Masters paper on morrowind

[mspyerzuka]

"How procedural rhetoric enforces a false Native nomos in Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind"[url]http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4463&context=etd[/url]

Logos means

Logos (UK /ˈloʊɡɒs/, /ˈlɒɡɒs/, or US /ˈloʊɡoʊs/; Greek: λόγος, from λέγω lego "I say") is an important term in western philosophy, psychology, rhetoric, and religion. It is a Greek word meaning "a ground", "a plea", "an opinion", "an expectation", "word", "speech", "account", "to reason", but it became a technical term in philosophy beginning with Heraclitus (ca. 535–475 BC), who used the term for a principle of order and knowledge.

Nomos means

In sociology, nomos refers to provisional codes (habits or customs) of social and political behavior, socially constructed and historically (even geographically) specific. [1] The term derives from the Greek νόμος, and it refers not only to explicit laws but to all of the normal rules and forms people take for granted in their day to day activities.[2] Nomos stands for order, valid and binding on those who fall under its jurisdiction; thus it is a social construct with ethical dimensions.[3] It is a belief, opinion or point of view; it is a human invention.

First off, Joshua lost me after the abstract on the first line literally. Honestly can't respect this guy's soft stem choice but who am i to judge. I haven't read this 60 page monster but have been skipping through it. Holy crap. I can't figure out if this guy is autistic AF to write a master's paper on morrowind or he's a genius to spend 45+ pages on straight game content. How the hell is this guy in a masters programs?

Note: Why are pdfs so lame? ><
edit: introduction is on page 8... Omg i gotta keep reading this guy is comedy gold.

[Kevaar]

Ergh. Sociology. Psychology's red-headed step-cousin.

I laud him for trying, but...<insert intellectual flailing here>

It is interesting to note, though, that our traditional view of Native Americans is being shown through new research as inherently flawed. Did he ever mention that...?

When you hear about how plentiful game and food was in Virginia when the settlers landed, that's because of the Indians' management of the land, not because of "natural bounty". Because they had no horses, no cattle, no plows, etc, their farms were made very differently. They would plant all sorts of crop species together into the same parcel of land because it was too difficult to clear several fields without plows. There were no fences because--why bother when you don't need to keep livestock in? They would frequently clear land through burning, which is also why quite a few of the native trees here are fire-resistant. They evolved that way as a response to the humans, not natural forest fires.

The horse-riding hunter-gatherer-warrior society we're familiar with evolved because their original agrarian society was disrupted by the White invasion and (in particular) the diseases we brought over that they had zero biological immunity to. As much of 90% of their population died to stuff like smallpox and malaria. It was like the Black Plague, only worse (Black Plague killed more like 50% in Europe). When the settlers landed, the Eastern Native Americans had no time to build up a genetic immunity to the diseases, so they were wiped out pretty quickly. But by the time we got out to Western America, several generations had gone by and now the diseases were no longer a problem. That's where we encountered the stiffest resistance, but you could also see the effects of war and famine in how their culture had changed.

When you lose 90% of the population, you lose your artisans, your political leaders, your farmers, your scholars...everyone. It's like a nuclear apocalypse. You're left with roving bands trying to put the pieces of society back together and returning to the basic of the basic to survive. In their case, this meant turning to hunting and gathering instead of trying to resow their fields. That's where our notion of Native American culture comes from, but in reality, they were only like that for a very small period of time, and only in response to the New World meeting the Old World.

Anyway, more on that in the books 1941 and 1943 by Charles C. Mann. Though his stuff on the Ice Age is a little shaky, the rest is pretty amazing.

Not sure how it relates to the Ashlanders, as it's stated in lore that they are a firmly nomadic people. So hmm.

The Native American history suggests that, so long as the environment and the social politics can sustain it, humans (and by extension elves?) would rather settle in one place with farms than anything else. The Native Americans didn't start as nomads; they became that way in response to war and available food sources. You see similar cultural upheavals in places of war and rebellion, where the losing or weaker faction "takes to the hills".

