Hey everyone! Welcome back to another world building post. This post is a little bit of a broad range of world building sections that I’ve kind of put into one group so it might be a little long. So, without further ado…
Worldbuilding: Culture
Culture is a very broad term. It applies to a lot of different aspects of daily life. There are five basic elements of culture which are language, symbols, norms, values, and artifacts. Ask any anthropologist about these five basic elements and they will tell you that each of them is just as complicated as the concept of culture. Language will be its own post next week but hopefully in this post I can cover the other four elements.
Symbols
Cultures have symbols. Symbolism can come in all sorts of different aspects of life, but these symbols permeate everything that people do and see. Sometimes symbols change but often they are semi-permanent figures in people’s lives.
Symbols can come from religion, language, history, or something as simply as long accepted stories (sometimes called wives tales) now taken as fact. For example, colors often have associated thoughts or feelings. These colors are then used in certain ways to evoke certain feelings. It was a long-accepted fact (which is slowly changing) in American and many European cultures that pink was a color for girls and blue was a color for boys. This wasn’t always true and even now it is beginning to change. But this symbolism still remained strong for several generations. This made it easy for people to simply show a single color to indicate a whole meaning of importance.
Other symbols mean different things because of a religious context. For example, crosses for Christians are an important symbol that indicate a wide variety of religious information. For others, it simply looks like a strange letter t. Same goes for other religious symbols. Items that might seem ordinary to some contain vast meaning and sub-context to others.
Language can also contain symbolism either through certain body language or reference. The Japanese of the Heian period could invoke very specific meaning through the use of a single word that referenced a single poem that had a very specific meaning. Sometimes topics are mentioned in conversation that remind people of a whole catalog of information. For example, large areas of American culture and Europe if the word Napoleon is mentioned that invokes a vast database of knowledge such as his specific type of hat, his short stature, and also Waterloo.
Symbols are an important part of culture, and they can help to convey a wide variety of information very quickly.
Norms and Values
Norms and values are often discussed together in the context of culture because they can often influence each other greatly. Values series of unspoken rules and beliefs that can influence every aspect of your daily life. Often times values are associated with religion, but they can also be developed through life experience. The values of a society can affect their laws but can also affect their personal and daily choices.
For example, does the society in your story widely accept the value that killing is wrong? If not, why not? Is this due to religion, a shift in political power last year, a decade, or a century ago? Is this do to some other value that is held in high regard in their society. What other values might be affected or changed if your society does not accept that killing is wrong? Do the laws change? How do they change?
On the other hand, what are the norms of daily life? What are things that happen in your society that appear to be normal for a person from there but a person from another culture might find strange or unnerving? For example, in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series there is a group of people who do not walk on stone. It is seen as wrong and semi-sacrilegious. This is normal, therefore, none of their buildings are made of stone. In this way, other cultures who build with stone are strange and sometimes even heathenistic.
How do the values you have written affect the norms of a society. Using the previous example, if your society does not believe that killing is wrong what changes in their daily life that might appear normal to them but might be strange to someone from a society where killing is wrong? Maybe they are desensitized to death and violence, perhaps there are no courts for manslaughter or murder. There could be a wide variety of things that might be normal if you think killing is wrong that wouldn’t be normal if you don’t think it’s wrong.
Norms and values are an important part of culture. They are things that happen often that you might not realize are not common outside of your own culture. Learn about other cultures, speak to people from other cultures and find out what they think is strange about your culture and consider what values those norms are attached to.
Artifacts
Artifacts of culture are exactly what it sounds like. The items left behind by a culture that teach us about the aspects of their culture that we can visually see. For example, if several hundred years from now, cars are no longer in use, then the remains of cars left behind (where they are located, what condition they are in, what evidence of use remains) would tell those future historians a lot about our time periods.
When archaeologists are digging sites, this is what they mainly look for – artifacts that can tell them real facts about the people that lived there. Perhaps there is only one location where parties are conducted. What kind of items might be left in that location? What kind of items would your characters use on those occasions?
How does the religious practice use real objects? Are there special bowls used, special locations, special tools that might be the ‘artifacts’ of the culture? Do they have dentists? What kind of tools do dentists use in this culture? What kind of tools do doctors use? Are there any strange tools that the people use that might seem normal to them but strange to your reader? Will you have to explain how these artifacts work?
What kind of tools are used in daily life? Do they use forks, spoons, knives, chopsticks, or other forms of utensils? How do they eat? From bowls? Plates? Other kinds of dishes? Where do they eat? Where would these objects reside? Do they have cupboards, shelves, drawers?
Are there any artifacts that are unique to this culture and not any other? Do they have an environmental resource that no other culture has that would lead them to develop a certain type of tool that others might not? Is there tool more specialized than ones similar in other cultures?
These are the kinds of questions that need to be considered when thinking about culture and what exactly the culture(s) of your world is/are like.
As you can see, culture is a very broad definition for a large variety of information and things. There are even some aspects that might not fall directly into one or the other of the five elements of culture. For example, what religions does your world have? What do they believe in? Do they have holidays? Are special artifacts used for those holidays? How does that religion affect the norms of their daily life? Does this religion affect travelers, outsiders, or immigrants?
Culture is a unique and vast area to write about. If you are worldbuilding I recommend choosing one or two aspects of culture that really are important to your story and only develop those deeply. Maybe touch on the other aspects of culture but don’t try to spend too much time on them or you might find yourself overwhelmed.
That’s all I have for this week. Don’t forget that next week we’ll be touching on the last element of culture, which is language. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, become a blog page member, share, and follow me on social media at the links below. And remember,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!