Culture is a communal system for living.
This is similar to our definition for religion, which you will recall we defined as "a communal system of right action and right belief transmitted from the gods." As with religion, culture is a communal system. It exists only in a community of people who have a shared understanding of life. It is transmitted along traditional lines from parent to child, adult to youth. Culture deals with life and living. It encompasses action, belief, and habit. It includes religion, economics, politics, ecology, language, ethnicity, and other areas. People may inherit culture, as with WASP or Puerto-Rican culture, or chose it, as with U.S. Marine Corps culture or the culture of a political party, or they may come to a culture by mixed choice and inheritance, as with religious cultures such as Islam or Christian fundamentalism.
In fact, culture and religion are tightly bound. Both influence how people act. To understand the cultural beliefs of a person we must understand their religious beliefs. The glue pulls both ways, if we would understand someone's religion we must also understand their culture.
The first part of culture that we need to understand is economics and patterns of subsistence. Patterns of subsistence are the ways in which people fend for themselves, the ways they find food, love, and living space. A peasant farmer fits one subsistence pattern, a fisher woman whose husband forages for nuts and roots in the woods fits another. Subsistence patterns can be divided into small-scale and large-scale patterns, and further into Foraging, Horticulture, Herding (all small scale), and Agriculture (large scale). City Dwellers are removed from the requirement to produce their own food, but they are nonetheless part of large-scale Agricultural societies.
For most of a million years we humans have survived as hunter-gatherers foraging for food. From the earliest years of humanity until five- or ten-thousand years ago we have picked food where it grew rather than cultivating it. Hunting and gathering requires less effort than cultivation of food. Even in the marginal territories that foragers inhabit today the work required to live consumes only about ten hours per week. Foraging has two serious disadvantages. The first disadvantage is that foraging does not support a dense population. Every year a foraging group travels along a circuit of fruitful areas, eating the food in one place and then moving to the next. This requires a lot of land that cannot be inhabited by other humans. The second disadvantage is that foraging does not allow people to easily build up stores of food, and droughts and famine can quickly destroy their communities. In good years foraging is a wonderful lifestyle, and legends of a lost Paradise or Garden of Eden may reflect mythic memories of primordial human life.
Some people today, concentrated in lands that are too barren for anyone else to want them, still live by hunting and gathering. Aborigines of the Australian Outback, some Amazonian tribes, some African tribes such as pygmies and Bushmen, Eskimo, and even some Native American tribes, still survive by means that humans have used for over a million years.
Typically when people talk about "hunter-gatherers" they mean walking foragers. They are talking about a Mesolithic lifestyle. Walking foragers travel on foot around a yearly circuit. One campsite will be convenient to lots of tubers and nuts, and is near a bee hive that they can raid for honey. Once the group finds and consumes the available food they pick up camp and travel to the next site. They find a part of the forest that attracts thousands of tasty grubs, and subsist on them for a while. Next in the circuit the group visits a watering hole as it fills up in spring, attracting all sorts of animals. Next they stop for a few days and eat the savory bulbs of a flower that has just started blooming. They also pick and eat a particularly tasty strain of mushrooms. Next they go on to their summer home, deep in the heart of the forest, and make camp there. There is plenty of game and foraging there. But as fall approaches it's time to move on once again. Each time they move they travel some distance ranging from only a few miles to more than fifty.
The average person in a foraging society spends from one to three hours per day actually gathering food, making shelter, and otherwise working. The rest of the time is free time, spent grooming, socializing, studying the natural world, the supernatural world, or preparing for battle.
Paleolithic foragers, who are more purely hunters, follow large herds of herbivores all over the place. They use bone, wood, and stone to make tools, such as scrapers, knives, axes, needles, spears, and hammers. They can inhabit many different climates, from equatorial Africa and South America to the furthest northern Latitudes. Since people followed this Paleolithic lifestyle through at least twenty Ice Ages we know that such groups can prosper in wide extremes of temperature and waterfall. From what we can tell most of them did not have permanent settlements, though they did have a concept of space and territory. One group might follow a herd of woolly mammoths. Another might follow a mixed herd of wildebeest, okapi and zebra. These hunting foragers get some nutrition from plants they gather, but most of their nourishment and most of the clothing and other equipment they need to survive they gather from the animal they stalk year-round. If you care to rank Paleolithic foragers on a technological scale with Neolithic foragers, the Paleolithic age came first. Mesolithic developments were fairly recent, in the grand scale.
The adults of the group are divided into two productive sub-groups, usually by sex. One sub-group, usually the men, who are more expendable because they do not bear children, will hunt prey and fight in occasional battles. Foragers do not fight large wars, but it's pretty common for them to feud and skirmish. Intermarriage is the most common way to defuse jealousy between foraging groups. Cultural values often emphasize pride and honor towards fellow tribesmen and cunning and viciousness towards enemies. Another sub-group, usually the women, watches the children as they forage by gathering roots, fungi, insects, and other resources that are neither big nor dangerous, but which provide a majority of the food eaten by the tribe.
Every year foragers follow the same circuit through their territory. The sun is not more regular in its passage through the houses of the zodiac than foragers are through their land. They pass through their territory and the seasons simultaneously in their planned order. The average group is no more than twenty-five people in size. Foraging life is orderly and happy. Everyone knows their place. Everyone is free. There are no permanent leaders to enslave the rest. Foragers have balanced diets, not too much or too little of any one thing, unless there is a famine. Years of famine are bad times but they don't change foraging life. Things don't change from year to year or generation to generation. For a million years human society stayed the same.
Mounted foragers live like walking foragers, but they have mounts. They do not herd domesticated animals. They hunt from the backs of their mounts. They may herd animals when they are hunting and intend to spring an ambush, but they do not guide the same domesticated herd through a yearly circuit. They may follow a herd. They do not control it. Otherwise they live very much like walking foragers, traveling from one campsite to the next, with the difference that they can go longer distances between campsites than walking foragers may. Their hunts also range further afield, since they can drag heavy game a long way to get it home. Walking hunters would have to move the group if they killed a large animal such as a mastodon far afield, but mounted hunters can drag it back over miles of territory.
After the Spanish reintroduced the horse to north America several Native American nations lived as mounted foragers. They followed buffalo herds across the great plains, a land they at one time regarded as a desert because it was too wide to cross quickly on foot. It is likely that they would have eventually domesticated the buffalo and developed a herding lifestyle, if left alone by American settlers. But that was not to be, and we can only wonder. Mounted foraging is likely to be a temporary lifestyle that eventually transforms a group of foragers into herders.
