Author: iern (---.NoDak.edu)
Date: 03-15-2002 15:32
Interestingly enough, there *are* human societies (even today) who live the life of "freedom" that you describe in the article about humans. Most of the culutures whose primary subsistence method is *not* exclusive agriculture - hunter-gatherers, pastoralists and horticulturalists, have cultures that are qualitatively very different from the one in which we live. You have touched upon the subject yourself, by describing how humans in RPGs normaly go around eradicating everything that could harm them, or their means of producing food (interestingly enough, by farming - exclusive agriculture again). What we tend to forget, simply because such an overwhelming majority of the world's population *is* member of the same meta-culture (one of farming), is that we as a species, have lived for hundreds of thousands of years as something else than farmers. We lived as beings that needed their brains to survive - and all the associated phenomena (like imagination, religion, language, etc.). Farming doesn't really require all of that...no wonder we feel unhappy, stiffled, boxed in.
If we look in the specific subsistence methods of archetypal RPG races, we can notice that elves and hobbits are horticulturalists (gardening their environement to provide food), orcs and other goblinoids are typical hunter-gatherers, and dwarves normaly being the specific subtype of excl.agriculturalists, not because they farm, but because their food production is normally dependant on the food surpluses of other neighboring cultures with whom they trade. Humans are almost invariably (I truly can not remember a fantasy world or novel where humans had different primary subsistence method) farmers.
Now, if you look at the population growth that specific subsistence methods allow, and needed territory for that, you immediately see why human relations with orcs are the worst - and arguably the best are with dwarves.
What did Europeans think of Plains Indians? "Incredibly lazy" says one memorable account, "they just lie around all day and talk or smoke pipes - no one is farming, and they go and hunt less then once a week!" The speaker in question being a farmer, completely missed the fact that those lazy people had to work less (on average)than 8 hours *a week* to get enough food to survive.
Now look at the life of an archetypical orc tribe - they need large territory for hunting, and once their numbers swell more than that territory can support, they go and raid neghbors for more territory, or food, or whatever. Human species has lived like this for hundreds of thousands of years - but from the point of view of "civilized" man, this is completely unaceptable behavior.
Why?
In a culture based on axclusive agriculture, every individual produces far more food than it can consume (as evidenced by the explosive population growth in every such society) - and loss of such an individual is a net loss to the capability of that society to grow. On the other hand, in the hunter-gatherer band, when the group is too large, extra individuals are just a burden - there simply isn't enough food to go around. In order to increase food production, such a band needs either to gain more territory, or to lower it's numbers. Therefore, loss of certain number of individuals might be a good survival strategy for the group - and we witness that in real life. Yanomamo Indians are probably the most studied group of hunter gatherers still existing, and they are in an almost constant state of warfare with neighboring tribes.
For hunter gatherer societies, killing a human being might not be an evil thing to do at all. Ergo, orcs...
Now, since excl.agriculture can support far higher population densities than other subs. methods, no wonder you have humans everywhere, human cities everywhere, and simply because of their numbers, human cultural norms everywhere (I am talking about RPG humans). This is mostly true in real world too, and thus is mirrored in most of our fantasy worlds...
Similar parallels between different human cultures and their representations in RPGs can be made with all the other races - the world of RPGs is remarkably uniform mirror of our own views about other cultures..
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