#reconnecting with culture

[chaosbuddies]

I find it so funny that people go after @shining-star-system for being Asian or "not Asian enough" but don't come at me for being "too white" to be italian we both just want to reconnect with our cultures but no he has to be harassed so that people can "make sure" it's gross and needs to stop

[mamaangiwine]

MNIDO GIIZIS or "SPIRIT MOON" –

The first moon of the thirteen moons is The Spirit Moon. During this time I acknowledge the silence of winter. The stillness of all things, try to hear the Great Mystery in it, and contemplate my own place within that movement.

[dolce-tenebra-toscana]

Guess who's doing research about her heritage/ origins and feeling fucking happy about it?

Meeeeeee!!!

It was about time i actually tried connecting with my south american roots and what i'm finding out is so amazing and interesting!

Still a long way to go but meeting this wonderful group of people from Brazil here in siena ( new besties yay ) is really helping me understand where i come from and what i was missing

I feel like i am finally giving answers to the lil girl who was raised european but didn't feel european at all.

I am embracing my skin color, my curls, my curves, my face ( i stopped hating my eyes and nose yay ) and so much more

It's the beginning of a journey i wanted for so long, maybe one day i'll actually go to Brazil for the first time in 27 years..

[stormesandshowersparttwo]

Hit 1k 🥳 thank y'all for helping me find my old mutuals and meeting new ones. Here's a classic post bubble bath pose.

[lavampira]

d'alia + her turali outfits

[writingwithcolor]

Characters reconnecting with their ancestral cultures in an interplanetary setting

@pixiedustandpetrichor asked:

Hi! I am writing a novel with three main female characters in an interplanetary setting. They grow up as orphans in an Irish-coded country and as children are mostly exposed to solely that culture, but they leave after becoming adults. Character A is Tuareg-coded, B Mongolian-coded, and C is Germanic-coded. It isn’t central to the story, but I would like them to get in touch with/learn more about their ancestral cultures, especially in terms of religion. A does this by actually visiting the planet her parents came from, but B and C do not. What can I do to depict their relationships with said cultures and their journey to reconnect with them? Would it be realistic for each of them to have different mixed feelings about participating in these cultures and for them to retain some sense of belonging to the culture they grew up in as well? Thank you for your time.

Hello, asker! WWC doesn’t have Tuareg or Mongol mods at the moment, so we're not able to speak to the specifics of cultural and religious reconnection for these particular groups. Still, I want to take this opportunity to provide some general context and elements to consider when writing Tuareg-coded characters, or other characters from groups that have experienced colonization in the real world. My fellow mods will then share thoughts about cultural reconnection in general and with respect to Germanic heritage in particular.

Drawing inspiration from groups that have experienced colonization

As you’re probably aware, the Tuareg are an ethnic group indigenous to North Africa. As with many indigenous groups, they have experienced colonization multiple times over the course of their history. Colonization often leads to the loss or erasure of certain aspects of culture as the colonized people are pressured to conform to the culture of the dominant group. In many cases, it’s near impossible to say what the ancestral culture of a colonized group was prior to colonization.

When coding a fictional culture based on a group that was colonized in the real world, it's important to ask questions about:

Which aspects of culture you're portraying

Where these aspects come from

Whether you're ready to tackle their implications for the world you're building

It’s not necessarily wrong to use elements of coding that draw from cultural aspects influenced by colonization. As I said, it can be very difficult, even impossible, to portray a “pure” culture as it would have been had colonization not occurred–because we simply can’t know what that alternate history would look like, and because so much has been lost or intentionally suppressed that the gaps in our knowledge are too wide to breach. But it’s important to be aware of where these cultural elements are coming from.

Where is your coding coming from and what are the implications?

For example, while the Tuareg today are majoritarily Muslim, this was not the case prior to the Arab conquest of North Africa. Some elements of Tuareg culture today, such as tea ceremonies, are derived from the influence of Arab and Muslim culture and likely did not exist prior to the 20th century. As you’re developing the culture of the Tuareg-coded group in your fictional setting, you have to decide whether to include these elements. There is no right answer–it will depend on what you’re trying to do and why.

Is your setting in our far future, in which case we can assume your Tuareg-coded group is distantly related to today’s Tuareg?