Aquatic foragers are fisherfolk. They live along the banks of rivers where fish are plentiful, or along the sea shore. They hunt fish and turtle and whale and dolphin. They get most of their nutrition and wealth from the sea, but are often poor. Stone age technology requires them to work harder than other foraging groups in order to maintain their relatively complex tools, such as canoes, kayaks, fishing tackle, nets, and harpoons. Aquatic foragers settle in one place and stay there, for the sea's bounty is great. Some nutrition comes from tubers, fungi, legumes, nuts, and other vegetable matter which is gathered by a sedentary subgroup. Aquatic foragers live in higher concentrations than other foraging groups. Average groups might range from one hundred to two hundred people. This is quite a large group by the standards of other foragers.
Fishing is an activity that is often identified with foraging, but it is also common in large scale societies such as agricultural and city based societies. If fishers stay close to home to catch their fish then it is generally a foraging activity. Boat repair, construction, and the processing of fish is all done by the fisher and his or her family, not by a specialist. Trade requires personal interaction with the person who caught the fish. Aquatic foraging is a personal activity rather than a large scale activity. It requires generalists rather than specialists.
In large scale societies fishing requires many laborers who are employed by a boat owner. Fishing expeditions take the boats far from their port. They may be gone for days or weeks in their hunt for fish. When they bring the haul back to shore they sell it to a merchant who in turn sells it to other merchants or to the people who eat the fish. Large scale fishers do not sell fish directly to consumers. They are specialists in a specializing society.
Many forager religious activities take place in primeval forests and dark caves. The earliest cave paintings we know of are from the Paleolithic era, such as the cave paintings in Lascaux. Paleolithic peoples had a shamanic form of religion and probably thought of the world as a magical, abundant place. They were pantheists. The pantheist shamanic form of religion is not unique to Paleolithic peoples, it is the most common form of religion for all foragers. Every tree, insect, rock, stream, and breeze is alive, magical, sentient. The world is alive, sometimes helpful, sometimes hostile, and one must be awake to the opportunity to befriend it, and aware of the taboos, those actions that offend the sacred world.
If the world is alive, this was twice as true for the alternate reality. Shamans could travel into an alternate reality, the otherworld or sacred world, and there meet ancestral and divine spirits which could be kind and helpful or angry and vengeful. Shamans could cure or kill with their travels into the otherworld. They could find the lost souls of the sick or accompany the souls of the dead to their resting place.
Typical rituals in forager religion are ecstatic ones. With so little time required for productive work and much time for leisure, including religion, a solution presents itself. Psychedelics grow in the wild all over the world and foragers gather and use them in ecstatic rituals. They also use other, more advanced, means of reaching ecstatic states, such as dancing, drumming, singing, and so on. Still, psychedelics are an important piece of forager religion and spirituality, and have been a common ingredient in human religion ever since the dawn of time. Modern prejudices against mind-altering chemicals aside, it is not surprising that the idea of a band of hallucinating holy warriors wielding poisoned arrows and spears would frighten people.
On our Earth, hunting and gathering as we think of it now developed during the Mesolithic period (after the Paleolithic and before the Neolithic). Sources of nutrition were pretty much evenly divided between meat and vegetables, with fish, nuts, fruit, roots, and grubs supplementing that diet. Honey was a delicacy, possibly a focus of disputes between groups, and the hunt for honey was likely to have been surrounded with ceremony and deep meaning. Interestingly enough, permanent settlements preceded the development of agriculture during the Mesolithic age; many hunter-gatherers were so adept at drawing on different resources at different times of the year that they could settle down in a village and only send out hunting teams when needed. Growing population in Mesolithic settlements produced pressures to find sources of food which allowed greater population density than a hunter-gatherer lifestyle could support, and thus horticulture came into being.
Hunter-gatherer peoples still exist today in wilderness lands far away from civilization. They don't rule the world anymore because they need lots of land to provide enough food to live, and open land ran out a long time ago.
Horticulture means "gardening." When people cultivate plants and animals for food but do not make permanent settlements that they cultivate intensively with specialized labor then they are horticulturists.
What do horticulturists do? What defines them? Horticulturists have begun to domesticate a few plant and animal species. They use human and animal labor to grow food crops, and use simple, easily used tools. Any of the adults in a group are able to perform all the tasks required by the group, so there is little need for specialization. They produce most of their nutrition through horticulture, but depend on hunting for meat and other delicacies. Hunting continues to provide an important part of their diet. Because their style of cultivation wears out the soil, they must move their villages every once in a while, usually staying in a settlement between three and twenty years.
People in horticultural societies work more than foragers do. They must put in about twice as much effort for personal nourishment as a forager would. They need to prepare fields, plant them, and harvest the results. They need to sort out seeds, some for planting and some for eating. Their life requires more conscious planning than a foraging life, and is more sedentary. They have more wealth than foragers do, with items such as pots and jars to store food, and have better tools and finer weapons. But because of the need to move every few years most horticulturists cannot accumulate great wealth, nor do they learn to specialize.
Horticultural societies live in small villages, ranging in size from one hundred in relatively barren areas to perhaps a thousand or two in extremely fertile places. Depending on the fertility of the nearby soil, they may move every few years, building new homes, or they may stay in one place for generations. In tropical climates where the jungle grows over cultivated areas quickly they may move along a circuit. They may farm one village for a few years, then leave it fallow and going on to the next village which has been abandoned for twenty years, resettle it and then continue along the same path they took two decades before.
Slash and burn, or swidden, horticulture is the most common form of horticulture. Several thousand years ago people lived like this all over the world. Now people live by intensive methods of agriculture in most of the world, but several million people still survive by practicing swidden farming, mostly in equatorial jungle areas hard to cultivate any other way.
Slash and burn refers to the way that people prepare the fields. They cut down vegetation by hand, burn it, and plant a mixture of different food crops on the cleared land. The burning leaves a layer of ash which is rich in nutrients. It produces one or two good crops, but burned soil depletes quickly. After one or two years fields must be left alone for several years until the wild growth is lush and can be cut and burned again. This fallow period can last from five years with good soil to twenty and on up with poor soil. Over long periods of time rains will wash away all the best topsoil, producing a desert from a once fertile area. For example, there are those who claim that the Sahara is the result of tens of thousands of years of swidden farming in an area which legend tell us was once a lush paradise.
