropologists Attack.”
As usual, I owe my patrons a great debt of gratitude! The New Worlds Patreon has been going strong for four years, and without their support, none of these volumes would have been possible. Now let’s dive back in!
Legal Systems
(3/6/20)
Many of the largest topics in worldbuilding are difficult to address in anything like a detailed fashion because they spread their tentacles through many other parts of society. In the case of law, these tentacles branch in two very distinct directions at once: first in the direction of government, and second in the direction of policing and judicial matters. So although the top-level concepts of law are rarely going to matter in a science fiction or fantasy novel, it’s worth taking a moment to perch at the junction of these things and take a look at the basic principles at play.
To begin with, we might note that law can generally be divided into two extremely broad categories: public law and private law . (The latter is also sometimes called civil law , but since that term also gets employed to mean something else we’ll be talking about shortly, I’m going to attempt to avoid terminological confusion.) Public law concerns the interaction between individuals and the State—capitalized here to indicate that the entity in question might be anything from an empire down to the local city government—and includes things like administrative law or penal law, i.e. “crimes” in the technical rather than colloquial sense of that word. Private law, on the other hand, concerns the interaction between individuals, and involves matters such as contracts and torts.
(Before I get any further, I should note: by necessity, these essays will contain some major simplifications, lest I bog down in a level of detail that will almost never play into a story. Also, my terminology is mostly going to default to American usage, because I’m from the United States—but I’ll diverge from that where necessary for clarity. One of the great challenges in addressing this subject is the wild thicket of technical jargon, much of which varies from location to location, sometimes in outright contradictory fashion.)
Very few writers are going to bother drawing up a description of the legal systems of their worlds, but there are two reasons to remember that this aspect of society exists. The first is that it can provide multiple avenues of conflict within a story, which is especially useful when one of those gets blocked: remember that O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder in his criminal trial, but found “responsible” for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in the subsequent civil (private) trial. Second, not every society draws the line between public and private law in the same place. In the modern United States, murder is a crime, i.e. a public law violation, because the government has decided that killing a fellow human being is an offense against the State…but historically, some legal systems have considered that essentially an offense between citizens, and have only gotten the State involved when the victim was royal or an official or otherwise belonged to a particularly important group.
The other thing to be aware of is what is meant by a “legal system,” and what that means for how a society adjudicates violations of the law. These days nearly the entire world can be classed under one of two systems: common law or civil law (here not used in the sense of private law), with religious law forming a third, less widespread category. Of course, that tidy picture falls apart near-instantaneously because countries can and do hybridize the systems in various ways, and the finer points of what distinguish them can be difficult to see from the outside. We can, however, still take a moment to look them over.
In a civil law system, a judge presiding over a case looks first to the legal code: a book (or more commonly, a whole set of books) that lay out how disputes should be adjudicated. Unlike the infamous line from Pirates of the Caribbean , this code definitely consists of actual rules, not mere guidelines—but since the rules can’t possibly cover every possible specific scenario, there will be times when the judge has to interpret how they should be applied. To do this, they generally look to the opinions of legal scholars, who play a very large role in shaping how the law gets applied.
By contrast, a judge in a common law system will also consult the legal code first. When the application of that is ambiguous, though, instead of turning to the opinions of scholars, they will look at case law, a.k.a. judicial precedent: previous decisions made in comparable cases. How binding those decisions are is variable and dependent on circumstances far too complex for us to get into here, but the general takeaway is that judges play a more direct role in affecting how the law will be interpreted going forward.
A religious law system—which includes Jewish halakha , Islamic sharia , and (sort of) Christian canon law—more closely resembles civil law than common. It too draws on a set document, in this case a sacred one rather than legislative, and relies on the opinions of legal scholars to guide interpretation. The key difference here is that unlike a legal code, religious law is not often subject to amendment, expansion, or r