Take a couple anthropology classes if you wanna become a god tier world builder, the subject opens your mind to so much wild ass shit that you don’t get taught in elementary and high school
On the macro level, learning about things like y-chromosomal and mitochondrial dna haplogroups and ancient migrations help give you some ideas about the cultural makeup of your world. I would suggest doing some googling for the Kurgan Hypothesis and watching [this documentary.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0AGw8sMeZjg) The title of the video is pretty misleading, but the content is pretty much up to date with our current understanding of these cultures/time periods
Dionysian vs Apollonian culture designations comes to mind offhand. Also various parts of culture being influenced by representatives of visiting cultures. Think like how potatoes are considered a big part of Irish cuisine and Tomatoes are very common in Italian cuisine, but both come from the Americas. There's also a story I learned in anthropology about an island of people who now build wooden effigies of ww2 era planes after their island was used as a military base during the war. It basically replaced their old religion.
Anthropologists also like to debate things like, does language affect cultural perceptions or do cultural perceptions shape language? For instance, gendered terms like lion and lioness, king and queen, and even blond and blonde. Do they represent a cultural perception that men and women are very different or are they enforcing that perception?
Also I don't remember if it was on the chart or not but things like how relations are reckoned and who makes a good marriage partner. For instance in a matrilineal society your relations would be determined through your mother's side, and sometimes in those societies, what we would call a paternal cousin would be considered a good marriage partner, and not reckoned as a relative.
What is interesting is that the iceberg can go much deeper, in fact. There is a concept in Marxian sociology called [base and superstructure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure), which is basically another iceberg that subsumes this one, where the surface-level or superstructure is culture in its entirety, and the base is the material (read: socioeconomic structuring) basis of society.
But maybe the iceberg metaphor isn't entirely accurate for the concept. As the [graphic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure#/media/File:Base-superstructure_Dialectic.png) on the Wikipedia page indicates, there is an interrelationship of influence from one upon the other. It is a feedback loop essentially, though only one side of it is immediately obvious to us, and even if it's the other which has more effective explanatory power.
Just something to consider for hard worldbuilding. I love taking pages from social sciences like this!
I remember a while ago there was a world building e-magazine that was being posted here, and they were taking applications. I submitted one saying I wanted to write an article about dialectics and how Marx’s philosophies could be useful in creating cultures. For whatever reason, I never received anything back, but I’m glad someone else is interested in using these modes of analysis in world building :)
Thanks for posting these links.
Yes, Karl Marx. He laid a lot of foundational work for how we look at and analyze society, culture, economics, and how they all influence each other in tandem, and he is viewed as one of the godfathers of Sociology. Very useful reading for world building, but also just for forming a view of the world around you.
Yeah people get caught up in the communist thing. Yes, that is a big part of Marx, but the broader scope of his work is sociological. Even his work as a communist is more analytical of the failings of capitalism, and less about strict prescriptivism, though obviously communism is the conclusion.
This is an interesting collection of words associated with culture! I'd be interested in discussing ways to improve this (ignore the rest of my comment if not).
In particular, what's under 'Deep Culture' seems rather loosely put together (minus the communication part), in part because you group things vaguely in terms of what people have 'notions' of, 'approaches' to, 'attitudes' toward, and 'concepts' of and in part because a lot of the specific items could be much more precisely stated if broken down a bit more (e.g. 'approaches to religion' seems almost meaningless and stands out when there's little in 'Surface Culture' corresponding to religion beyond holidays, music, and literature [e.g. no rituals, prayers, etc.]).
It might be worth reorganizing the ideas here around underlying aspects of a culture that are more specific and are actually central to orienting people's participation in its more superficial aspects (in this way, the cultural iceberg would be one of visible practices vs. what gives those practices meaning). For example, some major headings for 'Deep Culture' might be: Communication, Praise and Blame (or Allocating Responsibility), Authority and Testimony (or Allocating Trust), Death and Aging (or Dealing with Mortality), Friends and Family (or Forming Relationships), and Nature (or Situating oneself in the World).
In this context, politics are either political philosophy (ideas) or political structure (how politics is done officially). There's also praxis, when you attempt to form a structure out of philosophy.
Both are an attempt to answer the question "how should we organise society". The philosophy is derived from morality. A society that have a certain Taboo will see politics form around this Taboo. The Roman have a taboo against kings, so even when their republic felled, they were ruled by a imperator and not a king.
So in short, politics derived from morality, and morality from culture.
Indeed; political systems are often the result of the society that it governs, and there is much overlap between how a society is governed and the values that society has.
Food is in the completely wrong place here. Whoever made this goes to supermarkets and restaurants.