When people go along a field, poking holes and dropping seeds in the holes, and then go off and wait for plants to grow, that's called Dry Land Horticulture, or just plain horticulture for short. We call it "Dry Land" horticulture because it doesn't use irrigation.
Other horticulturists scatter seeds on the banks of rivers and in other well watered places. They may seed the dry riverbed of a desert stream with desired crops right before the rainy season ignites riotous, explosive growth. They may plant grains in swampy land. They may even use dung as fertilizer to keep farming a plot of land after one or two crops which would have otherwise exhausted it. But all these techniques require more work than the basic slash and burn style of horticulture, and move towards full agriculture.
Horticulturists tend to believe in a hostile natural world and a polytheistic religion. Where foragers believe their habitat to be magical and friendly or neutral, horticultural peoples believe that they have in some way wounded the earth and earned its anger. They farm by poking sticks in the ground and dropping seeds down the holes. They cut and burn down natural growth, using fire, stone, and metal tools to subdue the earth. Mythically, these practices have wounded the earth and taken away the Divine Habitat's ancient right to punish them by starving them with a famine. Wounded, the divine Habitat of forager peoples recedes from the immediate surroundings and is reconceived as the creator, a sky god or mother goddess who was driven far away by human rudeness. People begin to worship a number of individual gods aside from the creator and the ancestors. The number of gods they worship appears to increase proportionally with the number of different crops they grow. Groups with a few different crops only worship a few gods and groups with many crops actively worship dozens or hundreds of gods. This isn't a direct, linear relation, but it does show a very real tendency for societies with many crops to worship many gods.
Horticultural societies have shamans or people like them. They aren't likely to have full-time religious specialists, priests, in charge of all the rituals, but there may be a shaman who takes care of interactions with the ancestors and the gods. These people may be called witch-doctors or shamans. If they are your enemies then you might call them sorcerers or witches.
Typical rituals in horticultural religion include sacrifice, to return some of what people have wrested from the soil to the gods of the wounded earth who have been offended by human impertinence, and appeasements of many types to settle the angry gods of many different stripes. There will be other rituals based on the culture and what is important to it. Feasts, processions, holidays are all likely.
After the Mesolithic age came the Neolithic, during which various weeds were domesticated, pottery was developed to hold the starchy seeds produced by domesticated plants, and so on.
Only a few species of wild animals and plants on earth have reacted well to human attempts to mold them to human uses. Neolithic people adopted the wolf, the moufflon, and a few other animals and made them domestic. The descendants of these animals are the common farm animals and pets of today:
Most domesticated species would not survive in the wild, and certainly not in the niche they originally filled. They have been altered too much. Feral examples of these animals do exist, but they are not as useful to humans as their domestic cousins nor as viable in the wild as their untamed cousins.
Though a few other breeds of animal have been domesticated with some success, they haven't been transformed by human cultivation as thoroughly as have these breeds. The silkworm moth would never survive in the wild without human intervention; it cannot fly. The modern Holstein breed of cow weighs almost twice what the ancient auroch weighed. The chicken cannot fly, has no protective coloring, and is too stupid to decoy hunters away from its offspring. It could not survive in the wilderness. These breeds of animal have been changed by human intervention, they have been domesticated into forms that serve us.
Wild Animal |
Domesticated Descendant |
Wolf |
Dog |
Bezoar Goat |
Goat |
Asiatic Moufflon |
Sheep |
Wild Boar |
Pig |
Auroch |
Cow |
Wild Cat |
Cat |
Red Jungle Fowl |
Chicken |
Guanaco |
Llama |
Wild Ass |
Donkey |
Tarpan |
Horse |
Wild Camel |
Camel |
Cavy |
Guinea Pig |
Wild Rabbit |
Rabbit |
Wild Turkey |
Turkey |
Bombycid Moth |
Silkworm |
Plants are altogether more malleable to human cultivation and we cannot make such a brief list of domesticated plants. Still, several vegetable species stand out as excellent examples of human intervention. The cereal grains (wheat, rice, oats, barley, maize, millet, and rye) originally descended from prairie grasses selectively bred until in time the grain yielded large quantities of seed. Once this happened it became economically feasible to bake crushed grain into bread, to make beer of grain, and to feed grain to domesticated animals. Along with the invention of the plow, these new, fruitful cereal grains were the last step needed to progress from small scale, generalist, personal society, to a large scale, specialist, impersonal society, and thus from horticulture to agriculture.
Some anthropologists believe that the earliest horticultural societies, those with few cultivated crops, were matriarchal and held mother earth to be pre-eminent among the gods, and that these groups were eventually all conquered by nomadic peoples who inserted their tribal gods (mostly male) into the chief positions in the heavenly hierarchy. This is difficult to prove since any proof was destroyed ages ago, long before sacred stories were first set down in writing. It also seems somewhat unlikely since none of the agricultural societies that now exist, even those with similar crops to the first ones, are ruled by women. In any case, you don't have to obey history, if you want to make up a matriarchal society in your campaign then you can.
Most herders depend a great deal on their herd animals, however at least one nation, the African Masai tribe, subsists entirely on what they can get from their cattle. They eat cattle flesh, drink cattle blood and milk, and claim to need nothing else to survive.
Herders are great travelers who get much of their nutrition from a herd of herbivores. People who live in areas where the land is not fertile enough to support intensive farming, or in cultures that value mobility over stability, may become herders. Herders commonly follow one of two patterns, transhumance or pastoral nomadism. In some groups only the actual herders travel with the animals while the rest of the community stays in a village and tends gardens and small crops. This is called "transhumance." In other groups the entire community travels with the herd. This second type of herding is called "pastoral nomadism." Though herders receive much nutrition from their animals they need more. They may get other nutrition from their own gardening or from trade with other communities with lands that border on their routes from pasture to pasture.
Herders tend to travel gradually from lowland to highland pastures. They winter in lowland pastures and stay until the fields dry up with summer heat and then guide their herds to mountain pastures for the summer and fall. Often they follow the same route for generations. They will know every pasture along the way and every natural feature that could trap one of their herd. Herders will be expert in the lay of the land along their traditional routes, and may record much of it in myth and legend.
