ANTHRO 100: Things to keep in mind when playing - and designing cultures in - the Fifth World

The Wandering Free Families

There are four basic kinds of human society, listed here from the least to the most complex:

1. Bands
2. Tribes
3. Chiefdoms
4. States

The line between tribes and chiefdoms is kind of blurry, but otherwise that's pretty much it. I'm going to spend the vast majority of this post talking about bands, because those are what most Fifth Worlders live in. And I'm going to say right now that there are no states in the Fifth World. I'll go into more detail on this later, but a state—the level of society we live in, with cities and large-scale farming and stuff—requires a whole lot of ecological resources. We are currently in the process of consuming an insane amount of those ecological resources, so after our civilization collapses, Fifth Worlders aren't going to be left with much of a foundation on which to build a state. I'm not talking nuclear radiation or anything, just that 400 years isn't anywhere near enough time to restore the amount of fertile topsoil they'd need for such a venture, to name only one problem. But again, I'll talk about that more later. Right now, let's talk about bands.

Picture your extended family. Like, everyone. All the family members who get together for holidays and all the ones who can't make it some years. Everyone you would invite (or did invite) to your wedding who's related to you through either blood or marriage. Hold them in your mind. Now imagine that they're basically your entire society. This is the band. In fact, if you've got a big Italian family like me, it's probably even smaller—like 30 to 50 people. It's the least complex kind of human society there is, and it's what most Fifth Worlders live in. And no one put it better than our friend Willem Larson in his article, The Wandering Free Families:

Imagine this: you, your parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents, mothers and fathers, children, cousins, second cousins, your whole extended family, has lived the life of a year-round summer camp for as long as you remember. You live together, resolve conflicts, and support one another as best you can, as a family. Your in-jokes have become the stuff of legend, your artistic styles have inspired each other, for countless generations you have collaborated on a vital and celebratory family culture that you enjoy. You make decisions as a community, relying on the wisdom of those you trust. The smallest child contributes to voice of the community as a whole. No police, no bureaucracy, no institutions…instead you have taboos, family consensus processes, and traditions. A Free Family, living your life on the land.

In video game terms, think less Sid Meier's Civilization, and more The Sims 3. The Fifth World is about your family living on the land—and I don't mean that in a Little House on the Prairie way, where you live with your nuclear family and go to church and go into town to find bustling marketplaces. Your family is your society. Most of the time, the only people you see or talk to are related to you in some way. You might get together with neighboring bands every so often. But the only strangers you'll ever meet, you'll meet at festivals.

Every so often (maybe once a year or once every five years or something in-between), there's this huge festival that draws in people from all over the area. People trade, play games, tell stories, fall in love, and marry people they fell in love with at the last festival. It's like what we might call a city, but it bears more resemblance to Black Rock City than New York City. After the festival, each band goes home, often (because of the marriages) having gained a few new family members and having lost a few.

Admittedly, to modern ears this sounds kind of stifling. But this isn't the extended family most of us have, where people lead wildly divergent lives on opposite coasts and tempers flare at Thanksgiving. These people live together day-in, day-out. They look after each other's kids and provide for each other's meals and take care of each other when they're sick and tell each other stories for entertainment. They get along because they have to get along. Because they literally rely on each other for survival, they're closer to each other than many of us are to even our closest friends. They are united by tight bonds of love and heritage.

A previous version of the game focused on relationships, and required that every relationship at the table be either "blood" or "sex." In other words, everyone in your band is either related to you by blood, or you're in love with that person. That emphasized very early on the smallness of these cultures. Unfortunately, the mechanics had a lot of problems and Jason ultimately decided that he wanted the game to be about improving the land rather than interpersonal drama. But while the blood-or-sex relationship requirement is no longer a part of the rules, it's still a good principle to keep in mind when, say, coming up with an NPC or thinking about how two characters at the table know each other.

Aunt Susan Hath Spoken

When people think of primitive societies, they're usually picturing a chiefdom. Because our hierarchical society is all we've ever known, the concept of a truly egalitarian culture is hard to picture—and often easy to dismiss as unrealistic. Even in a hunter-gatherer band, we imagine, there must be some kind of chief. How could there not be? Once you start thinking less in terms of "band-level society" and more in terms of "wandering free family," you start to understand why the idea of a strong hierarchy in a band is so absurd.