In that case, they will probably have kept many cultural aspects their ancestors acquired through their interactions with other cultures around them–including cultural groups that colonized them. They may–let’s build hopeful worlds!–have reclaimed aspects of their ancestral culture they’d been forced to abandon due to colonization. They may also have acquired new aspects of culture over time. This can be very fun to explore if you have the time and space to do so.

I would recommend speaking with Tuareg people to get a better grasp of how they see their culture evolving over the next however many centuries or millennia, what they wish to see and what seems realistic to them.

Alternatively, maybe your setting is a secondary world unrelated to ours and you only want to draw inspiration from the real-world Tuareg, not represent them exactly. In that case, you need to decide which period of history you’re drawing from, as Tuareg culture is different today from what it was 50 years ago, and different still from 200 years ago or 1000 years ago. You’ll need to research the historical period you’re choosing in order to figure out what was happening at that time and what the cultural influences were. If it’s pre-colonial, you’ll probably want to avoid including cultural elements influenced by colonization from groups that arrived later on.

Finally, if the time period you’re drawing from is post-colonial:

Are you planning to account for the effects of colonization on Tuareg culture?

Will you have an in-world equivalent for the colonization that occurred in real life?

For example, will the Tuareg-coded characters in your world be from a nomadic culture that was forced to become sedentary over the years and lost much of their traditions due to colonial pressure to conform?

Where did this pressure come from in your world–is it different from what happened in ours? If so, how different? And what are the consequences?

Writing about colonization can be quite the baggage to bring into a fictional setting. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it will certainly require sensitivity and care in portraying it.

In summary: think it through

I’m not saying all this to discourage you, but to point out some of the considerations at play when drawing inspiration from a real-life culture that has experienced colonization. Similar challenges arise for coding based on any other indigenous group in the world.

My advice to you, then, is to first sit down and decide where and when in history your coding is coming from, and what you’re trying to achieve with it. This will help you figure out:

which elements of contemporary Tuareg culture are pertinent to include

How much your coding will be influenced by the Tuareg’s real-life history

To what extent that will inform the rest of the world you’re creating

This, in turn, may help in deciding how to portray your character’s reconnection journey.

Again, I am not Tuareg and this is by no means meant to be an exhaustive list of considerations for writing Tuareg-coded characters, only a few places to start.

If any Tuareg or Amazigh readers would like to chime in with suggestions of their own, please do. As always, please make sure your comments adhere to the WWC code of conduct.

- Niki

Pulling from diaspora and TRA narratives of cultural reconnection

Marika here: This ask plotline could also pull directly from diaspora and TRA narratives of cultural reconnection. Many diaspora and TRA cultural reconnection stories are, in effect, about navigating the difficult process of resuscitating, or renewing ties to culture using limited resources in environments that often lack necessary cultural infrastructure or scaffolding.

See this question here to the Japanese team for suggestions of how to handle such a storyline in a similar sci-fi setting.

More reading: Japanese-coded girl from future

-Marika

Reconnecting with German heritage

Hi, it’s Shira. I’m not sure whether German-Jewish counts as Germanic for the purposes of your post but since German Jews were more assimilated than other Ashkies, Germanness does feel real and relevant to my life (especially because my father worked there for approximately the last decade of his life.) NOTE: when I see “Germanic” vs German I think of cultures from 1500 years ago, not 100-200 years ago, so I can’t help you there, but I’d be surprised as a reader if a character focused on that for reconnection to the exclusion of the 19th century etc.

People in the United States specifically, reconnecting with German heritage, often lean into Bayerischer/Bavarian kitsch, I’ve noticed. Personally, though, what I find most relevant is:

1. The food (although I’ve come to learn that what I grew up eating was closer to veal/chicken scallopini than actual schnitzel because it was drenched in lemon, but I do like the other foods like the potato salad and sweet and sour red cabbage etc.) Your character could try making one of these “ancestral” foods as a way to reconnect?

2. The classical music, because I’m a second generation professional musician – if character C plays an instrument, leaning into that might be meaningful (Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann and her husband Robert, etc.)

3. The nature, especially specifics that I enjoyed during my time there – personally, I loved the bright pink flowers all over the chestnut trees, but there are a lot of choices especially because of the Alps. If C is an artist maybe they can sketch something Germany-related from old photographs they found on the Space Internet?

