Worldbuilding Wednesdays: Cultural Ingredients

Welcome to Worldbuilding Wednesdays!  Every Wednesday, we spend what is probably far too much time walking through our worldbuilding process.  This week, we start talking about building cultures.  Yeah, plural.  Turns out it's easier to make a bunch of them than it is to make just one.

What We Have So Far

We have three different intelligent species: what we've been calling the nu humans, the furries, and the scalies.  We have a lot of space for them to roam in, and we have made sure they are at least slightly more inclined to cooperate than drive to extinction any others they encounter.  We have a set of biomes that will change behaviors as the species adapt to them.  We have a relative abundance of resources, considering that this world is mostly Earth-like except for being 100 times larger (and only 10 times as massive).

We have, in short, a stage.  It's time we start setting it.

Cultures, Fast and Dirty

Let's put down a definition real quick.

  Culture.  A culture is a set of agreements, spoken and unspoken, between a group of people.

See?  Told you it would be quick.

This is not the most common definition of the word, but it is the one we'll be using.  Why?  Because, for right now, we're not developing the trappings of culture.  Normally, a definition of "culture" would also include the achievements, history, and technology of that group of people, but we have none of that as of yet.  We're still working on the "group of people" part.

Let's walk through how a culture develops, shall we?  We'll pick the nu humans to start, since they're going to be the people most familiar to us.  Then we'll dive down to one particular spot on the world:  a megasavanna about 20,000 km wide and 6500 km long.  It isn't the largest single biome on the planet, but it is on the larger end of the scale.  For reference, it's comparable in size to the entire surface area of Earth.

All the nu humans who live in this megasavanna are going to have more or less similar experiences.  They'll interact with each other regularly, and over time, they'll develop tools to do so more readily.  Tools like "language" and "art."  To make things more peaceable, they'll come up with "rules" that dictate how to behave.  Eventually, when they learn the trick to it, these people might even write some of the rules down, although not nearly all of them; nu humans are a little lazy, just like us, and they'll assume "everyone" knows certain rules.

How many cultures- that is, different sets of agreements- would you expect to pop up in this one megasavanna?  One?  Or would you assume, with space equal to Earth, the number of cultures would match that of Earth, in which case the number would be closer to 4,000?

The answer will likely be between those two numbers, and this also has to do with human laziness.  Let's say that one particular group forms a set of agreements before all the others do.  This isn't entirely accurate; based on what anthropologists have been able to determine, there have been multiple instances and locations throughout history where humans have spontaneously developed the idea of doing things the same way every time.  Still, it'll work for this little thought experiment.  This group forms a set of agreements, and by interacting with other groups, they teach them to do things the same way.  Slowly but surely, their culture spreads, yes?

As the culture spreads, however, it slowly changes.  Anyone who has played a game of "telephone" understands what happens- as the agreements get passed along, the people doing the passing begin to distort them.  Sometimes it will be intentional, as someone finds a "better" way to do something, but at least as often, it will be accidental, as someone forgets exactly how the agreement worked, but figures they got close enough.  Distort the agreements enough and you will eventually have two distinct sets of agreements.  And just like that, you also have two cultures.

There's no precise way of telling when and where a new culture will develop from an older one, but we can put an upper limit on how many will pop up in a given area.  Assuming all else stays the same, we can make the reasonable assumption that a given culture will hold sway, at the very least, with the people who invented it.  We could probably also make assumptions about how many of the people they directly interact with would be absorbed into their culture, but let's make this our absolute minimum.  We'll further assume that, until someone comes up with civilization, every culture is nomadic, wandering through the limits of the territory to which they lay claim.  Lastly, we'll assume that the upper limit of the culture's territory is equal to the area a culture will willingly cover on foot (because these cultures predate domesticating animals or vehicles).