Again, think about your extended family. There's probably someone—a grandparent, an uncle or aunt—who is seen as the family patriarch or matriarch. Maybe Christmas and Easter are always held at her house. Maybe everyone sees her as being the one who keeps the family traditions alive. Maybe everyone goes to her for advice. But she's not "chief." Unless she's a total asshole, she's not like, "I COMMAND THEE TO GO TO LAW SCHOOL. AUNT SUSAN HATH SPOKEN." She's more like, "No, I completely understand: college is a time when you explore what interests you. I'm just wondering if you've given any thought to what you're going to do with a philosophy degree."

Elders are respected and listened to because they've seen it all—or at least more than you have. But their word isn't law. There is no law, really, just a collection of taboos reinforced through subtle social pressure. And of course, you can always disagree. If there are arguments, you'll try to settle it through talking, and try to come to a consensus: is there any way to make everyone happy? This is the purest form of democracy there is: everyone has a voice not because they have a vote, but because there's maybe 40 people in your whole society, and you can listen to everyone explain their opinion—at length.

Most people find it hard to believe that human beings ever lived without hierarchy, or economic inequality, or leaders. So when they hear that bands don't have any of these things, they don't believe it. It sounds like Noble Savage idealism. It doesn't gel with what people think they know about our own "primitive" ancestors: the dumb  grunting caveman clubbing people over the head. But it all keeps coming back to the fact that this is a family. You'd have to be a total asshole to boss your grandchildren around, and you'd have to be a total asshole to not at least listen to what your grandfather has to say. You'd have to be a total asshole to not share with your child all the food you had hunted or gathered, and you'd have to be a total asshole to not do the same for your parents. And murder? Yes, it sounds utopian to live in a society where murder is so rare that your grandmother's the only one who remembers the last one, but again, we're talking about murdering your own family members. And because this society's so small, the murder of one person is proportionally as devastating as World War II.

So it's vitally important that bands develop ways of getting along, that they create taboos against various forms of assholishness and know how to enforce those taboos without the enforcers themselves becoming assholes. After all, if everyone was being a total asshole, they'd all stomp off and die alone and that would be the end of their society. The bands that survive are the ones that learn to live together harmoniously. It's been 400 years, so we can say with some certainty that those are the only ones left.

The really wonderful thing is, all humans can do this. There's a lot of evidence that we evolved these ridiculously big brains just so we could navigate social networks: so we could keep track of who was ticked off at whom and how that effects her relationship with him, and adjust our behavior towards all those people accordingly. Unfortunately, we never evolved to handle more than about 150 people, so our mass society with millions of people crammed into each city kind of makes our heads asplode. We invented things like laws and leaders as a crutch to overcome that. But in the Fifth World, those crutches broke. Fifth Worlders are going to have to relearn those skills—or else they're not going to live long enough to become Fifth Worlders.

Fernando's Hideaway

Okay, so I've hammered the "family" part of the "wandering free family" equation into the ground. What about the "wandering" part? Foragers don't settle down in just one place; if they did, they'd hunt all the animals and pick clean all the plants in that one area, and then they'd starve. They travel around a very large range, generally in some kind of circle, camping in the southern part of their range in the winter and the northern part of their range in the summer. (Obviously, if they're in the southern hemisphere, it's the other way around.) That way, by the time they get back to their other camps, the land has had plenty of time to restore itself.

Even horticulturalists move. They garden the area around the "new village" for about twenty years or so, and then they move back to the "old village," and the two swap places. By that time, the area around the old village has had time to recuperate, and they can begin gardening again.

This raises the question of places. The first thing you do when playing the Fifth World is pick and name a place on the map. Most people, having grown up in a state-level society, will automatically think of a village, small town, or city. But as we saw before, no Fifth Worlders live in cities, and only some of them live in settled villages—and even those, you probably have no more than two of them on your map. So if a place isn't a village or a town, then what is a place in the Fifth World? Well, if someone asked me to name what some important places were to me growing up, here's a few that come to mind:

