Worldbuilding 201: Cultures
Hello and welcome! This is the worldbuilding blog with your favourite alien Limax, Vivian! Pleasure to see you all again! This time we will be talking about cultures. Which is a very broad topic and is likely to be redone in subparts along the way, but for now, the broad aspects!
What is culture?
Culture is a loose concept to define, so when we think about a culture, what do we usually include, and why? This is of course on a large scale; an individual person may deviate.
Beliefs: Religious beliefs are included here, but they are not the only ones. Beliefs such as what is worthwhile, what matters in life, and so on are all included as well. “Honour before surrender” is a cultural belief. A focus on honour, loyalty, wealth accumulation, all of those are cultural beliefs.
Expected social behaviours: When you meet someone, there are certain expectations in how to behave. How you introduce yourself, how you talk, how you deal with conflicts, deviations from these can be huge issues. The classical is east vs west in behaviour. But all these expectations and actual behaviour is part of the culture. It however does not mean that all behaviours are ethical or moral, just because they are cultural.
Customs: A culture shares customs and rituals that are done at specific times, events, and such, and shares the manner that they do it. Everything from human sacrifice to singing happy birthday!
Style: From art, architecture, and such, a culture has a style to it all that they like and appreciate. This includes music and well any kind of artistic expression.
And more!
Yes, there is more, but these things can in some sense be seen as the core of what makes a culture unique compared to the others. A thing to pay attention to, however, is that the degree of tolerance of the level of deviance from these cultural traits is itself a part of the culture. And cultures may be more tolerant of deviations in some aspects but entirely intolerant on others.
Biology and culture
I can hear you say
Biology and culture are two different things!
To which I say… are they? Well yes, they are, but culture is affected by biology. For example, food rituals. I am autistic and have always viewed food as just a means to keep my biological body running. But of course mum and others around disagree 🙄 You gotta sit together and eat, discuss today's topics and all here in the west. In other cultures, it is more! There are so many rituals and customs around eating, you can’t just grab the food and do your thing. Anne happily informs me that in some American subcultures, it is expected to eat in front of the TV with no talking, lucky bastards in that regard. Okay, enough bitching, now imagine if they were more reptilian-like? They don’t need to sit and eat everyday, let alone thrice a day! Keep in mind, the rituals for humans change depending on which meal it is! What if these reptilians only eat once a week? Once a fortnight? The importance of the meal will take on a whole new meaning, especially if they eat so much they have to spend a day or two sleeping to digest it. How many cultural things could you do around this? Lots!
Now what about… family? Family has historically been a means to secure reproduction as that is important to life. I am not saying that is all that matters, just that historically it has been the main focus. There are so many options based on human reproduction and differences. Now, what if you have a species that lays eggs? How does it change how the culture interprets what it means to be a family? Females might retain more power, as gestation does not incapacitate them nearly as much, and might even take control by having the males care for the eggs. What if males have a pouch to keep the eggs warm, and females don’t?
What about displays to show fitness and such? What about water habits? The way a species biologically functions does have an effect on how their culture will develop. It does not predetermine it entirely, but biology affects it. For example, my Limaces lay wet eggs and need to lay them in water with special nutrients that they themselves produce. So early on, they formed communal pools where everyone laid their eggs into one pool that everyone cared for regardless of whose eggs were in it. Communal pools of course also help safe-guard against opportunistic predators that want to eat the delicious nutritious eggs! This all meant that culturally, a lot of them viewed eggs as less “one's own” and more “it is the group's egg,” and every child that came was part of everyone’s family.
History and culture
Cultures have history to them, and they can be absolutely ancient… but the thing is, all cultures have evolved and moved through time since the first one came about hundreds of thousands of years ago, or even millions of years ago for you humans. So when did it really start? Each culture chooses where their cultural identity starts. Some pick fairly recently, some are foggy about it, others see themselves as very ancient. The Swedish cultural identity, for example, is generally thought to start to emerge at around 1000 in your calendar.
But an important thing to remember is this… the culture ALWAYS changes. Current culture is not the same as it was a hundred years ago, let alone a thousand years ago. Some cultural things are more resilient to change than others, but things always change. If you claim a culture is over 5 thousand years old, that is fine, because it has continued for so long. But the culture back then and today are not the same: language is different, and there are likely very few things beyond some core aspect that remains the same. A thing to notice here, however, is that the rate of change differs. Isolated cultures tend to change slower than open ones. In the next section, you’ll get why!
Cultures and cultures
Say after me
No culture exists in a vacuum.
I have said this before in other instances, and I stand by it more so here! There are more cultures than the one culture, and within cultures, there are subcultures. Outside what a culture might call “its border”, which you should think of as a fuzzy cloud on a map rather than hard lines, there are more cultures that will be different, and the two, three, or however many borders will interact. Language and customs will start to affect each other. Even if you start with perfectly distinct cultures with a hard border, over hundreds of years, cultures will start changing and create areas with similar cultures, but not identical. For example, Nordic countries, which includes Sweden, generally view themselves as culturally similar. We have similar values, thoughts, and ways of doing things–not identical, but similar. You can expand these groupings out to encompass more and more cultures; for example, Europe itself has a cultural identity to it due to the Christian history that all share, but the core values are much vaguer than it is for smaller groupings of cultures.