Based on Earth's nomadic people, we can assume that nu humans will want to follow a roughly annual route, changing their location based on the prevailing conditions.  Our world has a "year" dictated by an unending storm that we at one point called The Blanket, causing each continent to cycle through three months of "kind of damp" and one month of "pretty wet."  A typical Earth nomad travels 10-20 miles on foot per day, giving us an acceptable average of 15 miles.  Days on our world are 40 hours long instead of 24, so nu humans would travel twice as far in a "day" (15 miles before stopping during the heat of the day, then 15 more before it got too dark to travel).  That gives us a 3600-mile annual circuit that a typical culture would cover.  Convert to kilometers, assume maximum occupied space, divide our savanna up into equally-sized chunks, and...

We have a maximum of 160 cultures.  The number might seem daunting, but it is much closer to "1" than "4,000."

Still, let's assume, for the sake of simplicity and symmetry, that cultures on our world are usually larger than that.  In fact, we're going to assume that cultures spread to 3 degrees of separation, because we like using the number "3" when answering questions.  That means your friend is going to be in the same culture as you, as is your friend's friend, and maybe even your friend's friend's friend, but that's as far as it goes.  Some blending will occur at the borders of a given culture's reach, which will lead to subcultures, but we're just interested in the major cultures.  Crunch the numbers again...

Our megasavanna, with its ideal conditions for maximizing the size of a culture, would average about 3 of them.  Extend that to the entirety of a continent on our world, and we would have 94 cultures and a few hundred sub-cultures.

Easy!

Remain Calm

Don't worry, we aren't going to spend the next year or two developing every culture.  In point of fact, the plan is to develop three major cultures and four major subcultures.  And even there, we'll be cutting some corners.

Remember how we said that it was easier to make a bunch of cultures than it was to make just one?  That's because the easiest way to make a culture is to start with an already-made culture and note the differences.  "The Beta Culture, unlike the Alpha Culture, does blah."  It gets easier still with multiple cultures, because they solve a problem with decision-making you might have.  Say that Culture 1 always blesses people after they sneeze.  You want to use that particular touchstone to differentiate between Culture 1 and Culture 2, but you can't decide whether Culture 2 curses people when they sneeze, points and laughs, or pretends they didn't notice.  Solution:  apply the other options to Culture 3 and 4, respectively.

Subcultures are also fairly easy; take two cultures, and then pick and choose cultural hallmarks of each.  It doesn't even have to be an even split; a subculture could be exactly like Culture 1 except that they all curse people when they sneeze.

Similarly, even major cultures can have things in common.  American cultures are all similar enough that most outsiders don't even notice there's a difference, and most American cultures have more in common with Canadian and Mexican cultures than they do European cultures.  American and European cultures, in turn, are more similar than American and Sub-Saharan African cultures.  So on and so forth.  This means that, even with the cultures we intend to address, we don't have to come up with a difference in every single category.  We swear, it's a lot less work than it looks.

A Beginning Checklist

To conclude, let's set the list of things we'll need to build a culture from scratch.  Remember, this is just the barebones "we identify as this group because we all follow the same set of agreements" culture.  The other bits, like history and whatnot, will be an exercise for later.

  Language.  The largest single set of agreements- an agreement as to what everything is called.

  Values and Beliefs.  The largest set of unspoken agreements.  This set, in particular, tends to be how a culture identifies itself.

  Norms.  The "average" behavior of members of a given culture.  Normally (ha!), norms are enforced through social pressure, rules, and laws.

  Social Organization.  We already have some idea of how each species organizes itself, thanks to the profiles we made, but those basics will change as the population of a given culture grows.  At the very least, hierarchies get established.  Someone always ends up in charge, after all.

  Adaptations.  Last but not least, every culture is going to adapt or be absorbed by a culture that adapts better.  What will they adapt to?  Whatever they need to do, whether that be changes they have to make to survive in a new environment, or changes they have to make to survive the introduction of another species.

Conclusion

Now that we have a list of things to establish about our cultures, we're ready to build a few and then watch them interact.  Since their location can be an important determination, it sounds like we're finally ready to return to our favorite spot.  Tune in next week, when we return to...

The Hill.