Aside from travel time herding doesn't require much daily work. Birthing time, shearing time for sheep and goats, and the slaughter time are exceptions. During the rest of the year herders have plenty of time to socialize or engage in diversions. They require few tools. They own their herds and the products they get from them: milk; wool; meat; leather; manure. Usually the herds are the property of a family rather than an individual. Some herders, such as herders of cattle and horses and other large animals, ride mounts to keep up with their herds. Others, such as goat-herds and shepherds, tend to walk. Herders do not require complex tools, and as a result of their mobile lifestyle do not tend to accumulate much wealth. Some herders who become proficient traders do get quite wealthy, and they are highly respected in their community.
Herding people require even more land for their territory than foragers do. They have to support not only themselves but their animals, so good pasturage is very important. This creates conflicts with neighbor cultures. As a result herders tend to be very competitive and aggressive. Because they travel so widely, occasionally they will trespass on the lands of farmers. Herders pass through areas only once a year, so if farmers settle in the middle of a migratory route early one spring they will be surprised later that year when the herd descends on their fields, eating some crops and trampling others. The herders may only want to reach pasturage further on, but if farms are in the way of the only route then the herd must go through. Many herders trade for food they cannot produce themselves, especially staple foods such as grains. This forces them to cultivate friendships and business partnerships with neighboring farmers, merchants, and even city dwellers. Since trade is important to their survival people in herding cultures tend to be good at it, and occasionally one will get rich.
Transhumance is one style of herding in which some people farm and others travel with and tend to the animals. Shepherds, goat-herds, even cowboys exemplify this lifestyle. The farming engaged in is typically non-intensive gardening and requires no special tools or skills. Some of the community actually herd the animals, and travel with the herd along their route. They tend to the animals and are expert in the geography of their routes. Sheep are often herded in this manner, as are goats. During the winter and spring the flock subsists on stored feed; in balmier latitudes it grazes on lowland pasturage. During the summer and fall shepherds guide their flocks into mountain pastures, and must drive them back at the end of fall before winter can trap them.
The shepherd's life is a lonely one, and they must adjust to months away from their families. Herders in this lifestyle have plenty of free time to socialize but no-one to socialize with. They often travel by themselves for months, so they lack social contact. This can cause and aggravate serious conflicts.
Pastoral Nomadism is a lifestyle where the entire community is on the move with the animals, except at cyclical festival times. The horse-herding Mongols of middle Asia and the ancient, horse-herding Semitic tribes of the Middle East exemplify this pattern. These groups do not farm. They may hunt and forage for some things, such as honey, dates, and figs, but they either trade with or raid neighboring societies for other requirements. Usually nomads trade for grains or bread, both staple foods they cannot produce themselves. They may also get cloth, tools, and other items from trade. Nomadic raiding brings back slaves, animals, and valuables: Slaves for various uses including farming; animals for food which doesn't require nomads to slaughter their own herds; and valuables which can be traded again for necessities. Nomad warriors are also herders.
Generally the animals belonging to each family are marked, but all the animals travel in the same herd. So too with the herders, who travel together and socialize a lot. Nomads are not lonely, unlike shepherds and other solitary herders, but they do tend towards an "us versus them" attitude. The herding camp is as good as family. The rest of the world consists of the weak, who must be conquered in raiding, and the stupid, who must be outwitted by crafty bargaining. City dwellers are generally counted as both weak and stupid.
Many herders travel all the time, leaving them unable to practice complex rituals, maintain temples, or celebrate many holidays. Their traditional routes take on religious meaning. Traditional routes are incorporated in myth and legend, every myth or legend commemorated with a shrine.
The very process of herding takes on a religious significance. The Patron Deity who commands and guides the tribe is the common pattern of herder religion. The chief divine figure is likened to a herder and the tribe to his herd. Sometimes the patron deity rescues people from certain harm. Other times he might kill individuals. But at all times the patron acts for the good of the tribe. The tribe is not expected to understand the patron deity's motives or reasoning; can sheep understand the motives or reason of the shepherd? Pastoral nomads may acknowledge a number of deities, each a master of an important ability, instead of a single divine patron who is the master of all.
Agriculture is plow based planting. It allows for large settlements, long-term stability in site location, and rewards degrees of social organization that are not rewarded by foraging or horticultural lifestyles.
Once a horticultural people have domesticated a sufficient number of plants and animals to provide a complete diet they may progress to agriculture. Agriculture requires the continuous cultivation of several fields, unlike horticulture which cultivates a field until it wears out and then moves on. The main tool that makes this possible is the plow. The plow turns over a field exposing parts of the soil that someone using a digging stick would have never been able to reach. It allows people to fertilize with dung and wastes without leaving raw sewage on the land's surface and encouraging flies and other pests. In order to be useful the plow had to be attached to an ox or some other large animal. The other big change from horticulture is fertilizer. Animal waste provides more fertilizer than human waste can and is less offensive to humans, but it requires animals. Intensive agriculture can feed up to four hundred or even fifteen hundred people per square kilometer of agricultural land, far more than slash and burn horticulture can support.
Agriculture is safer even than horticulture. If properly cared for with regular fallow periods and sufficient fertilizer and irrigation fields will not suddenly stop producing food. A wide selection of crops means that people don't have to risk their lives in the hunt to get nutrients required to survive. However, agriculture requires much more intensive work than horticulture or foraging does. The average agricultural worker spends ten to twelve hours a day working. The average person also accumulates a lot more wealth than a forager or horticulturist. This may be directly proportional to the amount of time worked, an idea which would come as no surprise to any Calvinists in the audience. A permanent home with furniture, a plow, draft animals, chickens, a milk cow, stored food, and the tools required to maintain all these things are the basics for agricultural life. A permanent home is the basis of wealth. With agriculture real wealth becomes possible.
The subsistence methods described up until this point are all small scale. Small scale societies have settlements of small size. They support group sizes from a low of twenty on up to a maximum of fifteen hundred. They don't require special or complex tools. They don't require specialized knowledge. They require people to be mobile and ready to move to get to food. They depend on found food for much nutrition. Each family unit can provide everything needed for its own survival. Each family produces food, clothing, shelter, and all other necessary goods.
Large scale societies have settlements bigger than fifteen hundred people or so. Large scale societies become possible with the development of intensive agriculture. Intensive agriculture requires the plow, which is a tool that can renew soil's viability by turning it over and combining it with fertilizer, and control of the water supply through some kind of irrigation. Plows require draft animals such as horses or oxen. Draft animals can also be used to drive irrigation pumps.
