beccaelizabeth: my Watcher tattoo in blue, plus Be in red Buffy style font (Default)
[personal profile] beccaelizabeth
I've been reading a RPG world description, and it's been bothering me. They keep on emphasising how weird and confusing and contradictory their 'eastern' culture is. They also emphasise that it isn't actually Chinese or Japanese or any particular Earth culture, but it is said to be descended from a big mixture of cultures from that bit of the world. It mentions how strange and surprising it is that Buddhism and Hinduism and Taoism and Confucianism and Shinto and probably some others I forgot the words for bump along together not just as a community of different believers but as different beliefs in the same people. It's a description of culture from the outside, saying that they don't know how they make sense of it.

Recently I have been studying a culture that was theoretically monotheistic but had many revered holy beings, hierarchical but mocked those in the hierarchy, that spent vast time and effort on holiday, festival, carnival, turning the rules upside down, then justifying them in grand pageants that acted out a theory of everything, living for a faith that believed in the holiness of humility and charity and celebrating it by covering stuff in gold and gems and valuable cloth. And people living in this culture, where they could still be killed for heresy, nonetheless looked to authorities from polytheistic religions for moral guidance, explained their behaviour by the actions of Mars and Venus, who were both stars and gods, told stories about sacrificing to different deities, and held up as heroes people who had never heard of their one god. They idealised a code of behaviour adopted from Arabic civilisations, and then did a lot of war with them. Layers and layers of beliefs accumulated holy figures from very old stories. Fertility rituals and the honoring of small spirits coexisted with varying degrees of comfort with the big political monotheism. And everyone bumped along feeling it was pretty coherent, all in all. This is British culture. Christian, Greek, Roman, Islam, European, earlier beliefs of these islands, bits of Norse stuff brought in by the North folk, and the kind of everyday superstition that individuals build up. How do we make sense of it all?

Every belief system we've bumped into we've brought home and worked in to some kind of pattern with everything else. Usually that involves thinking how We make sense and They do not.
... usually this involves really not looking in the mirror very carefully.

Date: 2009-01-20 10:58 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] mcamason.livejournal.com
Yes, Becca, I certainly do love your thinky brain more than a little bit.

VERY nicely summarized.

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beccaelizabeth: my Watcher tattoo in blue, plus Be in red Buffy style font (Default)
beccaelizabeth

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