A series of articles on creating fantasy cultures

[limetom]

Thanks for your necessary guidance.

No problem.

[Elemental_Elf]

Wow the second article was VERY interesting.

I agree, it was over too soon, I hope he posts more! ^_^

[LordVreeg]

Durkheim is often creditied as one of the fathers of sociology.  His stuff is extremely useful for anyone trying to graduate past 'World-Building 101'.  I was introduced to it back in College, and enjoyed it, but a Grad Psych/Anth class I took much later gave me much more of an appreciation.

One thing that reflects Durkheim the most in Lehrich's primer is the appreciation for 'messiness', in that 'Social Facts' exist in and of themselves without a need for logic.  His views on education and social norms are almost as useful, especially in response to Meepo's comment.
[blockquote=Epic Meeepo]Second, when designing a culture intended for use in an RPG, it is often better to describe only the ideal form of that culture. Sweeping and unqualified generalizations about fantasy cultures are useful roleplaying tools. Determining the degree to which members of a culture deviate from these ideals is what you do when you develop the personalities of specific characters. Doing so beforehand merely ends up limiting PCs, making them strangers in their own cultures if they have a creative take on how a particular ideal would impact (or fail to impact) everyday life.[/blockquote]
I actually like to differentiate what is idealized and what is actually practised, sort of like giving a mean and a standard deviation for cultural aspects.  An example is the 'Pact Veritus' of the civilized areas of my setting, where all competing patrons agree not to discriminate against a person if they leave a patronage and spend more time at another church, but there are actually limits and hidden retributions that reflect human weaknesses.
I'm not going to go into specific outliers, but understanding both the idealized and some level of normal differentation gives a player a more 'realistic' and rich idea of what is around them.

Taken further...

Somthing that needs to be mentioned that is not mentioned is the opinions of a cutural subset from other cultural subsets, and this is where the purely '-emic' viewpoint ultimately fails, in that describing a cultural subset purely from the inside makes it easier to understand how someone from within that subset sees themselvels and lives thier life, but difficult to see how others see it from the outside.
This is fine in a setting where a GM always plops people into the same situation, so everyone sees it from the same, inside perspective, but since most of us prefer to create rich, interwoven campaigns it is actually just as useful to have the '-etic' viewpoint, or if not the neutral, constructionist version of '-etic', at least the way others who regularly come into contact with a certain cultural subset actually view that cultural subset.

That is why this statement by LC...
[blockquote=LC]If I go to China, I may be confused at the unfamiliar behaviors I find there. But if I start justifying what I observe through my outsider's perspective-- "The Chinese do X because of Y" -- then I am grossly oversimplifying that culture (and probably getting it all wrong, in the process.) Any tale I could tell you about China based upon my oversimplified explanations would be quite dull and false-feeling, compared to the actual Chinese culture.[/blockquote]
is so important.  
It is valid to understand that a total outsider to China would have a totally neutral view, more important to a game to understand how the Chinese see themselves (if we are going to drop our players into China), but I would argue just as important is how the Tibetans and Eastern Russians and Japanese and koreans and mongolians view the Chinese.  
God, Guild, and Country is the triumverate of the most sacred in my setting (and God and Guild are very often the same thing), so understanding the inside view (the '-emic') of a faction and how those who are constantly contacting that faction percieve it are the two most important views to consider, with the neutral, outsider's view (the '-etic') the third and least important view.

Thus,
[blockquote=LC][blockquote=Rael]For example, how are we supposed to discard the outside perspective? Aren't we initially outsiders, even to our own creations?[/blockquote]
I wouldn't say the need it to discard it, but to avoid using external justifications for why a culture does what it does. If we play Jane Goodall to our cultures, we reduce them to apes.[/blockquote]
is actually illuminating a larger issue with this view, a dyadic split that is confounding the issue by itself.  To wit, players need more than just the inside and the outside, they need to know about the interaction between them.  I actually prefer more of a Mayist view of Umwelt, Mitwelt, and Eigenwelt, and bastardizing (what is what sociology does to psychology anyways) the terms to mean:

Umwelt-an outsiders view, emprically how the world works upon the faction or person.
Mitwelt-the faction or person as it interactas and is experienced by those directly affected and affecting it.
Eigenwelt-The faction as it sees itself from the inside perspective only, how the faction is viewed an lived by a participant.

Personally, this makes more sense to me.

(Edit--I had way too much fun writing that.  Haven't worked that particular group synapses for a while.)