And no, cultures taking from each other and influencing each other is not a bad thing. The American idea of “cultural appropriation” that gets thrown around is entirely baffling to Europe, where cultural exchanges have happened for millennia. Most of the world doesn't care either and says “go ahead and have fun!” if someone wants to do something from their culture. Though this, of course, depends on the exact aspect of culture. Customs and traditions have different weights, and some are definite ones where a culture doesn't care if anyone does anything, positive or negative. Others, however, are much more important and making fun of those things is a good way to make yourself hated in a culture. So don’t be afraid of doing other cultures' fun stuff, but if you get a feeling that it might be exceedingly important to them, a question never hurts! You are likely to be welcomed in.
Enough life lessons! Why I brought this up is to remove a lot of fear people have about “cultural appropriation” and to illustrate that having cultures in your own world share customs with each other is not only okay, it is important to make it feel alive. If you write culture fearful of doing other cultures’ customs, your world will be less real, and you’ve shown yourself to be American. A writing choice that ties in, however, is how respectful characters are to the other cultures and their customs. If your writing mocks another culture, that’s a problem. Characters can be prejudiced, but you shouldn’t be.
Cultural practices & customs
As I stated above, practices and customs are a huge part of a culture. This involves an absolutely enormous amount of things. Everything from how you speak in certain situations, how you handle certain foods, how you act and behave during certain celebrations, how you conduct rituals during celebrations, and more. It is an absolutely insane amount of things, so where do you even start?
Well a few places to start are these:
Birth/Hatching/Emergence: Depending on how your species reproduces, the event of a child, or more, again depending on your species, is likely to be a big thing, as sapient life should reasonably pass on knowledge, and thus take care of their children.
Coming of agency: This one is one I have made up as I have done it. Infants and really young babies and such rarely possess much agency. They don’t really make much thought and cannot control much of their life; in some stages, they control literally nothing. The culture may make a tradition when the baby makes the transition to childhood when they have agency and can start to influence the world and make choices.
Coming of age: There is generally a sense in every culture where a child stops being a child and starts being an adult. This, however, may be severely distinct from biology. For example, humans are sexually developed around the age of 13 and 14, but are still considered children by most cultures. It is often higher up in age where they start becoming proper adults, even if the human development isn’t fully complete until around age 21-25.
Educational milestones: This one is generally for more advanced societies where education is at least starting to become more commonplace. But what happens when the child or adult accomplishes education? Education is no easy feat, after all!
Wedding/Official coupling: No matter how coupling and sex works, your species is likely to pair up in some sense. It might be very different from how you humans do it with 1-1, might be 1-3, or anything you can imagine. But it is likely that when it is official, there is a custom related to it.
Gestation: Congratumulation! You are now proud to have a soon-to-be-child! What are the related preparations? How do others help the soon to be parents? This one is likely to be very common because back in the dark times, early deaths were common so each gestation is likely to be highly valued.
Funeral/Death: The inevitable end that consumes us all. This is obviously not for the deceased. Well, it can be! Depending on their beliefs of the afterlife, this can involve a lot of things that are intended to help the dead in the afterlife. But a lot is also about the living people dealing with their loss. Keep in mind, how they view death affects a lot of this. Some cultures have huge parties of happiness, not because they are happy someone is dead, but to feel good. Or keep evil spirits away with positivity. So you can make it a more pleasant experience.
From these ones you can expand outward, what kind of music is it in each case? What does it sound like? Where are things done? What food is used for each occasion? What do they do with the food? There are many things around that you can then use. For example, if you decide on wedding food, then you have an idea what kind of food they have. So then you can work on general customs around dinner or whenever they eat!
I included extra because Anne brought it up during editing, Isn’t Anne the best? But there are a couple that I didn’t include. For example, not all cultures celebrate birthdays or consider them even remotely relevant to anything. So it is possible to make those that don’t celebrate it. I, for example, have a species that celebrates their “coming of agency” day instead.
Cultural beliefs
This one is also huge–honestly, everything here is. But an important aspect to focus on here is that this is not all about religion. Religion is A part of it, and both influence each other, but cultural beliefs are also a lot more. Cultural beliefs include but are not limited to:
How should we be ruled?
Who deserves to rule?
What are virtues?
What are vices?
How should resources be distributed?
What is fair?
How shall society be structured?
What shall the hierarchy be like?
These are just a few. A society cannot work in the shape it is if people do not culturally believe that it is the proper way for things to be. Revolutions and huge disruptions happen because those cultural beliefs deteriorate.