In addition to larger settlements, large scale societies encourage specialization and economic interaction. One village that produces excess rice can trade with another village that produces excess chickens. With the stability provided by agriculture comes specialization, and class and caste differences follow. A specialist group of leaders arises, so too specialist groups of religious experts, soldiers, traders, entertainers, criminals, and all the myriad professions standard in fantasy literature and real life. They all survive on the backbreaking work of the farmer, who is the heart of the agricultural system.
Most of the people in the world today can be accurately described as peasants. Peasants are farmers. The family lives in a farm for which it provides most of the labor. The farm produces enough food for the family's needs and a small surplus which can be traded for various items or privileges. Virtually all the labor is performed by hand. Seeding, transplanting, weeding, and harvest are all manual operations. Animals such as oxen or horses will be used to pull a plow and prepare fields, or to power irrigation devices. All of the work a peasant can do to prosper is done personally or with the help of family.
Peasants are small scale producers in large scale societies. They are food producing generalists in societies that are able to become more stratified as the peasants get better at producing food. As societies stratify special skills become more valuable and better respected than general skills, and generalist peasants sink to the bottom strata of society. Peasants are underdogs. As the bottom social layer, the "salt of the earth," they are dominated by outsiders. They don't control channels of distribution or sale and can't compete militarily with professional soldiers. Overlords may tax them heavily to support projects far from peasant lands or needs. For these reasons they are often poor. Because they are so often victims of outsiders, taxed into poverty by overlords, cheated by merchants, robbed by soldiers on campaign, peasants tend to be extremely defensive and suspicious of outsiders, or even of anyone with more wealth than they have. Peasants understand that most wealth comes by stealing from peasants. Through most of human history peasants have outnumbered city dwellers by ten or twenty to one. This numerical superiority combined with their underdog status made for a lot of peasant uprisings, some which failed against superior military force, some which succeeded and replaced the old overlord with a new one who often turned out to be as bad or worse.
The Kingdom of Lenmark is famous for its beef cattle and neighboring Isdiop produces a lot of very fine raw cotton. The King of Lenmark establishes a plantation to grow a great number of beef cattle to be traded for Isdiop cotton, which is in its turn produced on plantations established by the Merchant Magnates of Isdiop. Commerce between the two supplies Isdiop with beef it cannot produce and Lenmark with high quality cotton, and enriches the King of Lenmark and the Merchants of Isdiop.
Large scale societies require agricultural production to address needs that small scale societies do not have. Not only do large scale societies encourage people to specialize, but they encourage society as a whole to specialize. Large scale societies need to encourage commerce between societies, and to do so they need large, easily controlled supplies of products. Plantations can provide enough agricultural products to fuel such commerce.
Plantations are large farming operations. There are three classes or castes of people involved with them. The owner of a plantation may or may not live on it. The staff of a plantation manage its day to day affairs, report to the owner, and live on one section of the lands. The workers of a plantation do the physical work, obey the orders of the staff, and live in owner supplied housing somewhere on the lands. The staff and worker quarters are segregated from each other to keep them from getting too friendly. Cultural differences, for workers and staff typically come from different cultures and backgrounds, prevent camaraderie from developing between staff and workers. As a result of the dehumanizing system of plantation management, workers are treated as property. In many plantation systems the workers are actually slaves. In nearly all plantations the workers are desperately poor. Frequent turnover among workers prevents the kind of uprisings that oppressed peasantry are so famous for.
Industrial civilization devotes considerable energy to replacing human farm workers with machines. Machines don't complain when you work all day. They don't require expensive food and shelter, don't have religious holidays at inconvenient times, and don't disagree with their overseers. Mechanized agriculture affects peasant farms and plantations equally. Peasants who use the machines for agriculture can farm more land than they used to, and the farms of successful peasantry quickly grown to the size of plantations. Plantations replace workers with machines and the staff operates them. This leads inevitably to the phenomenon called "agribusiness" which is common today in Europe and the Americas. Some people whose ancestors were peasant farmers become owners of agribusinesses, just like plantation owners. The masses of peasant farmers and plantation workers who, because of these developments, are no longer needed on the farm flock to cities and feed the industrial machine, becoming factory workers and other generalists in the specialist system. Their position in the bottom social class does not change.
Peasantry and plantation workers have the same sorts of religious feelings that horticulturists do. They are likely to acknowledge a large number of divine figures, ancestors, gods, spirits, angels, heroes, saints, and demons, and turn to one or another in certain situations. Because of their underdog status they are likely to take one divinity as a special patron, a divinity who stands above the other gods and rules them, in the same pattern followed within their culture. A culture with a chieftain control structure will have a divine chieftain or emperor obeyed by circles of nobles, with ancestral spirits taking the place of peasants in the divine hierarchy. A culture with a tribal control structure will acknowledge a council of gods that may appoint leaders for special situations but have no permanent leader.
Most large scale societies have chieftain type control structures. The most natural way to combine multiple gods with a chieftain is to acknowledge a chieftain of the gods. In a Henotheistic conception a supreme god is surrounded by lesser divinities and ancestral spirits. Thus peasant religions tend to be Henotheistic.
Humans have built homes from their beginnings in the Olduvai plain. They started with mud and wattle huts, built by caking mud on top of bunched grasses to make a wall which dried in the sun, and roofing the top with thatch. They built tents, lean-to's, wooden houses. They dug homes out of the earth and roofed them with turf. They built villages of mud and wattle huts hanging off of cliff faces chosen for the protection they offered, both from the mid-day sun and from raiders of other tribes. When humans started to build homes for their dead, for their gods, palaces for their rulers, and bridges and waterworks, then they took a major step towards civilization.
Cities began as religious centers and homes of nobility. They grew as people moved to be near the wealthy and powerful. Merchants moved in, attracted by the relative safety provided by noble policing, and set up markets which were quickly controlled by the nobility. For much of human history cities stayed the same. Each city had two centers: The palace and temple district, home of gods and nobles; and the market district, in which the business of the city was done. Cities were magnets for wealth and capital. Other residential areas developed, in which people attracted by the city's wealth and power could live. These people worked at trade or in the temples and government. For most of human history cities continued in this basic form, until the industrial revolution added another facet to city life: Industry. Industry attracted additional people to the cities, displaced peasants and plantation workers who dwelt in outlying areas and worked at industrial jobs for low wages. Now cities were homes for the very poor as well as the very rich, city life became even more stratified and complex than it had been before, and crime became a serious social problem.
