Libby Cuskelly

Okay so even I fell asleep reading the first post on my world-building series, dribbling onto my keyboard with the letter P branded onto my right cheek.

My apologies to those who read the earlier version, although I may have inadvertently, single-handedly cured the insomnia issue for humankind. So I decided a total rewrite was in order … and here it is … version two …

Part One – Types of Societies and Subsistence

Anthropologists, by nature and discipline, look to explore the commonalities that lie at the base of all societies and culture. Keeping this in mind, this series will provide a look at the world around us in the same way that anthropologists do – from the ground up. What this means is that when faced with having to build a culture within our fictional world we understand the basic foundation upon which that culture can be built.

We can approach world-building from different angles. Some writer’s start with a map, others start with a language or a city. Anthropologists start with subsistence. Basically this means how people feed themselves and their own. From there we can develop or build a society that makes some kind of sense.

It may seem like a strange place to start but what you realise when you look at things from this angle is that all else can evolve from this one point.

Look at hunter-gatherers. They had a fairly simple kind of existence (as opposed to complex) because they just went where the food was. This meant that they were nomadic in nature or at least followed the seasons. This also meant that permanent housing wasn’t required, trades other than hunting and gathering weren’t necessary because they pretty much had what they needed. They were usually made up of kinship groups, that is, families. Leadership was a job for the elders and any outside opposition was taken care of by the vital and the strong. The elderly and children were provided for by the group so it was an egalitarian society. It has been called the original affluent society.

Agricultural societies or sedentary societies took the food production thing to the next level and domesticated plants and animals. This, in turn, tied them to one place so they were forced to make more permanent places to live. Focusing on food production led to food surpluses, so that meant the surplus had to be stored, recorded and distributed. This led to bricks being fired to build storage facilities, the creation of measurement and writing systems for recording purposes and some kind of group leader to oversee the distribution of all the excess food. From here all kinds of subsidiary trades evolved which meant that not everyone was involved in the process of feeding the group. This led to trade or barter systems cropping up so that the tradesmen could still feed themselves in some way. A natural offshoot of this became currency.

Are you starting to see how this kind of world-building has a type of domino effect?

So the final type of society to examine is the state, often city states. These guys do everything on a much bigger scale. Here you get a dedicated political system to distribute the resources of the state. The haves and the have-nots begin to separate and you get an elite class that tends to call all the shots and get all the benefits. The elite don’t just have to be of the economic kind, they can be religious or political. In many ancient states, all three were tied together. While this may all sound grand, there are some obvious downers in a complex society such as this. Poverty, crime, long working hours = ill health.  You also get wars with this bunch as they have “more” to protect. All those accumulated crops and taxes can be extremely tempting to the next state over. So these guys need a military system to protect their gains.

Sadly, these guys can often be a little arrogant too. Many civilisations that have disappeared in the past have done so for a whole host of reasons, but a common thread has been the environmental degradation brought about by their agricultural practises. Changes made to the environment to yield more and more crops usually come unstuck in the end resulting in major bad juju to the state that made those changes. Think the Mayans, think the Aztecs, think today’s society … well, wait long enough and you’ll get what I mean.

Anyway, so that’s how to look at the concept of world-building by taking an Anthropologist’s view of things – using subsistence. As writer’s we can begin to play with types of subsistence. Is it only food that is stockpiled or could magic or humans themselves be seen as resources for storing, distributing or trading? How about exchange? Will your world have a form of currency such as money or can you think of other kinds of currency with which to trade goods? What about trade specialties that might evolve from the surplus of your resources? What kinds of quirky and cool things might spin off from a world where magic could be stockpiled?

In your own world-building it may help to take just one aspect of a society and grow outward from there. As we’ve seen here, it takes on a kind of domino effect and what we end up with is a society that has an internal consistency because one thing automatically leads to the next thing.

Happy world-building!

Did that give you any new ideas about approaching world-building? What ideas come to mind when you think about alternative ideas of subsistence?

Next week – Social Stratification and the Ruling Elite

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