justifying cultural imitations

[jason taylor]

This is only loosely connected with denunciations of cultural appropriation. The point is about how to plausibly justify making speculative cultures that are imitations of romanticized real ones.

Now some things one can plausibly push through. Some institutions that are widely spread would prove useful in a frontier environment. Clientage for instance might be a substitute in the absence of an efficient government but that does not mean everyone is the Mafia (though the Harrington series' justification for it was clever as was positing it's evolution into a conventional and semi-benign aristocracy that retains cultural tropes of the Mafia).

Similarly one can say the original colonists came from such and such a culture or were romantic restorationists or whatever. But what are some ways anyone else can think of to pull this off?

[dcarson]

Conditions that make using methods that some culture has developed to deal with them and other stuff gets dragged along by association.

The western US uses Spanish style water law. It started because the Spanish controlled the area first but has not been changed to match the more UK style in the east because the climate is more like Spain and the laws work better.

[The Colonel]

There are some basic conditions that just seem to crop up - something very like knight service feudalism seems to have occurred independently in Japan, the Perso-Arabic Middle East, Western Europe and Western Africa (and previously in the Hellenistic Empire, albeit not with a basis in heavy cavalry).
Likewise - to the outsider at least - most horse nomad cultures have a lot in common, as do a lot of hunter-gatherers.
The Mafia model can be seen in at least a couple of other cultures where an aristocratic class was suppressed from outside and forced underground - especially when it re-emerges in an emigrant disapora. (The Chinese triads are an obvious comparison).
Starting with a core model and then customising it to your own campaign and setting is the key to that - cliche and stereotyping are things that might give someone a right to object, but aside from that, there is no new thing under the sun. Arguably fantasy counterpart cultures can have more to recommend them than bad historical fiction...

[DeadParrot]

Keep things general. Pyramids happened in several places. Same for human sacrifice. Nomadic warrior cultures are fairly common. Use of mud bricks is common around the world. Multiple nations have developed a seafaring culture. Lots of people developed farming of crops. Actual crops varied a lot across the planet. Avoid terms that most folks will associate with a particular culture(even if others used it). Don't call your leader a Pharaoh, use King or Quark. As others have mentioned, many cultures have an organized criminal network. Don't call it the Mafia, use Halfling Benevolent Society or the Street Urchin Network instead.

One made up city could be located at the mouth of a river. The leader is Quark Frodo VI. This city has a decent fishing fleet and a few coastal patrol vessels. They have a strong wall to protect the city from the frequent bands of mounted raiders. Oddly, they also trade with the same raiders as the raiders respect a strong defense. Fish for hides. Finished knives for wagons of iron ore. They also trade up river with a nation that builds pyramids. (keep going at this point)

[whswhs]

My technique for naming, in my last fantasy campaign (which had seven sapient humanoid races and several times as many culture areas), was inspired by astronomical nomenclature and science fiction that used it: Everything had a Latin name. Urbes Septemplex, Montes Nubili, Dumetum Furtum, Terra Media, Occasia, Mare, Portus Argenti. This gave the world an exotic flavor without suggesting that any of those names were literally the ones its people used.

[vicky_molokh]

I suspect the answers vary depending on the type of imitation. Contrast: Night Elves of WarCraft vs. the Vodacce of the 7th Sea.

[SionEwig]

Originally Posted by DeadParrot

<SNIP>
Street Urchin Network
<SNIP>

Now I've got a more criminally inclined version of Our Gang/Little Rascals in my brain. I don't know where I'm going to use this, but I will use it.

[Lovewyrm]

As long as it's not mockery, I don't care if someone goes Germanic in any flavor for anything.
Likewise, I reserve myself the same ability for anything I want to do, even if some unrelated party doesn't like it, or even a first party.

Way too much artificial media racebaiting (cultural appropriation is part of that buzzword set) as well as local Abrahamic 'missionary' branches that have skewed such things for me to buckle under that.
In other words: 'real people' don't tend to mind any of such things.

Edit:
To clarify it a bit more.
The internet and media being so prevalent and steerable by a comparatively few individuals compared to the people affected, it can seem like the world is in a pretty bad state (to the extent that some might think that African people are really concerned if someone is wearing cornrows)
But it's really not.

It's the friend computer/skynet situation. In those settings, a single computer mind, even if it's spread over a network, has the information highway locked down.

But that's not how the realworld is, yet.
Just imagine a fictitious social media network that has a billion users (ficitious, but believable), 2000 moderators all working together with an agenda, and their powers are augmented with an AI that also falls in line.
If they work diligently, they can make a good chunk of that billion userbase, seeing how the average person takes things in good faith, think whatever is on the agenda is a bigger sensation than it is.

But it rarely is, even if it snowballs into follow up 'self moderation' of people going 'but that's how it is!" but that's usually done if they feel like going against it could endanger them, aka, not the private setting under friends.

And while things like cultural appropriation are now well entrenched, it's still just a comparatively few who push it. It's a recent term, and would never have been a thing without the internet. Not on this scale.

Thus:
If I want to play a direct copy of a Maasai Warrior, I'm gonna do it.
No Maasai will mind, the entire tribe of them could sit around and be okay with it, until some wormtongue memester comes in and spins the whole meme around them (he's appropriating you, back at home they kept you as slaves and now he's mocking you! totally!), then they might see it that way too. But not naturally.

That's my personal justification.

[thrash]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

But what are some ways anyone else can think of to pull this off?

To paraphrase Dr. Notestein: "“If you copy from one culture, that’s appropriation; if you copy from many cultures, that’s research.”

No two settings or periods are ever exactly equivalent (unless that's the point, which requires a different approach). It's also rare that there is only one obvious analogue. So, mix and match: Your steppe nomads are organized in a hierarchy of affine groups (guilds or krewes) rather than arbitrarily divided into military units based factors of ten, and they cover their faces when in public. Your palace intrigue owes as much to the Borgias and the Tokugawas as it does to the Plantagenets. Maybe your buccaneers are rightly feared because they embrace a "death before dishonor" code of conduct and are contemptuous of anyone (friend or foe) that lives to be captured.

[Johnny1A.2]

In Jerry Pournelle's future history (which contains the famous novel The Mote in God's Eye), the strongest human state 1000 years from now is an empire which is copied in many ways from the British and French empires of the 19C, including a hereditary constitutional monarchy and a hereditary aristocracy (but it is not feudal!).

To justify this, Pournelle shaped the star flight tech to create travel times and other conditions paralleling (but not identical to) the era of the Crimean War. The Empire uses the traditional European titles (Duke, Marquis, etc.) because the founders of the empire consciously copied them.

But the setting is also shaped by it origins in a mid 20C alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union that was in control of the Earth when star flight started, and that left a deep mark. So it's not a pure copy of 19C politics.

I used a different approach in my own world: the most powerful state on the 22nd Earth has a hereditary ruling class, 30 families that use the title of 'Prince'. They use some of the old symbols and regalia of the old European aristocrats, the but the title is actually a double play on words, because their origins of power are less in warfare than money, 'merchant princes'. The coronets and other symbolic regalia start out as an affectation.