The Native Americans shifted from agrarian farms for sustenance to migrating animal species like the buffalo, and then became nomadic so they could migrate along with them. (I think the Inuits do this too with the caribou? Though in their case, they never farmed because nothing really grows up there!)

Ashlanders could also be considered political outcasts and rebels because of their issues with the Tribunal, and thus pushed into exile. However, this would suggest that the conflict with House Dunmer is VERY violent, and we would need to show that in our quests for them in the Mainland. More like terrorists, or people being actively prejudiced against and on the run.

The other route would be to make their food sources nomadic. Assuming the House Dunmer aren't actively harassing them, there's nothing really stopping the Ashlanders from finding some suitable plots in the Ashlands and planting some ashyams and trauma shrubs. But as far as I can tell from their ingame presentation, they don't farm. Instead they rely on guar and shalk.

So, we COULD assume the guar are migratory and the Ashlanders follow them...only problem is it is VERY hard to domesticate a migratory species: we've tried with the buffalo only for them to charge right through the fences when it is Time, and we could only really domesticate them by crossing them with cows. Since guar are fully domesticated, and we don't hear any stories of our pack guar running off at certain times of the year, I think we can assume they're not migratory. (Alternatively, the House Dunmer have bred theirs differently, similar to our cow-crossing, while the Ashlanders have not.)

That leaves the shalk. We know very little about them except that they're harvested for resin and (assumably) chitin. We don't know if you can EAT shalk. Which serves a problem to the migration debate. If all they give Dunmer is crafting goods, then they don't need to follow them all year round, so the Ashlanders would not be nomadic just for their shalk. They could just as easily wait until the shalk come back every spring with their babies and harvest them then. You only need to follow a creature year-round if you need them year-round, like for food.

ANYWAY, TL;DR, House Dunmer need to be more assinine to the Ashlanders in TR, and shalk might be migratory. LOL.

[Gnomey]

From vanilla Morrowind:

The two most common herd animals of the Ashlanders are the guar and the shalk. The guar is a large biped, trained as a beast of burden, and raised for meat and hides. Wild guard[sic] are encountered in the wilderness; they're usually quite peaceful. The shalk is a large, unaggressive[ha!] beetle, raised for meat and resin from its shells.

First of all I ought to mention that my knowledge of these matters is very shallow. Caribou/reindeer are however, for instance, animals that are both migratory and have been domesticated to greater and lesser extents, by the Sami among others, including being used for meat, hides and transport. Actually, I'd have thought there were quite a few such examples; Bactrian camels, some of the wilder horse breeds, etc.
One of the real-world comparisons people make of the Dunmer is to the Israelites, and certainly Morrowind takes heavy inspiration from the fertile crescent; I don't think it would be unreasonable to compare shalk and guars with goats and camels. (Note the packs in particular).
As far as the Ashlanders are concerned, I'd always felt the more obvious comparison was with the Eurasian steppes as opposed to the Plains Indians, though naturally as opposed to either they don't appear to make (significant) use of mounts. (A large part of this is due to gameplay, no doubt; I've pointed out before that there's a large intact siltstrider shell in the middle of each camp except, I think, for Ahemmusa, which has fallen on hard times, which goes a long way in explaining how the Ashlanders move their camps).
The steppe people have certainly been around for thousands of years and -- again, to my knowledge -- have generally not benefited from extensive agriculture, except when they happened to establish a dynasty in China or conquered their way down the Silk Road. Even when they did have agricultural land available, many of those steppe people still didn't bother to make the full transition into sedentary culture.

In-game dialogue certainly suggests the Ashlanders keep to their nomadic lifestyle due to choice, not necessity, though their less than ideal territories are a result of necessity -- being hemmed in by the ever-expanding Great Houses -- as opposed to choice. Part of that may be bluster, of course; they just don't like admitting that they have to completely readjust themselves at the whim of the decadent Great Houses. But I think another part is their general conservatism and spirituality. To them, the exodus may never have truly ended, and as attentive students of the Daedra stasis and stability are unappealing to them.