City life is very stratified. Nobility, including religious specialists in major temples, are very wealthy and powerful. The working poor live in wretched poverty. There are many class divisions between the two extremes. Most city dwellers work about as hard as peasants do in their society. Skilled artisans and merchants can gather a lot more wealth than peasants can, and their lives are more pleasant. General laborers, who for the most part are displaced peasants and plantation workers, keep the same low status and low standard of living they had in the country. Their hope is for their children to rise above their dismal lot.
City dwellers see themselves as sophisticated. City life is very different from country life. Country folk don't understand city life. Neither do city folk understand or appreciate country ways. They see country people as rubes and hicks, and believe that everything about country life is backwards. This includes religion. City dwellers are very likely to look at the religion of their country cousins and see only hidebound traditionalism. Those who are born in the country and move to the city tend to keep their religion. But their children tend to lose touch with the old ways, including the traditional religion. For this reason many city dwellers are irreligious. They have rejected their ancestral religion without finding a replacement.
The word "civilization" is linked to the Latin word for city; more than anything else civilized people are city builders. They build cities which are more than large villages of many homes, they are full of monuments: they contain temples, tombs, palaces, are encircled by walls, penetrated with roads, and connected by bridges and canals. Some advanced cities are even watered by aqueducts and drained by sewers. These sorts of monumental projects require cooperation between large groups of people, for no one man or woman can build a temple or a road, monuments are built on the order of powerful rulers who can organize many people, and there is no better place to find a large number of people who can be controlled by a few than a city. Thus the monumental buildings that define civilization are found by and large in and around cities, for cities are necessary to large scale construction.
"Civilization" and "barbarianism," its opposite, are normative terms. They compare the speaker's society to an alien one and morally judges the alien by how closely it resembles the familiar. The ancient Greeks heard neighboring tribes speaking their outlandish languages of nonsense syllables, "bar bar bar," and so invented the word "barbarian" for those who spoke languages other than Greek. The Greeks divided the world into the civilized peoples of the Mycenaean cities and the barbarians outside Mycenae. In the same way every tribe or country divides humanity into the civilized and the barbaric, drawing the line so that those like us are civilized and those unlike us are barbarians, savages, or primitives.
Anthropologists and historians and others who need a relatively unbiased way of measuring "civilization" define it differently. They define civilization by referring to a specific complex of behavior. They have reduced the complex to three things that so-called civilized socities share. First, civilized societies domesticate plants and animals, breeding and cultivating them to human needs. Second, they create large structures for other purposes than dwellings, such as temples, bridges, government buildings, and memorials. Third, they develop or use writing, a way of storing knowledge and passing it on to succeeding generations. These three kinds of behavior exemplify civilization. They also support one another; writing is necessary to keep breeding records for animals, and to record patterns of drought and flood needed to prosper with agriculture; likewise a desire for personal meaning in a society in which the individual is unimportant encourages creative writing and monumental architecture.
We are familiar with market economics, and in fact modern universities teach economics as the study of markets, but that is not the only type of economic system that exists or is possible.
Every year during December millions of people all over Europe and the Americas draw up lists of friends and acquaintances, purchase Christmas cards, and send them off. The postal services are flooded with these cards. The cards are intended to spread good cheer and happiness, and convey news back and forth. Everybody sends out some number of these cards and expects to get the same number back. If you send someone a card and they don't reciprocate then you may stop sending them a card in the future. If someone who was not on your list sends you a card then you may add them to your list. The annual Christmas card exchange is a reciprocal exchange.
Reciprocal economic systems exist in which people give goods away to others with the expectation that a gift of similar value will be returned. For instance, medieval European rules for proper host-guest relations encouraged people to give in expectation of later return. When you have a guest in your home you should exert yourself to your best and satisfy his every need. When you later visit your guest you can expect even more lavish treatment. Likewise, when visiting you should not stay too long at risk of bankrupting your host. This practice made visits much more pleasant than they would otherwise be, and it cemented friendships between people who could have constantly been at war. It also provided a way to show off, to prove superiority by spending more than your guest could afford.
Redistributive economic systems are those in which everyone gives goods to a single person, who in turn redistributes the goods back to everybody else. Government taxation and spending programs are a modern example of such a system. Everyone is familiar with such programs. Redistribution doesn't need to be described further, except to explain that when the redistributer keeps too much of whatever is traded or redistributes it unevenly everyone who contributes is apt to feel victimized and unhappy.
Market economic systems are those in which someone with goods trades them to someone else for something of value. Market systems encourage a specialist class of merchants to develop. Merchants take part in almost all transactions in a market system. They serve as middlemen between producers and consumers. Money is not necessary for a market system to function. Barter can work. However, money makes markets work much better, since everything can be priced in a single scheme. There's no more "apples and oranges" problem, and no need to price something in terms of how many chickens it would bring.
Commerce is a large scale market system. When goods are exported from one nation to another, and goods received in return, then you have commerce. Commerce requires money to function, and encourages the development of a "commercial" class, a superior class of merchants, to sponsor and carry out such large-scale trade. Commerce was the driving force behind the Spanish and Portuguese voyages of world discovery that led Christopher Columbus to the Americas in 1492. He was trying to discover a trade route that would connect Portugal with India and instead discovered a pair of continents in his way.
People form themselves into family units in lots of different ways. One of the most common forms seems to be the atomic family which is idealized in the USA, with a mother, father and children. Another common form of family does not include the biological father, who lives with his parents and siblings and cares for his sister's children, so a family would consist of mother, some of her brothers and sisters, grandmother and some of her siblings, and children. Yet another common form consists of five easily identifiable groups: father, first wife, other wives, children of the first wife, and the other children. These are all types of family structure, and it is not the function of this book to criticize any of them.
Kinship can be charted along two axes, the axis of location and the axis of relation. The axis of location, from matrilocal to patrilocal, describes where married couples and their children live. The axis of relation, from matrilineal to patrilineal, describes whom children of a marriage count as blood-relatives.
Where do newlyweds live immediately after marriage? In small communities where the work of every member is key to group survival this is a supremely important point. The axis of location describes how this distinction is made. When people marry and tradition dictates that they should move in with the family of the husband, that is a patrilocal system. When they marry and are expected by tradition to move in with the family of the wife, that is a matrilocal system. Most living cultures are not at the extremes, but lie somewhere between. Newlyweds in a system halfway between the patrilocal and matrilocal extremes might immediately establish their own home or have an even chance of joining either family.