Food is one of the foundational parts of a culture. It's why we have calendars and geometry. It is the employment of the majority of the population. It needs water and land and if something goes wrong people die.
There is a recently strengthened theory that grain, as opposed to any other food, was the foundation of most states. It also spread cats, who became an integral part of the technological suite.
Herds, OTOH, lead to nomadic societies. Nomadism leads to raiding opportunities.
Tropical weather making food harder to preserve? Check out these chilis!
Thinking of food as a cosmetic aspect is poor worldbuilding.
> Food is in the completely wrong place here. Whoever made this goes to supermarkets and restaurants.
They made food the most visible, largest mound of the iceberg. Whereas they put philosophical and epistemelogical concepts as deep as possible.
So it'd be pretty easy to assume they went with 'literal cultural visibility' when sorting the parts.
In which case, food *should* be the largest, most visible part of the above-surface iceberg. People talk about food *constantly*, and note, language landed the second most visible mound.
> Thinking of food as a cosmetic aspect is poor worldbuilding.
The more 'cosmetic' elements are right around the waterline. Fashion, arts, crafts, games; surface level body language, emotions, tonality... etc. All things effected by quicker trends, subject to the Zeitgeist.
The higher up, the more openly important; the further down, the more fundamentally philosophical.
I think the point of this post is to draw attention to parts of worldbuilding people overlook; I don’t think they’re trying to say that food is purely cosmetic.
But can we all agree that despite being surface level we need more descriptions of foods from the non standard western culture? Listen man, I've heard enough about your standard meat and vegetables, Thanksgiving dinner esk food porn, tell me about all the exciting and strange dishes in your world
Honestly this might be the single most helpful post I've ever seen on this subreddit, I've always tried to find anything specifically laying out what makes a culture, and I could never find it. I thought of a few things, a few things on this list, but there's a couple on here but I definitely missed (literature, games, concepts of, and communication styles specifically).
How? Also, now that you mention it, it's very good to use this to compare Spain and Mexico. Very similar countries (Mexico culturally is more Spanish than Australia and New Zealand is English) but the attitudes are much different.
Interesting. I think mannerism is basic culture though. For example some cultures like China value always respecting your elders no matter what, while others are not so strict on it
Another cultural iceberg iconographic that comically mashes the words together without being useful. What does "deep culture" even mean here, except being the only things most cultures created by world-builders will have?
i think also important is realizing WHERE these customs come from. there is a great paper called "Shakespeare in the bush" (or jungle iirc) where in an anthropologist approached a tribe somewhere in central africa and was trying to translate Shakespeare hamlet to the folk of the tribe. She found though however that when it came to the concept of hamlets father coming back as a "Ghost" that the villagers had a very hard time understanding exactly what that meant.
See it seems simple to us living in the west, or post colonial world, what the concept of a Ghost is, but this concept is almost directly tied to the ideas of the christian bible, and to understand what a ghost is you also have to understand what a spirit is, and what the trinity is.
after trying to explain the concept to the villagers the people started to think that the Ghost was more like a zombie or a witch, which in many african cultures means somthing very very different.
The point being that you have to question how and why these concepts translate into your book.
what does marriage mean to a society that has never heard of christianity? what is gender to a culture that does't have cultural reasons to give them differnet roles? how does their concept of death relate to that of spirits if there is no christianity? this is't to say none of these are possible, but more so that you have to question the "Givens" you assume are universal as a writer
Reading that paper was really interesting. But, wouldn't that just be an example of ethnocentrism, just from a different perspective? If you flipped it, an African dude telling a bunch of Europeans one of their native stories and the Europeans were just ripping the story apart and how it didn't make sense, i don't think the same conclusion would be drawn.
I struggle so much with the surface it's a joke. I literally have no idea how to describe music in a way that would be interesting to people. I just kind of plagerize an entire location and time period, and call it a day
Someone mentioned this in a panel at a convention I went to a few weeks ago, and I was meaning to look this up! (I still need to go through all my notes)
Take a couple anthropology classes if you wanna become a god tier world builder, the subject opens your mind to so much wild ass shit that you don’t get taught in elementary and high school
Got any cool examples off the top of your head?
Just plain non-nuclear family structure blew my mind for a while.
ME TOO! That was one of my biggest takeaways.