I think it is VERY realistic for the characters to remain connected to the culture in which they were raised, by the way, whether or not they have positive feelings about it. Culture isn’t an inherited trait. Sure, if they want to completely walk away, they can, but I bet there are still ways it will creep back in without them realizing it simply because it’s really hard to have universal knowledge of the origins of all our quirks. Plus, not everyone feels alienated from their raised-culture just because they’re genetically something else.

P.S. There is also Oktoberfest, which I don’t really get into but is a thing, and beer, which is another point of German cultural pride.

German gentiles, weigh in – y’all have your own stuff, I know! OH YEAH so for German Christians, Christmas “markets” are a whole thing. That’s worth looking up. 

–S

What do you mean by Germanic?

Hello it’s Sci! I had to study German history for my historical fantasy novel set in the late 18th century Holy Roman Empire. I am not sure what is meant by Germanic as that can encompass a variety of things.

Germanic people: from the Classical Period of Roman Empire and early Middle Ages. Similar to Mod Shira, I unfortunately can’t help very much here.

The Germanosphere: regions that spoke German, which includes modern day Germany, Austria/Hungary, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Belgium, and Luxembourg. I generally define this as the regions captured in the Hapsburg Empire along with Switzerland usually encompassing “Central Europe.”

Modern German national identity (i.e. German): post Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (> 1815) only including the territory of modern day Germany.*

I ask this because modern German national identity is surprisingly recent since Germany only popped up in 1871 under Otto von Bismarck. Previously, Germany was divided into smaller states and city states as a very decentralized region under the German Confederation and before that, the Holy Roman Empire. Depending on the era, you can see different conflicts and divides. During the early days of the Protestant Reformation started by Martin Luther, the northern and southern German territories generally split along Protestant-Catholic lines. The 18th century saw Austria and Prussia as the foci of global power who warred against each other even though both were part of the Holy Roman Empire.

Other states and city-states like Baden-Wurttemberg or Saxony sometimes had power but it was typically more localized compared to Austria. Post-WW2, you saw the split of Germany into West Germany run under capitalism and East Germany run under communism as a satellite Soviet state leading to more modern cultural divides. Due to heavy decentralization historically, each region had its own character with religious and cultural divides. 

Assuming that the Germanic character is not from the classical period or early Middle Ages but not from the 19th century either, you can include your character reconnecting to classical folklore like that of Krampus (if they’re Christian), German literature and music like the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe or Mozart, or German philosophy like Immanuel Kant.

*A major wrinkle: German royals and nobility married into other states and nations frequently with Britain and Russia being notable examples. In Britain, the House of Hanover took over after the Stuart House died without clear direct heirs. When Queen Victoria married the German prince Albert, they celebrated Christmas with a tree and brought the German tradition of a Christmas tree to Britain and the British Empire. Only during World War I did the royal family’s house of Hanover name change from House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the more “English-sounding” Windsor. As a result, the German cultural influence may be even more widespread than we think.

However, without more specific descriptors of what Germanic means in the context of your story, it can be difficult to determine which aspects of German culture your character could reconnect to.

-Mod Sci

[bucephaly]

It's kinda shocking to me how few people seem to know how prevalent the 'my great grandmother was cherokee' myth is and how it's almost never actually true, especially when it comes with things like 'never signed up' or 'fell off the trail' or 'courthouse burned down destorying the documentation' etc etc.

People just don't even seem to know the history like.. when the Trail happened. My great great great grandfather was 2 years old during Removal in 1838, so peoples 'my great grandmother hid in the mountains!' is so clearly wrong. And we have rolls. From before and after removal, rolls done by cherokee nation and others by the government, rolls that were not stored in one random flammable courthouse. It's not difficult to find the actual evidence of ancestry.

And just.. there are lots of ways those family stories get started. It was a practice during the confederacy to claim cherokee ancestry to show one's family had 'deep roots in the south' that they were there before the cherokee were removed. Many people pretended to be cherokee and applied for the Guion-Miller payout just to try to steal money meant for cherokees - 2/3rds of the applicants were denied for having 0 proof of actual cherokee ancestry. [We even see lawyers advertising signing up for the Miller roll just to try to get free money.] And the myth even started in some families in the cherokee land lotteries, where the land stolen from us was raffled off, including the house and everything that was left behind when the cherokees were removed. We have seen people whose families just take these things stolen from the cherokee family and adopt them into their own family story, saying that they were cherokee themselves.