Who are a person's nearest relatives? The axis of relation describes how a person can figure out who his or her nearest relatives are. In a patrilineal system a child's father is the nearest male relative and the mother is the child's nearest female relative. Bloodline identity is figured through the father's family. Family names are passed down from father to son and adopted by wives who "marry into the family." Patrilineal relationships hold equally well in polygamous societies. In polygamous societies women marry into the family of their common husband, and become related by marriage to his other wives. In a matrilineal system the mother is still the child's nearest female relative, but the position of the father may vary. Some matrilineal systems simply turn the patrilineal convention around so that family names and lines of descent are traced through the mother's family and the husband takes on the name and identity of his wife's family. In these systems the husband joins his wife's family. In other matrilineal systems the husband remains a part of his birth family and instead of caring for the children of his wife he takes a parental role for the children of his sisters. In such systems children may not even know the identity of their natural fathers. They will instead treat their uncle as a parent.
A group of people who live near by each other require rules and some kind of control structure in order to function as a society rather than feuding individuals. Several basic control structures have developed during human existence: Band; Tribe; Chieftan; and State. Each of these control structures works best for settlements of a certain size. What works for an extended family with nineteen members will not work for a nation of 1.3 billion.
The band control structure is democracy in the ideal form. This control structure only works well with a small group. A band has no specialist leaders. Everyone, or at least all the adults, participates in decisions. The adults of the group make choices based on consensus decisions. They may appoint temporary leaders for certain tasks. Someone with a talent for finding honey might be put in charge of a honey hunt. A talented or fierce warrior might be put in charge of a war party. But when the task that calls for the leader is accomplished everyone returns to their equal status in the band. The band control structure is common among foragers and small groups of horticulturalists or herders. It works well with small groups under twenty in size and functions acceptably in larger groups of hundreds of members, but becomes divisive, unwieldy and slow as group size increases and finally becomes completely unworkable somewhere around a thousand.
A tribe consists of a number of families who live together or have some reason to unite with each other. Tribes are controlled by representative bodies called councils. Each family sends a representative to the tribal council and together the tribal council deliberates and makes decisions. Tribes are essentially republics in which every collection of people has their own representative in the council. The council leads the tribe in all decisions and actions, but does not itself have a permanent leader. As with bands a tribal council might appoint a warchief to supervise warfare, or a hunting chief to supervise a hunt, but at the end of the enterprise everyone returns to their earlier positions whether on or off the council.
A chieftain is a single leader who controls the populace. This control structure could also be called a dictatorship, autocracy, tyranny, kingdom, or empire. Often the chieftain has a group of advisors which behaves like a tribal council, but the chieftain has last word on their decisions. Whether a chieftain remains the leader of the group for life varies, but the group will always have a chieftain. Some societies choose chieftains for life and allow a chieftain's children to inherit the position. Other societies choose a series of chieftains through some means or another. "Sacred kingship" is an interesting variant of the chieftain system in which a king is chosen for a period of time, wields real power, but at the end of the time is sacrificed for society's prosperity and replaced by a new king.
State has been defined many different ways, with the most common one being a centrally governed community consisting of many smaller communities. However, at its heart the state is more than this. The difference between a state and one of the other forms of government is that citizens of a state owe allegiance directly to the state in the same way they obey a divinity. In fact a state is a kind of divine figure or principle that rules over the activities of communities within its territory. A state consists of many people who consider themselves to be members of various communities. It may appear to be led by a chieftain and/or a council. However a state has a different, secretive, divinely ordained mechanism for government. Often the state has an apparatus of government which supersedes the chieftain and council and actually governs the state. This apparatus is often called a state or government bureaucracy, and the governmental bureaucracy owes its primary loyalty to the state rather than chieftains or councilors.
Our knowledge of cultures can be used on more than just humans. You can fit any group you want into this system, just think about the consequences. It works for other races too.
For an example let's see how we could use the systems shown earlier in this chapter to describe the behavior of various groups of dwarves. What do we know about dwarves? We know they are short and strong. We know they live underground. We know they spend a lot of time digging things out of the ground, that they are naturally gifted miners and metalworkers. We know they have a love for the deep earth and the treasures that it holds. Given those constants about dwarves, lets see what it would look like if dwarves lived according to the social and cultural patterns that are common among humans. Let us travel to the World's End mountains and discover how dwarves live in a land where they have no serious competition from other races.
The Alkesh dwarves live in small bands of no more than thirty. They travel in their bands through the deep caverns and tunnels of the World's End mountain range, making camps in the dark and gathering salamanders, insects, fungi, algae, lichens, and other creatures of the dark depths for their food supply, and seeking out and exploiting the holy caches of those rock crystal geodes they can form into the combination axe and digging tools they use for everything from tunneling to warfare to hunting to food preparation. The Alkesh dwarves are extremely shy and secretive. They hide even from other dwarves. It is almost impossible to meet them, and if you do meet them you will wish you hadn't. For the only time they rush to meet outsiders is when the outsiders have accidentally or purposefully trespassed upon the holy precincts in which the rock crystal geodes are found. Then they wage terrible guerrilla warfare on those so unlucky as to be discovered in Alkesh sacred territory. The debris left behind in two holy sites, apparently abandoned long ago, that have been discovered indicate that the Alkesh engage in some kind of dancing rituals, and worship the animals they hunt. If the mad ranting of Isidore Zumis, a missionary whom they captured and drove mad with years of fiendish torture, may be believed they worship a mysterious entity of darkness and emptiness that they name Wloka.
The Murian dwarves live in mobile villages ranging in size between fifty and five hundred individuals. They establish temporary villages near large caverns which they proceed to plant with spores of various fungi and lichens. Luxuriant growth proceeds apace for a while but quickly the supply of animal prey runs out. The crops are filling and necessary but do not supply all the nutrition they need. After a while the village must relocate to another cavern site and plant it anew, while feeding on stored food and the insects and animals that inhabit the new site. They worship many different gods. They have ancestor divinities, gods of various fungi, a bat god that is the source of guano, which makes an excellent fertilizer, gods of salamanders and insects, gods of darkness and the art of tunneling, but primary among the gods is Muri, who long ago founded the tribe and passed on the secret of how to sow spores upon the chthonic winds. They no longer worship the darkness spirit whom they claim created them and the universe. This creator figure, named Whilk, lurks in the darkness and no longer cares for its mortal children.