I can take my Limaces again; they control a large swath of space (but still a tiny dot on the galactic map!) and govern over many dozens of species. They are not tyrannical or anything but near the top, and the Limaces are heavily overrepresented as the rulers because by the region's religious beliefs, Limaces are divinely chosen and thus deserve to rule. Especially so with the fact that the mortal incarnation of their god is the supreme ruler that assigns these other Limaces their rule. This is just an example to show an issue I often see with cultures where everyone hates and doesn't believe in the structure, yet it remains… this is not how it works! Even in a dystopia, there has to be consensus as to how things function.
Culture and happenstance
This one is often forgotten by a lot of worldbuilders. Everything in the culture is in response to something external that then just persists indefinitely. Which is true for a lot, but not everything. Where does lucky and unlucky stuff come from? It is not in response to something; 7 is not lucky any more than 13 is unlucky. But it is a cultural belief that exists. Where do these come from? Happenstance and pareidolia are the causes. Pareidolia is the tendency for the brain to find patterns where none exists. This is an evolved trait because it is generally better to find a subtle hidden pattern. That is because if you miss a significant pattern, you might die! But if you react one time too many to a non-existent pattern, what is the cost? Well, a bit of energy and time… but you are alive! So you can make beliefs, customs and rituals that are entirely nonsensical historically and practically because they come from something that happened too many times and people believed there was a pattern.
Again, my Limaces have one of these. A big thing in their culture is that keeping your own egg to raise the child is considered horrendous. You’ll be ostracised, and the child is essentially tainted. Full of bad luck that will bring disaster to all nearby! Now this of course makes no sense, but it is kept alive by pareidolia and confirmation bias. Back in the day, it didn’t matter which child you picked once they emerged from the eggs, but people at various points noticed that Limaces who picked a child of their own colour (which makes it more likely it is their own child as Limax colouration is genetically determined) experienced more bad luck. Well, they didn’t, they had a streak of bad events, and then people connected it to the colouration. Thus, a tradition of “Do not take your own colour child from the pool” was born, and it has continued. From this, in modern times, their culture adopts children and donates eggs to their church, which is the one taking care of eggs until a parent gets it now that communal pools are less of a thing. And imagine, it all started with a few individuals having a bit of bad luck.
Going against the culture
This never happens! Everyone is identical, and cultures are one big homogenous bunch of people in a unified hive mind! Jokes aside, no matter how much into a culture one lives, there are things you are going to disagree with. For example, me and the food customs of Sweden. It can be minor things like that. It can be major ones as well where there is a legitimate danger to your life if anyone knows about it. There is a spectrum of tolerance and intolerance that a society can have. Certain areas are fine if you violate the culture and its norms. In others, not so much.
Worldbuilding-wise, a way to show cultural priorities is in this: where are they less likely to tolerate deviations, and where are they more likely to tolerate them? Hard lines do also exist as well. And from before, how much deviation is tolerated is also a cultural aspect. In one culture, it might be acceptable to some degree, in another it’s accepted a lot, but in a third, there’s no tolerance at all, despite all 3 having the same cultural practice. This is also a way to splinter into subcultures.
Real life as inspiration
And now we come to inspiration. Pay attention to that word, inspiration. Modern and historical cultures are a product of their time, situation, happenstance, geography, and many other factors that worked together to make those cultures what they are and were. It is not possible in any realistic sense that you can expect that identical cultures would exist in another world.
But I know you’re lazy, because so am I. The thing is also that sometimes we just really really really like a cultural aspect and want it. Is it, worldbuilding-wise, okay to take it then? Yes! Always yes. A tiny snippet of culture here, tiny bit from culture there, more from this culture, some extra sprinkles of that culture, then tie it all together in some nice package with your own clever fun ideas, and tada! You got a very believable, INSPIRED culture! This is perfectly fine as you are using cultures as places for ideas and build upon those ideas that you like, making them your own.
What however is NOT okay is to take stereotypes of cultures and essentially just use them with new labels. Stereotypes are often, if not always, the wrong view and understanding of a culture from a different culture. It is great if you make up your own stereotypes of your own cultures, but do not use real ones. It is insensitive and can be horribly offensive to the people in question. If you want to use some ideas from stereotypes, see previous statement, make sure you work on it so it feels part of the culture and not like you are ripping on a culture. And if you wish to use genuine real cultures that you are unfamiliar with, talk with people from the culture. It avoids stereotypes and stereotyping and will also make certain you help widen the horizons of readers by showing how diverse people can be.
And a fair warning: your own culture is affecting your own writing. You have these beliefs, expectations, and more that you’ll be painting onto everything, even your made up cultures, if you do not think about it carefully.
Summa summarum
Culture is a very diverse topic that I will inevitably come back to. But I have hopefully given a few starting points to focus on, a few ideas and inspiration on how you can make it exotic and interesting while tying in both biology and weirdness for its own sake.
And remember, when it comes to real life cultures, show them respect, and be respectful. Do not yell at people over what you think is a slight toward a culture you are not part of. Let that culture make its stance on it. When you write, you should write real cultures with respect, and if you are not ready to put in the work for research, either write your own culture, or make up your own. But then again, if you aren’t willing to work at research, you likely don’t have the will to work on that either.
Good luck!
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