If you had some family story about being cherokee and you wanna have proof one way or the other, check out this Facebook group run by expert cherokee genealogists that do research for free. Just please read the rules fully and respect the researchers. They run thousands of people's ancestries a year and their average is only around 0.7% of lines they run actually end up having true cherokee ancestry.

[loumandforyou]

Armand s3 wishlist outfits and house

[faytears]

thinking about lebanese percy again and how unbeknownst to a lot of westerners lebanon is full of greco-roman ruins (baalbek, tyre, sidon, etc.). like it makes me sooooo crazy to imagine percy finally getting the chance to visit lebanon with his mom to explore his human ancestry, but then he somehow finds himself standing in the ruins of berytus, the very city poseidon was the chief god of, and realizing that no matter what he does or where he goes there's no escaping his divine blood.

[figureofdismay]

i keep thinking about the lines from Vince Gilligan's Drive script, the antisemitic conspiracy theorist with the pressurized head demands to know if Mulder is Jewish and if Mulder is a Jewish name, and Mulder says, "Yes, I am, and no it's not," plus there's the fact that he was buried unembalmed, which made his resurrection possible in DeadAlive, plus DD's statement that he'd decided Mulder was Jewish and to play him that way unless told to do otherwise, so despite the messy parts of the Kaddish script and other culturally 'Christian Athist' Mulder moments in the writing (most likely because of how little cultural awareness there is about the difference in Christian vs Jewish theism that it bleeds through everywhere), I do think there was a conscious positioning of the Mulder character as Jewish Adjacent via his mother + complicated by his WASPy father's domination of the family...

But they wrote that without any specific research or much accommodation for the implications of keeping him tied up with alien conspiracy plots and eugenics plot. Yet! Mulder was always on the 'fighting it' side, and the power hoarding conspiracists were all signalled to be rich WASPy conservative men, all but one of whom were White.

Also early the 90s independent internet fringe conspiracy theorists, i.e. the Lone Gunmen, Max and others shown to be allied with Mulder, weren't the radical right wing fasch of the last 10-15 years, and in the context of the show don't carry the same strange implication of 'an ethnically Jewish person surrounding himself with conspiracy theorists' would in the present day. I do get the sense that they were radical left instead -- that doesn't necessarily leave out the antisemitism part, of course so it's not un-complicated, of course. (And though I suppose i should feel grateful that CC made Mulder's son a fish mutant and not a lizard mutant that's also not a particularly reassuring implication... but then again the Revival is a pretty different animal with different, less collaborative creative direction.)

Yes parts of this subtext do bother me a lot. The fact that they got 3/4rs of the way there in the writing but never once had Jewish Adjacent Mulder talk about the mental toll of sorting the wheat from the chaff, finding genuine abduction survivor and alien leads in amongst the mountains of antisemetic conspiracy bullshit on message boards or how he doesn't really ever know which contacts are going to meet him and decide he's the enemy because he 'looks Jewish'... it's both a missed opportunity and speaks to a lot of ignorance. It makes me pretty crazy. There are a lot of half gestures towards Mulder's Jewish background and then a lot of ugly coincidences and unfortunate implications because no one really thought about what that would mean in the context of The X-File's genre content and recurring themes. But also some of that uncomfortable feeling comes from the fact that there have been a lot of cultural shifts since the original run was on the air.

Like, i don't think he's culturally exactly anything, caught in the middle and mostly without. It's a story familiar to me and my mother because my grandmother was also a young Jewish woman who made a hasty love match (i.e. she got pregnant) with a WASPy goy from a rich industrialist family, and said family held the purse strings, so keeping his mother happy was everything -- which was true even after my grandparents divorced, because of complicated inheritance reasons. She assimilated and let my mother and her siblings be raised as Christmas and Passover celebrating 'nothing in particular' kids, who went to shul when visiting her parents and kept shabbos sometimes with the neighbors, but still broadly steeped in cultural Christianity and outside the community, because it was the 50s and 60s and she was a divorced mother in an upper middle class white area who had to be careful to keep social doors open to all of them. I figure Teena and Mulder had a pretty similar situation in the 60s and 70s, with the added complication of accidentally marrying into an actual WASPy conspiracy hub who could have you 'disposed of' for speaking out of turn.