• The fern in my family's side-yard that bent over in such a way as to provide a good amount of concealment. I called it "Fernando's Hideaway," punned off of a song from The Pajama Game. (No, I did not pay particular attention to the lyrics. Why ever do you ask?) I liked to crawl under its branches and pretend it was any number of things, but especially a secret hide-out from pirates or other bad guys.
• The tall lookout post in the middle of the field way out in the woods. It was almost magical: you'd be hiking through the woods for hours, and then suddenly it would just stop, and this vast golden field would unfold before you. And in the middle of this field was this tall, wooden, red-painted post probably used by hunters. If you climbed up to the top, you could see everything, and one time I found an owl pellet up there.
• The lake that marked the end of the line. Usually when I was hiking in the woods behind my house, I'd take a familiar trail that roped behind my street's line of houses all the way to a lake. When I'd get to the lake, I'd always feel a sense of accomplishment, and I'd stay for a few moments to look out over the waters before turning around and going back. Somebody was always trying to develop the area around the lake into some kind of McMansion neighborhood, and nobody ever could. So while the lake itself was beautiful, the area between the lake and the end of the hiking trail was (and probably still is) a dusty, abandoned construction site. I once ventured into the darkness inside an old trailer, rusted over and spray-painted with penises, to find bottles and other garbage scattered around. In my overactive imagination, I figured gangs met here to do drugs and plot murders—and I'd better get away before the gang members found me. Given that this was in the exurbs outside of Poughkeepsie, it was probably just teenagers. But I still remember the old construction site being a scary, mysterious place.

So that's the level we're talking about when we talk about naming a place. It could be a sacred waterfall where your character goes to pray. It could be the grove of old oak trees where your character's mother gave birth to him or her. It could be the swimming hole where your character and his or her siblings and cousins loved to cool off in the summers. But whatever it is, it's small. It's Fernando's Hideaway, not Poughkeepsie.

Little Hawk of the Headland Valley

Have you ever noticed that our names don't mean anything?

Well, that's not entirely true. A few of our names are also living words—mostly girl's names, taken from flowers, jewels, or virtues (Faith, Hope, Joy, etc.). And the rest of our names also mean something, just in other languages—like Latin, Old English, Hebrew, or Gaelic. But most of us don't speak any of those languages. Doesn't it seem odd that a person might look up her name in a name dictionary to find that it means "wisdom" in Greek instead of, say, just being named "Wisdom"?

Our names which are words only in other (often dead) languages is a unique result of our particular, fast-moving, globalized society. But even in European history, the concept that someone has a name given to her at birth which stays with her throughout her life is a relatively new invention. Surnames are new, too; you have to have a pretty complex and crowded society to require such elaboration as "William the miller" to differentiate himself from "William the fletcher." Little Hawk of the Headland Valley sounds very Last of the Mohicans to our ears, until you translate the pieces of that name back into their original languages to find that it's just the English translation of Gavin Rossdale.

For most cultures throughout most of history, all names had a readily understandable meaning. And most names grew out of nicknames, or descriptors of that person. If a medieval Frenchwoman was particularly pale, she might be called Blanche. Nowadays, a child named "Blanche" indicates nothing about her—except perhaps that her parents are very fond of A Streetcar Named Desire. In most band and tribal societies, your nicknames are your name—and when you change, the name changes with you. You'll often "earn" a new name when you come of age, or when you accomplish something great. This is why the Fifth World character sheet has four different slots for names, and why the other players at the table choose your names for you. Of course, we're simplifying it by giving you only one name at a time, which corresponds to only one age group: in a real band culture, different people might have different names for you at any given time, and all of them would be legitimate names.

Fifth Worlders, obviously, speak many different languages, none of which currently exist. So let's just assume for the purposes of the game that we're translating it into our language. There's no particular reason for them to hang on to our traditional names, which sound like nonsense words both to us and to them. (Unless they're a cargo cult, obsessed with the Fourth World—but that's pretty rare.) So Fifth World names should be English words and phrases that say something about the character. For instance: I used to walk on my toes all the time when I was little. Some people called me "twinkle toes." Therefore, my child name in the Fifth World might be Twinkle Toes. (Child names are often gently teasing like that; the name Pocahontas translates into something like "little brat.")

Place names are also descriptive like that. (I'll come back to place names a little later on.) For inspiration, check out the awesome and addictive Atlas of True Names, which replaces many of the world's place names (like "Chicago") with modern English translations (like "Stink Onion." Yes, Chicago means "stink onion.") Remember this when naming characters and places, and Little Hawk may fly once more.