The Zufidor dwarves are the oddest of all the dwarves in the World's End, for they spend a great deal of their time above ground. Dwarves are known to dislike open spaces, and the Zufidor are no exception, but their way of life forces them above ground. The Zufidor are fierce nomadic herders of bats. Several Zufidor families join together in camps and guide their herds of bats from one feeding area to the next in a yearly route that takes them from the swampy lowlands by Lake Glumweed where the bats feed on the numerous mosquitoes of spring and summer, to autumnal blackfly swarms near the peak called Tallspire. The Zufidor use special whistles and trained bats to guide their fluttering charges from one campcave to the next. When they pass near civilized cavernhomes they will raid for slaves, food, weapons, jewelry, coveys, and for herds of bats. They prefer to slaughter captured herdbats rather than their own as this does not diminish their own herds. They burn civilized homes and clothing, as they have it on authority from Zush, their terrible divine patron and master, that the only proper shelter and clothing are those made from bat skins. They trade some of what they capture back to renegade merchants and trade other items to outland merchants who dare the mountains, but are as likely to attack outland caravans as they are to trade with them. They pay obeisance to a terrible deity of fire and blackness called Zush who is as likely to kill them as grant their prayers.
The Kovic dwarven nation occupies another section of the World's End mountains. Each family inhabits a single cavernhome of middling size and tends to it. They have domesticated the bat and the rabbit. They value bats for their guano, which is a wonderful fertilizer for their crops of fungus and lichens. They have bred the rabbit to all sorts of sizes from large to small, emphasizing the claws and forelegs, both for digging ability and to defend their homes. Almost every Kovic cavernhome has its pack of rabbits for personal defense and tunneling work. They have learned to divert underground streams and runnels to irrigate their crops, and to alternately freeze and reheat the rockface with a tool they call an ice-oven to provide tiny cracks by which their crops can more easily leech minerals from within the rockface.
The Kovic specialize in the growing of the broadhat mushroom, which is nutty, substantial and delicious when they prepare it. Outlanders almost never prepare it properly and in their kitchens it is limp, acidic, and foul smelling. Outlander cooking is a topic for jollity among the Kovic. The broadhat mushroom is their staple food, which they eat in combination with everything. They gather other food by hunting and foraging for lizards, insects, and wild fungi and lichens. Occasionally they hunt on the surface, but the taste of most surface plants and animals is deemed too bizarre to be palatable. They are not suitable provender for civilized palates.
A number of cavernhomes clustered around a common center make up a village, which is ruled by a mayor and a council composed of family heads. The mayor is the ceremonial representative of the village in ritual and its emissary when communication with the outside is required. Every seven years, or upon the death of the old mayor, the council chooses a new mayor from among itself. Skilled miners and metalworkers are a common feature of Kovic villages. Every village has one or more jewelers and smiths who make high quality goods for local use and trade.
The Kovic nation has a central government which is located in the city of Glistendeep, the hereditary home of the Glisten clan of the Kovic nation. The Glisten clan rules itself much as any other village or clan does, but it also dominates the rest of Kovic land through its military might. Glisten legions spend much of their time guarding against possible raids by the Zufidor. Their role as guardians of the nation requires them to be everywhere, to act as police as well as a militia. The Glisten clan chief is the hereditary Prince of Kovic, Autarch of Glisten and Guardian of the Dark Marches. The Prince controls the Glisten College of Steelworkers, which is the world's finest producer of weapons. The Prince also owns many silver, gold, and gem mines the entire production of which is refined and worked into fine jewelry for commerce in the world above-ground. The products of the Prince's steelworkers are not officially for sale to outsiders.
Kovic religion acknowledges many gods. It includes more divine figures than even the Murian dwarves. Their gods do not have the same or similar names as their Murian analogs, but when talking about Murian religion they use Kovic names for Murian gods. The Prince of the Kovic gods is called the Allfather and is otherwise unnamed. The Allfather wields the terrible cavernfall as his weapon, speaks in echoes, and lives in a moaning cave deep in the heart of the world that is full of wonderful banquets and carpeted with insects. The Allfather dictated to Kovic priests all the laws they must live by and acclaimed the Glisten clan as his representatives in the world. The Prince can trace his bloodline directly back through his father's father and all the way back to the Allfather. The Prince is thus divine, a demigod, and after death joins his divine nature to the Allfather.
The city of Glistendeep is one of the wonders of the world. It is the capital of the dwarven Kovic nation and the home of their divine Prince. Almost a million dwarves live in Glistendeep amid fabulous tunnels and halls carved out by slave laborers through a thousand years of history. There are specialists of all kinds, merchants, priests, government bureaucrats, clothiers, cobblers, smiths, jewelers, and sages. They work in the palace, temples, and markets of Glistendeep and make the affairs of Kovic work. There is also an underclass of farmers, driven to the city by Zufidor raids or by natural disasters, which perform unskilled manual labor such as working the gears and powering the pumps that bring air from the surface into the city. Other lower-class workers are doomed to wander the harsh bright surface, foraging for random vegetable and animal matter in sacks to provide the raw materials for the unappetizing processed food product called Vegn, which is the staple food for the poor in Glistendeep. It satisfies dwarven nutritional needs, but is unsatisfying and repulsive. Every few years thousands of workers can no longer take it and go on hunger strikes, starving themselves to death rather than eating any more Vegn. Weakened by hunger they are easily subdued by the militia, and then are executed as object lessons to other potential rebels. For a while after this happens Vegn seems to taste better than it did. If it doesn't taste better, at least the poor no longer complain about it.
Glistendeep's worker and specialist classes consider themselves to be superior to their farming cousins. They reject much of the official religion. Even priests and temple workers have difficulty worshipping a god of fungus or cavernfalls when they have never seen such things. They worship the Prince because that is a civic responsibility, and because the punishment for failing to do so is death, but otherwise they celebrate their religion rarely and halfheartedly. The city is full of prophets, all proclaiming bizarre and mutually contradictory forms of religion, and every few years a new religion takes hold in the popular imagination, leads to mass demonstrations, and is subdued by government and temple working in unison. The city is ripe for the right prophet, one who can combine a popular message with an approach that doesn't invite a governmental crackdown.