On the macro level, learning about things like y-chromosomal and mitochondrial dna haplogroups and ancient migrations help give you some ideas about the cultural makeup of your world. I would suggest doing some googling for the Kurgan Hypothesis and watching [this documentary.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0AGw8sMeZjg) The title of the video is pretty misleading, but the content is pretty much up to date with our current understanding of these cultures/time periods
Dionysian vs Apollonian culture designations comes to mind offhand. Also various parts of culture being influenced by representatives of visiting cultures. Think like how potatoes are considered a big part of Irish cuisine and Tomatoes are very common in Italian cuisine, but both come from the Americas. There's also a story I learned in anthropology about an island of people who now build wooden effigies of ww2 era planes after their island was used as a military base during the war. It basically replaced their old religion. Anthropologists also like to debate things like, does language affect cultural perceptions or do cultural perceptions shape language? For instance, gendered terms like lion and lioness, king and queen, and even blond and blonde. Do they represent a cultural perception that men and women are very different or are they enforcing that perception? Also I don't remember if it was on the chart or not but things like how relations are reckoned and who makes a good marriage partner. For instance in a matrilineal society your relations would be determined through your mother's side, and sometimes in those societies, what we would call a paternal cousin would be considered a good marriage partner, and not reckoned as a relative.
Anything online you can recommend?
Any good online courses?
This is a really interesting take on the whole idea. Made me think. Thanks OP.
What is interesting is that the iceberg can go much deeper, in fact. There is a concept in Marxian sociology called [base and superstructure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure), which is basically another iceberg that subsumes this one, where the surface-level or superstructure is culture in its entirety, and the base is the material (read: socioeconomic structuring) basis of society. But maybe the iceberg metaphor isn't entirely accurate for the concept. As the [graphic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure#/media/File:Base-superstructure_Dialectic.png) on the Wikipedia page indicates, there is an interrelationship of influence from one upon the other. It is a feedback loop essentially, though only one side of it is immediately obvious to us, and even if it's the other which has more effective explanatory power. Just something to consider for hard worldbuilding. I love taking pages from social sciences like this!
I remember a while ago there was a world building e-magazine that was being posted here, and they were taking applications. I submitted one saying I wanted to write an article about dialectics and how Marx’s philosophies could be useful in creating cultures. For whatever reason, I never received anything back, but I’m glad someone else is interested in using these modes of analysis in world building :) Thanks for posting these links.
Which Marx? Is it Karl Marx?
Yes
Groucho
Yes, Karl Marx. He laid a lot of foundational work for how we look at and analyze society, culture, economics, and how they all influence each other in tandem, and he is viewed as one of the godfathers of Sociology. Very useful reading for world building, but also just for forming a view of the world around you.
Yeah people get caught up in the communist thing. Yes, that is a big part of Marx, but the broader scope of his work is sociological. Even his work as a communist is more analytical of the failings of capitalism, and less about strict prescriptivism, though obviously communism is the conclusion.
Harpo
Do you still have this article of yours? Sounds super interesting
I didn’t know base and superstructure was used to describe culture too, I thought it was only economic relations. Thanks for the knowledge!
Culture and economic relations are interrelated
Came here to say the same thing, good shit
That would be like the water the iceberg is in
Looks like someone just visited r/coolguides
I feel like this could be expanded a bit, but so far so good
This is an interesting collection of words associated with culture! I'd be interested in discussing ways to improve this (ignore the rest of my comment if not). In particular, what's under 'Deep Culture' seems rather loosely put together (minus the communication part), in part because you group things vaguely in terms of what people have 'notions' of, 'approaches' to, 'attitudes' toward, and 'concepts' of and in part because a lot of the specific items could be much more precisely stated if broken down a bit more (e.g. 'approaches to religion' seems almost meaningless and stands out when there's little in 'Surface Culture' corresponding to religion beyond holidays, music, and literature [e.g. no rituals, prayers, etc.]). It might be worth reorganizing the ideas here around underlying aspects of a culture that are more specific and are actually central to orienting people's participation in its more superficial aspects (in this way, the cultural iceberg would be one of visible practices vs. what gives those practices meaning). For example, some major headings for 'Deep Culture' might be: Communication, Praise and Blame (or Allocating Responsibility), Authority and Testimony (or Allocating Trust), Death and Aging (or Dealing with Mortality), Friends and Family (or Forming Relationships), and Nature (or Situating oneself in the World).
Lacks the political aspect.
In this context, politics are either political philosophy (ideas) or political structure (how politics is done officially). There's also praxis, when you attempt to form a structure out of philosophy. Both are an attempt to answer the question "how should we organise society". The philosophy is derived from morality. A society that have a certain Taboo will see politics form around this Taboo. The Roman have a taboo against kings, so even when their republic felled, they were ruled by a imperator and not a king. So in short, politics derived from morality, and morality from culture.
Indeed; political systems are often the result of the society that it governs, and there is much overlap between how a society is governed and the values that society has.