I was going to finish writing all this before I started posting it, but I'm tragically stricken with con crud and also tired because I haven't gotten a proper night's sleep in literally a week. I took NyQuil last night, but all that happened was I woke up at around 3 AM in a hallucinatory fog, convinced that the room I was in was some kind of RPG. Anyway, I've got a bunch more stuff about bands, and I didn't even outline anything about tribes or chiefdoms or reasons why civilization couldn't be re-started. So I think I'm going to go lay down on the couch, and get back to this later. Or Jason, you're the one with the fancypants degree in all this, so if you want to pick this up until I'm no longer riddled with plague, be my guest.

Now that I'm no longer oozing mucus from every orifice, I have returned with some more anthro geekery.

How Your Family Lives:

The way we look at nature is heavily influenced by how we interact with it. We happen to live in a culture that dominates nature: we personally plant all our own food, and so it's a disaster when nature doesn't provide us with enough rain, or gives us too much rain, or sends in swarms of insects. We personally raise and care for all our own meat animals, so it's a disaster when coyotes or wolves run off with some of them. Overall, "nature" is that scary, uncontrollable thing out there that's constantly threatening our livelihood. Only when our culture hit the Industrial Age (and our current post-Industrial age) and large numbers of people could live their lives apart from nature, did we gain the psychological distance required to romanticize it. But ultimately, even if we personally don't grow the grain we eat, our existence as civilized people relies on an adversarial relationship with the land.

Hunter-gatherers are different. They don't grow their own food or raise their own animals (except for pets - and even they mostly raise themselves). Nature grows all the food they need to survive; they just go out and grab some. They eat a far more diverse diet than we do. They know which plants and berries and nuts are edible, and they nibble a little bit of each, and they hunt a number of different animals, large and small. They take a little bit of basically everything in their ecosystem that's edible, and that makes up their diet. We, on the other hand, rely on a small handful of domesticated cerial grains (wheat, corn, rice, etc.) and domesticated animals (cows, chickens, pigs, etc.) and with few exceptions (like fish) eat nothing we didn't personally produce. A hunter-gatherer looks at a forest and sees a grocery store, only everything's for free; a farmer looks at a forest and sees a whole bunch of trees he has to cut down, and a whole bunch of undergrowth he has to clear away, and all the plowing and the planting and the watering and the harvesting and the grinding and the baking until he'll finally have some food. Frankly, it's kind of a stupid way to live. Jared Diamond agrees.

But we're not here to talk about the virtues of foraging vs. farming. We're talking about how subsistence patterns effect the way a culture views and interacts with the ecosystem around it. "Subsistence pattern" basically just means how you get your food. Most Fifth Worlders get their food through hunting and gathering, and that has a profound effect on how they relate to the world.

For one thing, it changes the kinds of buildings they live in. Some cultures construct houses that are easy to assemble and disassemble; others make houses they can carry around with them, like teepees or yurts. But whatever your Fifth Worlder's house is made out of, it's definitely not going to be brick and mortar. It's also probably only going to have one room in it, even though your character's whole family sleeps there. In case you're concerned about privacy, never fear: your character doesn't spend much time in her own home. Foragers spend most of their time outside, only coming inside to sleep, or if the weather's really bad. So if he needs time alone to brood, he'll go off into a quiet grove or a field somewhere. (Maybe his favorite place?)

The constant moving around also suppresses the population. Here's the thing: if you pick up your house and all your stuff and walk like ten miles every couple of months, how many babies do you want to be carrying around? Exactly. Each reproducing woman, through a mix of herbal birth control, extended breastfeeding, and - yes - abortions, restricts herself to at most one baby every two to four years. This has the added effect of equalizing gender relations.

In a farming society, you need more and more people to work the land - and people are dying all the time. Women as a whole aren't so good at the backbreaking labor of plowing, so they get shuttled inside to make themselves useful by cooking for the men and staying constantly pregnant, making as many new little farmers as they possibly can. Ten thousand years later, we end up with Phyllis Schafly. But when you're living in a society where women don't need to stay constantly pregnant to keep up with the death rate, and therefore get to, you know, do things, they get more respect. Don't assume that just because Fifth Worlders aren't flying around in jet planes and wearing suits, that means your female character is a second-class citizen, required to submit to her husband and make lots of babies. That's a civilized invention. She may gather rather than hunt, but her contributions are respected.

