When adventuring, chances are your players will be traveling to foreign cities and villages. Most of the time though, these locations will feel very similar. Maybe this village is run by an overprotective mayor. Maybe this city has a new gang threathing the local businesses. But these are essentially variations around a single frame of reference.
The good news is that there is a simple - yet deep and historically motivated - notion that can help bring your setting to life and generate endless stories: Cultural inversion.
Take the rival city-states of Sparta and Athens in the fifth century BC. Athens is considered the craddle of Western civilization, an enlightened city home of many philosophers and practicing democratic principles.1 Sparta, on the other hand, was home to warriors and oligarchs. As antrhopologist Marshall Sahlins puts it: “Dynamically interconnected, they were then reciprocally constituted… Athens was to Sparta as sea to land, cosmopolitan to xenophobic, commercial to autarkic, luxurious to frugal, democratic to oligarchic, urban to villageois, autochthonous to immigrant, logomanic to laconic: one cannot finish enumerating the dichotomies… Athens and Sparta were antitypes.”
This contrast between the two city states is not an accident. It incarns what anthropologists refer to as schismogenesis. Introduced by Bateson in the 1930’s, schismogenesis describes people’s tendency to define themselves against one another. While Bateson explored this concept at the level of individuals, it has been extended to encompass neighboring cities or even whole societies.
‘Schismogenesis describes how societies in contact with each other end up joined within a common system of differences, even as they attempt to distinguish themselves from one another. […] Each society performs a mirror image of the other. In doing so, it becomes an indispensable alter ego, the necessary and ever-present example of what one should never wish to be.’ David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything
Cities and societies can distinguish themselves from one another along multiple dimensions, from art to administrative systems. Let’s consider a few examples:
In the Fertile Crescent, the uplanders organized their artistic and ceremonial lives around the theme of predatory male violence, while the lowlanders tended to organize theirs around female knowledge and symbolism.
Evidence from ancient Eurasia points to a pattern where urban administrative systems inspired a cultural counter-reaction in the form of quarelling princedoms (‘barbarians’, from the perspective of the city dwellers).
In the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast and of California, wealth and status were the central points of opposition. Where the wealthy Yurok were expected to be modest, Kwakiutl chiefs were boastful and vainglorious. Where wealthy Yurok made little of their ancestry, Northwest Coast households staged banquets to enhance their reputations and secure their claims to honorific titles and heirloom treasures stretching back to the beginning of time.
In Mesoamerica, Teotihuacan stands in stark contrast to other ancient kingdoms. Elements of royal display such as the ceremonial ball-court or the equivalent of Tikal’s great tombs are conspicuously absent.2 Art is also markedly different: Whereas Maya and Zapotec art favour curves and flowing forms, the sculpture of Teotihuacan shows humanoid figures as flat composites fitted to angular blocks.
In this last example, the contrasts are so pronounced that art historian Esther Pasztory argued that the highland Teotihuacan and the lowland Maya consitute a case of conscious cultural inversion on the scale of urban civilizations.
Now you don’t need to be an anthropologist to use the concept of schismogenesis in your RPG setting. The previous examples already serve as a great source of inspiration to add texture and depth to your setting. But even more simply: What if, when traveling from one location to another, your players were to encounter a city or society that stand for the opposite of what they are used to? What new stories could emerge? How would their characters react?
References and further reading
- “The Dawn of Everything”, by D. Graeber and D. Wengrow
- “Against the Grain”, by James Scott
Athens is of course not the first democratic instance, and even then its democracy was all relative. The right to vote was reserved to its male citizens, excluding, among others, women, resident foreigners, and its slave population. Athens was indeed a society built on slavery, with slaves consituting more than half its habitants in some periods. ↩︎
Archaeologists have combed through the ancient tunnels around the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon and under the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, only to discover that the passages lead to chthonic labyrinths and shrines rather than the graves of sacred rulers. ↩︎