For the most part, I don't see relations between Ashlanders and House Dunmer as being very violent, if only because the Ashlanders know they would never win, even if they'd be able to hold out a long while and cause a lot of damage. The outcasts are an exception, naturally, and certainly some tribes like Erabenimsun might not let pesky things like being severely outclassed get in the way of their hubris.
Rather, I'd imagine that as a House expands into Ashlander territory the tribal unity tends to crumble -- some leave the tribe to settle down, others do business with the Great House Dunmer, then there are hardliners who want to go out with a bang -- most of the tribe moves deeper into infertile territory, a bunch of undesired ex-ashlanders wash up on the doorsteps of nearby settlements and the region becomes a little more lawless due to a wave of outcasts. Any actual conflicts between Ashlanders and newcomers would probably take the form of a series of noncommittal skirmishes as they seize each other up, and then either the newcomer figures that it's too much trouble and slows down a bit on the expansion or the Ashlanders figure it's too much trouble and withdraw.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Hlaalu were able to expand pretty peacefully thanks to striking some cut-throat deals with the local Ashlanders.

Certainly I do think House Dunmer would discriminate against Ashlanders and vice versa, but probably in a fairly low-key fashion; House Dunmer would probably not adequately see to the needs of Ashlanders, whether they've settled in their cities or not, while the devout Tribunal-worshipping Velothi commoners probably put a lot of pressure on ex-Ashlanders to conform to their ways. It would have been well within the means of the Temple to wipe out the Ashlanders millennia ago if that's what they'd wanted, though, so for the most part they seem to very grudgingly live and let live.

[10Kaziem]

On the subject of agrarian societies: I read the book [url=http://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/0062316095]Sapiens[/url] recently and one of the things it talked about was the transition from hunter-gatherer society to sedentary agrarian society*. It suggested that on average, a hunter-gatherer (possibly nomadic) society was probably healthier and happier on average on an individual basis. The benefit of agriculture is cheap food, meaning both "easy" and "not particularly great." You tend to get more people in an agricultural society if they start farming en masse, but on average these people are weaker, poorer, and less happy.

The tricky thing about this is more people = more strength, and agrarian societies with serious farming tend to conquer and drive out nearby hunter-gatherer societies.

Another tricky thing is that farming for food or getting food from a farmer appears to be much easier of a lifestyle overall, but it comes a with a great deal of hidden drawbacks. On the other side, the advantages of being a hunter-gatherer are less obvious but the drawbacks are clear.

This lifestyle divide (and therefore the divide in worldview and what is considered important and what is worth worrying about) is going to be important as one of the divisions between House dunmer and ashlanders.


(For example: the benefits of being a farming society are that you have a reliable source of food, that you have safety or strength in numbers, that you can have your own dwelling and possessions. There are others. Some drawbacks include: your "reliable" food source is actually at the whim of weather, insects, and diseases, your food's nutrition is not that great, that you need many children to work your fields, yet you have to feed and support those children, that too many people in one place leads to sanitation issues and disease, and that you are obligated to stay in one place to guard your possessions and land lest someone come take or destroy them, and if your animals or plants die you're screwed.

The benefits of being a hunter-gatherer include: you have a varied diet which gives you all the nutrients you need, you get all the exercise you need in the way humans were evolved to need it, you don't have to worry about disease or sanitation as much, and you don't have many more possessions than what you can carry on your back, so "defending" them is much less worrying. Last, if there's something wrong with where you are, you can just leave. Drawbacks include: if you get wounded and can't move around, you're going to have trouble eating, you don't have as many people in your tribe to help defend you, everybody in your tribe has to help get food, and it's hard to stockpile food or tools or clothes because you have to carry everything yourself or on your pack animals.)

(*Obviously there are many types and blends of human societies, but they can roughly be divided up by how people acquire food, and also many societies mix different types of food acquisition to get different types of food. But, still on the whole most societies either get their main nutrition from some type of farming or get it mainly from hunting and gathering.)

