I've often worried about this in my own writing, that my characters and concultures probably aren't different enough from what I've absorbed all my life from modern American culture, but that I don't know how to fix that since I wouldn't even be aware of what categories could be different.Linguoboy wrote: ↑Mon May 01, 2023 12:39 pmI've sometimes called this "the Ren Faire effect" and it annoys me no end. The trappings are all period, but the way people talk (not necessarily the precise words they use but the conceptional categories which underlie their utterances) and interact are exactly like contemporary folk with only a minimal veneer of otherness. No less an author than N.K. Jemisin (another lefty for you, malloc!) did this with her debut novel and it annoyed me so much I never bothered with the rest of the series.
I think Zompist has pimped this before, but I love The discarded image for just this reason. C.S. Lewis takes great pains to research and reconstruct the mediaeval worldview for modern readers so they can see the people of that time as fully-realised human beings who nevertheless made use of conceptional categories quite different to our own--not "more primitive" ones (whatever that's supposed to mean), just very different. Honestly, it would be useful reading even for authors of speculative fiction set in future space colonies just for how much it makes you think about how much your own worldview is a product of the time and place in which you've been acculturated. (I think reading anthropological studies is useful for much the same reason.)
I do think there a couple of areas where I have managed to see other possibilities, because of personal reasons... due to being trans, I've had plenty of reason to imagine how a culture could view gender very differently from ours; and there's some cultural things that have always felt non-obvious to me as a neurodivergent person. But I have to imagine that there's still a lot of cultural assumptions that it's never occurred to me to consider differently, at least not very deeply.
I'll try to read The Discarded Image sometime. Can anyone point to any other books that can help with this, or more broadly, ideas for how to even start thinking about what conceptional categories can differ between cultures?