While we're on the topic of misogyny, let's get another thing out of the way: don't project our culture's tradition of homophobia onto the Fifth World. Our culture is uniquely freaked out by sexual and gender diversity. Most cultures, and especially most primitive cultures, have a place for LGBTs - often a place of honor. Again, this has a lot to do with subsistence patterns. If people are dying around age 30 and you need to make more and more people to work the land, you will freaking hate that gay guy who isn't doing his duty and making with the babies. But if you're always moving around and a baby is just one more damn thing to carry (not to mention added pressure on the ecosystem), then that very same gay guy rocks the hizzy: now you've got an uncle who pitch in to help raise the kids you've already got.

Usually, primitive cultures recognize at least four genders: men with male spirits, women with female spirits, men with female spirits, and women with male spirits. Because LGBTs are viewed as having two genders, they're often believed to have a lot of power. (Living between two worlds gives you power, because you've got this perspective that most people don't.) What many Native American groups call "two-spirits," we'd consider "transgender" or even "genderqueer." Some cultures will lump gays and lesbians into that category too, but other times, there will be even more genders for them. Gender roles in these societies are very strict, but on the plus side, there's a lot of them and you can choose which one you want.

Here's another thing: foraging doesn't take nearly as much time or effort as farming does. The average forager only works about 2-3 hours a day. Which makes sense, when you think about it. I mean, when you farm, you're basically doing all of Mother Nature's work for her: planting, growing, watering, and then harvesting. All foragers do is harvest - and they don't even harvest all of it, just what they need at that particular moment. When you raise animals, you have to feed them, shelter them, protect them from predators, make sure they don't wander off, breed them, then kill them and slaughter them. All foragers have to do is find the animals, kill them, and slaughter them. They wait for Mother Nature to do all the work of growing and raising, then they come in at the end of the process and take what they need. Easy-peasy.

We have this idea of forager life being a life of unremitting toil, but once you know the basics of what's edible and how to hunt, it's actually pretty easy to survive. By the time the average forager comes of age, around 12 or 13 years old, she already knows basically everything she needs to. If everyone in her family died, she'd be able to keep feeding and clothing herself. She may not be very comfortable, but she'll stay alive. Any idiot can set a rabbit trap, and anyone can absentmindedly grab a handful of wintergreen leaves to munch on. Which brings us to our next subject: there is no skill specialization.

While your character may have, say, a really awesome score in "Hunter," that does not make him A Hunter, like he'd be a Ranger in D&D or something. That's why your character's got a base skill level in every segment on the compass. Everybody's got some level of hunting skill. Your character just happens to be seriously awesome at it, probably better than everyone else in the band. But he does other things, and similarly, another character on the table who's got a great score in Shaman probably hunts with you. There are no defined jobs, really: everybody contributes some food, and everybody helps set up the shelter, and everybody entertains their family members, and everybody carves arrowheads, and everybody everybody wants to love, and everybody everybody wants to be loved. Whoa-oh-oh. Sorry, just making sure you're paying attention.

But hunting and gathering isn't exactly the cold economic process I've made it out to be here. When you rely so heavily on natural processes to give you your food - to give you your life - it becomes a sacred thing. Author Daniel Quinn calls it "living in the hands of the gods," but most forager cultures don't believe in gods, per se. Hunting and gathering informs a "religion" that isn't really like any religion we'd recognize as such. Most Fifth Worlders are "animists" - a much-maligned, much-misunderstood way of viewing the world that I'll discuss in my next post.

Yay, somebody else posted in this thread!

Thanks for the corrections. As I said before, you're the one with the fancypants degree; I've just read a bunch of stuff for fun. And honestly, I'm writing all this mostly from memory rather than consulting any of the books. Partly because I can't remember exactly where I read all this. So... feel free to chip in more often. All of you. (Pwease.)

Actually, point #2 was what I was trying to say, but I kinda messed up the delivery. (Ha!) Yeah, it's pretty much only pregnant women that should definitely not be out pushing plows. Non-pregnant women can push all the plows they want; the problem is, farming requires a certain Duggar-like philosophy.