[Kevaar]

Don't mind me, I'm rambling a bit here. You guys bring up good points. It's definitely true the hunter/gatherer diet is healthier, but I think that also then lends to important differences in power between the cultures. Agrarian cultures need lots of hands to tend their farms, but that also means they have more hands to go to war than a nomadic culture would. Ashlanders would have significant problems trying to fight a war against their Great House cousins, so if there ever was a lot of violence, the Ashlanders would probably have had to give it up. If they were to have a very violent interaction with the House Dunmer today, it might be more due to current politics than a long-standing feud.

Using all your time getting food also means there's not room for more leisurely activities like scholarship, crafting, arts, organized games, etc. Still some of that, just not as much.

I'm curious what that might mean for why Ashlanders chose the nomadic lifestyle while the House Dunmer chose agragrian though, if not because one group was harassing the other group into exile. Certain professions would need mobility like traders, and again, there's the necessity to follow their herd animals around, so that might have peaceably evolved into a split over generations. Or there might be some connection to the wars with outsiders and the Tribunal leading to an ideological split, which eventually turned into a cultural split as well. Or even something like the Chimer recalling how they lived when they were Altmer, and trying to return to that lifestyle, but they discovered not all the land in Morrowind is farmable and had to make some adjustments if they wanted to live in the Ashlands.

Since Gnomey mentioned migration, I did some poking around the internet--

Apparently the domesticated caribou have been bred to have a weaker drive for migration. Like the dog-wolf comparison, they're also smaller and their breeding window has changed to be sooner. Wild caribou have a massive migration route in contrast, for purposes of breeding, finding food, and escaping the harsh winter.

Horses are also very changed from their wild form. A true wild horse ancestor would be like this guy:

[url]http://cdn.asiancorrespondent.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Mongolia-Wild-Horses.jpg[/url]

As opposed to the wild horses in the Americas, who are actually domesticated horses who got loose at some point in history. I can't find any mentions of either kind ever migrating though, unless it's the slow expansion of a species across a continent over generations. The Chincoteague ponies could be said to "migrate" from island to island, but that's initiated by humans. They let them (and sheep) run around wild until they mature, then round up and capture the ones they want to use. But Ashlanders probably couldn't get away with that unless they lived on an island, too, or else their herds might just run off entirely...

Apparently wild bactrian camels are like the horses in the Americas in that they might actually be runaway domesticated animals from a long time ago. I'm trying to find information on their migration habits. As far as I can tell, it's based on water availability in the desert, rather than inborn honing devices like birds or sea turtles.

But then, apparently the bison are like that, too. Looking it up, I might have spoken wrong, and the main reason bison have not been domesticated yet is they're pretty aggressive and hard to control.

Guar and shalk aren't mammals though, which all of those other species are. Insects are a more simple lifeform, and their migration urges are more hardcoded, as it were, than the semi-conscious go-where-the-food-is in mammals. A shalk could conceviably be a very migratory animal, and they still could be domesticated by the Dunmer easily enough, as the Dunmer just have to follow them around and put them to slaughter as needed. The meat and resin could be shipped. (And I have an image of an angry House Dunmer complaining to an Ashlander that their shalk herd just migrated right through his crops--do you mind?!)

Guars, in contrast, are used as mounts, so you would need total control of their movements. Some reptiles do the return-to-their-birth-place-to-breed thing, and I guess guar could conceivably do that kindof migration, too, since it's only part of the year they'd be gone. But, this would make guar very difficult to breed and use out of the reach of their breeding grounds, so it's probably not very likely. (Though perhaps also a reason why you don't see guar outside of Morrowind?)

As a sidenote, it might not be too far out of the line of reasoning to say the wild guar or shalk are escaped domesticated species, too, and the real ancestor species looks different. Not sure why that would matter outside of ingame scientific treatises on them, but twas a thought!

[10Kaziem]

Those are some interesting points about domesticated animals. Keep in mind that humans have pretty much domesticated every kind of animal they could, including bees, silkworms, and some other insects. (One can argue about the exact definition of domestication, but anyway...)

However, I would note that since the insects in Morrowind are quite large, they probably have more advanced nerve and brain systems and are therefore probably smarter than the average earth insect. Maybe not as smart as a pig or a dog, but not like ants, either.

I imagine that the divide between house Dunmer and Ashlanders started out very small and then got magnified over the years.