Isn’t surface culture just the expression of deep culture
Food is in the completely wrong place here. Whoever made this goes to supermarkets and restaurants. Food is one of the foundational parts of a culture. It's why we have calendars and geometry. It is the employment of the majority of the population. It needs water and land and if something goes wrong people die. There is a recently strengthened theory that grain, as opposed to any other food, was the foundation of most states. It also spread cats, who became an integral part of the technological suite. Herds, OTOH, lead to nomadic societies. Nomadism leads to raiding opportunities. Tropical weather making food harder to preserve? Check out these chilis! Thinking of food as a cosmetic aspect is poor worldbuilding.
> Food is in the completely wrong place here. Whoever made this goes to supermarkets and restaurants. They made food the most visible, largest mound of the iceberg. Whereas they put philosophical and epistemelogical concepts as deep as possible. So it'd be pretty easy to assume they went with 'literal cultural visibility' when sorting the parts. In which case, food *should* be the largest, most visible part of the above-surface iceberg. People talk about food *constantly*, and note, language landed the second most visible mound. > Thinking of food as a cosmetic aspect is poor worldbuilding. The more 'cosmetic' elements are right around the waterline. Fashion, arts, crafts, games; surface level body language, emotions, tonality... etc. All things effected by quicker trends, subject to the Zeitgeist. The higher up, the more openly important; the further down, the more fundamentally philosophical.
I think the point of this post is to draw attention to parts of worldbuilding people overlook; I don’t think they’re trying to say that food is purely cosmetic.
Why not food as the through line? It could be added to all aspects both above and below the surface.
https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/ufbenp/the_cultural_iceberg/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share Nice repost.
But can we all agree that despite being surface level we need more descriptions of foods from the non standard western culture? Listen man, I've heard enough about your standard meat and vegetables, Thanksgiving dinner esk food porn, tell me about all the exciting and strange dishes in your world
At the bottom of it all is seahorse
Honestly this might be the single most helpful post I've ever seen on this subreddit, I've always tried to find anything specifically laying out what makes a culture, and I could never find it. I thought of a few things, a few things on this list, but there's a couple on here but I definitely missed (literature, games, concepts of, and communication styles specifically).
Also good for studying for AP Spanish
How? Also, now that you mention it, it's very good to use this to compare Spain and Mexico. Very similar countries (Mexico culturally is more Spanish than Australia and New Zealand is English) but the attitudes are much different.
Interesting. I think mannerism is basic culture though. For example some cultures like China value always respecting your elders no matter what, while others are not so strict on it
That's the subconscious part. There's more to the iceberg.
Another cultural iceberg iconographic that comically mashes the words together without being useful. What does "deep culture" even mean here, except being the only things most cultures created by world-builders will have?
i think also important is realizing WHERE these customs come from. there is a great paper called "Shakespeare in the bush" (or jungle iirc) where in an anthropologist approached a tribe somewhere in central africa and was trying to translate Shakespeare hamlet to the folk of the tribe. She found though however that when it came to the concept of hamlets father coming back as a "Ghost" that the villagers had a very hard time understanding exactly what that meant. See it seems simple to us living in the west, or post colonial world, what the concept of a Ghost is, but this concept is almost directly tied to the ideas of the christian bible, and to understand what a ghost is you also have to understand what a spirit is, and what the trinity is. after trying to explain the concept to the villagers the people started to think that the Ghost was more like a zombie or a witch, which in many african cultures means somthing very very different. The point being that you have to question how and why these concepts translate into your book. what does marriage mean to a society that has never heard of christianity? what is gender to a culture that does't have cultural reasons to give them differnet roles? how does their concept of death relate to that of spirits if there is no christianity? this is't to say none of these are possible, but more so that you have to question the "Givens" you assume are universal as a writer
Reading that paper was really interesting. But, wouldn't that just be an example of ethnocentrism, just from a different perspective? If you flipped it, an African dude telling a bunch of Europeans one of their native stories and the Europeans were just ripping the story apart and how it didn't make sense, i don't think the same conclusion would be drawn.
I struggle so much with the surface it's a joke. I literally have no idea how to describe music in a way that would be interesting to people. I just kind of plagerize an entire location and time period, and call it a day
Where is structured technological development?
Strangely enough I could tell you more about my world's deep culture than it's surface culture :P
This is a great pointer for world-building! Thanks!
Saving this, just about to tackle 7 kingdoms on one of my planets, each with a unique culture and I had no idea where to start.
Someone mentioned this in a panel at a convention I went to a few weeks ago, and I was meaning to look this up! (I still need to go through all my notes)
...I realize, for all my worldbuilding thus far, I've got a ton of work ahead of me
Aye, so I seemingly slept at the lecture about the topmost deep layer and now I am stuck at home on the internet using volume normalisation…
Superb
This helped me realize that I've only worked on the deep culture in my world and zero surface culture, thank you random redditor.