03-20-2021, 01:55 PM
I am very skeptical about the quality of our anthropological evidence concerning games from other cultures.
So presumably these interactions went something like.
1. White European goes exploring amongst the "natives".
2. He (usually a "he" I guess) brings with him his cultural biases about the superiority of his culture. The degree to which his assumptions are racist may well vary from quite explicit to more condescending, but they probably were to at least some extent.
3. He sees the "natives" playing a board game and either simply observes it or asks about it.
4. Simply observing it is not guaranteed to get the correct rules at all. There may be situations that he never witnesses. The players may be taking shortcuts because they all can see that they make no difference.
5. Asking about them may be impossible or fraught depending on the language barrier.
6. Leaving aside translation issues, the people teaching him the game will most likely treat him like a child learning the game rather than formal rules. This could allow mistakes to creep in. In particular it provides another opportunity for nuances in the rules to be lost.
7. For reasons explained above he may be predisposed not to question any inadequacies in the game as he sees it.
8. Neither culture is probably a "boardgaming culture" in the modern sense. So both will likely have assumptions about what constitutes a boardgame and will assume the other shares those assumptions even when they don't.
9. So in summary neither side will have the tools to question whether the communication has worked.
10. The European may well not have the motivation to do so.
Am I off-base in this analysis? Is the available evidence examined through the process of trying to ask how reliable the process of gathering the evidence was in the first place?
So presumably these interactions went something like.
1. White European goes exploring amongst the "natives".
2. He (usually a "he" I guess) brings with him his cultural biases about the superiority of his culture. The degree to which his assumptions are racist may well vary from quite explicit to more condescending, but they probably were to at least some extent.
3. He sees the "natives" playing a board game and either simply observes it or asks about it.
4. Simply observing it is not guaranteed to get the correct rules at all. There may be situations that he never witnesses. The players may be taking shortcuts because they all can see that they make no difference.
5. Asking about them may be impossible or fraught depending on the language barrier.
6. Leaving aside translation issues, the people teaching him the game will most likely treat him like a child learning the game rather than formal rules. This could allow mistakes to creep in. In particular it provides another opportunity for nuances in the rules to be lost.
7. For reasons explained above he may be predisposed not to question any inadequacies in the game as he sees it.
8. Neither culture is probably a "boardgaming culture" in the modern sense. So both will likely have assumptions about what constitutes a boardgame and will assume the other shares those assumptions even when they don't.
9. So in summary neither side will have the tools to question whether the communication has worked.
10. The European may well not have the motivation to do so.
Am I off-base in this analysis? Is the available evidence examined through the process of trying to ask how reliable the process of gathering the evidence was in the first place?