I just... Jewish Mulder is deeply important to me as a character, it's the execution in practice that I find extremely frustrating. it's the half way there implications, partly intentional, partly accidental because it's apparent that no one educated themselves on the history some of the bigger themes beyond the surface familiar Scifi-Horror tropes. Actually getting there all the way and digging into it, or trying even 25% more to avoid the pitfalls around Mulder and Teena would have added a lot to the show. And would maybe even have insulated CC against (some of) the plot bungles in the Revival. Very frustrating all around. But at the same time, it is a scifi show, and the aliens and rich White conspirators are very literal in fact on the screen.

And what's more, Mulder's particular blend of faith and hope and contention and interrogation, his willingness to Keep Doing The Work no matter what, because it's worth it and it needs to be done in the hope for a better world... that is very Jewish to me at more than a surface level. For me that makes all the awkward implications worth it.

[sarafangirlart]

Funniest bit of tumblr revisionism is that Medusa was an African goddess before “Greek colonialism” reduced her to a monster (or whatever variation of that claim its all bs) meanwhile Perseus has more evidence of being worshiped in Africa, albeit in one not very reliable source but still more evidence than Medusa.

[kindaorangey]

ROLIN!!!!! EXPLORE ARMAND'S RELATIONSHIP TO ISLAM IN THE SHOW AND MY LIFE IS YOURS!!

[lunarsk1es]

Ben with some fancy dark elf clothes in my D&D / Dark Fantasy AU

[gluttonous-kerfuffle]

So I took one look at Shadowheart and knew in my heart of hearts that she was half Mexican. So here is my Jalisco Shad. If I danced folklorico, then she has to too.

Join me on the Mexican Shadowheart train.

[maintohthakgayibhaishaab]

for all the kanha fans, to all the Gopis 🦚

[thenuclearmallard]

Pictures: Bio mom, myself, biological cousin (left)

Sometimes I get apprehensive about sharing how I look because there's the ongoing battle and worry if I am good enough. It stems a lot from my upbringing and the area I grew up in. 

I was adopted and brought to the US when I was 18 months old and I grew up in a poor city in Appalachia without any Native community or group. In 2019, I decided to do my first DNA test due to being an adoptee and I was hopeful I'd find relatives through the app. Unfortunately, I did not but I was able to confirm the beginning of my reconnection journey. With the results, it showed I am 97.9% connected to Russia with a breakdown of regions that are Native regions: Novaya Zemlya/Arkhangelsk (Nenets), Altai Republic (Altai), and Krasnador Krai (Circassian).

With those regions in mind, I decided to follow up with Ancestry to see, once again, if I was also able to find relatives. I was not, but the DNA aspect confirmed the already existing test that I've taken.

Being fortunate and in contact with my family, I brought up the regions that DNA pulled from and talked to my family about Nenets and Altaian lineage. They confirmed these regions and lineages and also said my biological mother grew up Tatar. It is very important to have family confirmation, as DNA is not your answer to who you are, it's merely a foundation point that you need to build on. With DNA, you can start a journey, but without confirmation of family/community, it's still just DNA and not full reconnection.

With a lot of research, I decided to get a red chin line that extends half of my chin as an attribute of reconnection. The artist who did this has rules for Natives as he is Native himself: I will not tattoo it you do not know what you are getting done. The red line means spiritual growth, maturity, and connectiveness to ancestors. Usually there is a major transition in life to have these chin lines or facial markings complete. I clinically died May 8, 2022 and got my line completed in summer of 2022. Black, blue, and red are colors that the Altaians will use for facial tattooing. Red is used to indicate a healing role within society. It was also chosen to assure there would no misunderstandings with other tribes and to separate ourselves.

Chin tattoos and other facial tattooing has died off significantly within the Soviet Union due to the forced assimilation and the liquidation of people. A lot of people were forced to lose their culture and those reconnecting are tying to preserve what's left.

I am honored to share my Indigenous lineage and to put our Natives on the map. I do not regret getting into activism. I do not regret reconnecting and continuing what is right. I will continue to be a voice for my people and my family. We will not be silent. We are still here.