fantasy settings and cultural pluralism

[clehrich]

Nope, clouds part.  To paraphrase, what we are familiar with is "everyday life", what you are refering to is "everyday life, version 1.1 the gods are amongst us".  The details of what is experienced would be different, as they are for us and our medieval ancestors, but the psychology of everday life (another day, another dollar;  same shit, different day etc.) would be the same.  So the rabbit god in the carrot patch again, wouldn't be a source of wonder and awe but frustration and "honey, I thought you propitiated him this week".  About right?  If it is I'd hazard a guess that we are talking about the same thing, just viewed through differenct lenses.  The way I see it, the more lenses the better.

I'm assuming that you're being facetious, and that my cracking up at the remark on the rabbit god was intended.  Because I don't actually mean that it's necessarily quite that everyday, but I think we're on the same page, right?

I believe my confusion stemmed from the use of system in this extract:

If the gods walk among us, not conceptually but actually, they're people. Not quite people like us, but people. And that means they're part of the system.

with system, as political system, implied in section 6 of your original post in this sentence:

Assume that if there is only one religion, it is a state religion, an important function of which is to maintain and stabilize royal or other centralized power.

Combine "system" with "people" and I think politics, hence the misunderstanding.

Hang on a sec, I'm having a little trouble parsing here.  I'm not going to do a Ralph Cramden "I said that you said that I said..." thing, because that'll make it worse.  Best I can do: here is what you had thought I said:

The point is that the gods become politicians

Have I got that right?

In which case, no wonder you thought this a little odd!

Sorry.  I have been thinking rather too much about the issue of constructing fantasy settings since this thread first began, and a lot of the way I'm going about it weaves through various kinds of Marx-influenced ways of thinking about culture and society.  So when I said "system" I did mean politics, but you have to remember that for the Marxian crew, everything is politics.  Just because of the peculiar range of things I've been reading, the phrase "everyday life" is strongly colored for me with a Marxian tinge --- I'm thinking M. De Certeau, L. Febvre, H. Harootunian, etc.  So yes, because the gods are people they are political actors, but no, I don't mean that in a narrow sense.  I mean that the common conception we have of gods and spirits is that they are outside whatever system it is that we are living in and constructing and being constructed by; if the gods walk among us all the time, they are no longer outside the system but part of it, just like all of us, all the time.

My impression is that we're pretty much on an even keel here, yes?

[Green]

The discussion about the influence deities would have on everyday life if they manifested all the time is interesting, but I would prefer to keep things on topic and read about gods walking amongst us in another thread.

To bring the discussion to a more relevant point, I believe that going beyond the Western understanding of spirituality is indeed a great way to break away from the default Eurocentric cultural model.  In particular, moving from the transcendant to the immanent spiritual perspective changes the way people view their place in the world.  I agree with Chris in that immanent divinity would lead people to deal with gods and spirits as family and neighbors rather than beings completely beyond our understanding and experience.  A parallel example I can think of is a person who has been able to see and speak to spirits since childhood.  Regardless of what you believe about spirits, the person who sees them perceives and interacts with them much like they would anybody else.  The rules of interaction and the manner of contact may be different, but no more different than using a telephone or the internet to contact someone.

As far as magic and non-humans, I think what we must be careful of (and what is more or less what has been said throughout this thread) is making assumptions about how they work.  If we assume that non-humans are simply biological variations of humans or other animals, or that magic is a force that can be quantified like gravity or electricity, we run the risk of making everything just like it already is.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that you cannot answer questions about magic and non-human entities until you define magic and what makes non-human entities the way they are.  I'm not saying that completely disregarding real history and real science is the goal, but I think we should use these as springboards rather than boundaries.  For instance, something I've considered is making photon-based life forms that loosely correspond to angels, devas, and fairies.  Rather than spending so much time finding reasons why it can or can't exist, I'm more interested in exploring the natural, social, and metaphysical ramifications of this idea.

Otherwise, why play fantasy?

[CPXB]

To bring the discussion to a more relevant point, I believe that going beyond the Western understanding of spirituality is indeed a great way to break away from the default Eurocentric cultural model.  In particular, moving from the transcendant to the immanent spiritual perspective changes the way people view their place in the world.  I agree with Chris in that immanent divinity would lead people to deal with gods and spirits as family and neighbors rather than beings completely beyond our understanding and experience.

I think it is very wrong to conflate the Christian worldview with the Western.  Prior to Christianity, European pagans very much treated spirits as entities that they walked with on a day to day basis.  Confucious would find pre-Christian Roman spirituality both comprehensible and proper.

It is very hard, I think, to define what makes a spiritual belief "Western" or "Eastern".  One would think that Buddhism could make for the archetype of Eastern philosophy and its differences from Western philosophy; but the most common form of Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism, formed because of the contact of Sogdianian and Bactrian Buddhists with Hellenized kings (such as in "The Questions of King Milinda").  Likewise, many people have noticed that in the words of Jesus strongly resemble certain Hindu and Buddhist beliefs and speculate the 12 years of his life that the Bible doesn't mention could well be him traveling into the East.

As another example of what I'm talking about, you said that your first post that Star Wars is an example of the sort of thing you're referring to.  When the first SW movie came out -- I guess we're calling it episode 4, now -- my father got me a book called "The Force of Star Was" which treats the movie as a Christian allegory.  And much of the brouhaha over more recent movies has been the percieved racism in the orientalism of the badguys (esp. in ep 1 with the, what?  Trade Consortium?) and the whole Jar-Jar Binks fiasco.  My point being that many people don't take Star Wars as an example of Eastern-style mysticism (heck, considering how Lucas fails to understand the topic I'm pretty glad for this) and very much see racism in his percieved orientalism and depiction of some aliens.

In a more practical matter, in my experience in trying to run games with non-Western perspectives (something that I nigh constantly do in fantasy games) is very hard because few players really have an interest in attempting to understand non-Western cultures.  IME, they don't much want to do it.