Fast Jimmy wrote...
Dean_the_Young wrote...
You know, the world's largest nation has already faced that delimma. It's name is China, and it's one of the greatest cultural unifications in history. It has assimilated countless cultures, composes over a billion people, and has enough minorities to make literal oceans of blood. It also has one of the largest ethnic groups in the world, the Han Chinese, which are what everyone thinks of when they here the word. There are plenty more sub-groups than just the Han: other ethnicities, other linguistic groups, and the world's third-largest nation for geographic identifiers.
Why does the most populous empire in the world identify by something other than geographic location? Why doesn't it's people identify by ethnic group, by geography, by religion? Why does the rest of the world identify them by the same? Because culture- the shared beliefs and identity of what they have in common, rather than what they see as meaningless differentiations.
If over a billion people can identify themselves as Chinese, and another 6 billion can handle recognizing them as Chinese despite countless possible subcategories, the concept of a unifying identity that can be understood both internally and externally doesn't seem to be as hard or confusing as you make it to be.
This doesn't work as an example. China is a culture and a nationality. I could no more convert to being Chinese than a dog could convert to being a cat.
Sure you could. The Chinese culture is one of the historically most successful cultures at converting foreign Barbarians into civilized Chinese. It might take some centuries, but that's pretty much how Chinese expansion worked over the dynasties: some new foreigners came in, took over, and were turned Chinese. You'd be a minority until then, the nationality without the culture, but China's actually a diverse place when you look behind the wall.
There's also the point that China being a culture isn't simultaneous with being one's nationality in the other direction. Chinese culture, the veritable China Towns and various enclaves across the world, is one of the more successful at maintaining cultural identity even for those who change nationality. Chinese expats are famous for their cultural resiliance even when adopting new nationalities.
I COULD convert to Buddhism, or Taoism, or Hinduism (one of China's many religions). Does that make me Chinese?
Not on its own, but it could be a part. Cultural assimilation works on a number of levels.
Wouldn't it be insaenly confusing for me to start introducing myself as a Chinese person just because I adopted a different set of world views?
Not especially. If you were culturally converted, I might think you odd but that's a function of rarity rather than incomprehension. But then, I've met African-Chinese (the union of a Chinese worker in Africa who took his bride home), White-Africans, African Americans, Arab-Israelies, Iranian-Americans, and even the mythical French-Brit.
I'd hardly claim their integration was easy and smoothless. Racism is real. But they can also be a part of the culture they identify with, and identifying them by their culture rather than their ethnicity is perfectly functional.
talian as a grouping makes little sense if there is no Italian polity or identify. You might as well call them Romans. Or Oscans. Or Flying Cheese Wheels.
If the only ethnic group anyone identifies as the Catholics are the people from the Italian peninsula, and everyone in the world understands that when you refer to a ethnic Catholic you are referring to the people from the Italian peninsula, the practical application is... Catholic.
Kind of like how, in the real world, we can refer to Italians as both a non-synonymous ethnicity or nationality. If I tell you my lover is Italian, which am I refering to?
Yet this is NOT the case. In our fictional example of Qunari or in Catholicism. Catholics can be found all over the world. Even if medieval times, they were never confined to Italy, despite that being the headquarters of the Catholic relgion.
Italians, both nationals and people of Italian descent, can be found all over the world as well. At one point, the city with the largest italian population in the world was New York City.
You act like Pal Vollen is the only place in the world where people of the Qunari faith can be found, yet we see that Rivain has many HUMAN converts who practice devoutly. As does areas of Tevinter. And, apparently, pockets of people in Kirkwall.
They're not confined to Pal Vollen. Neither are ethnic and national Italians confined to Italy. And...?
The current model would mean you'd have to find some way, either through context or explanation, of saying someone was a human Rivanni member of the Qun... as opposed to an Elvish Free Marsher member of the Qun... as opposed to a gray-skinned giant from Pal Vollen who is NOT a member of the Qun.
Rivanni-Qunari. Marcher-Qunari. Or, if the origin was irrelevant, simply Qunari for both: in general I probably wouldn't care any more for the origin of a group of Qunari than I would the origin locations of my Human foes. And Tal-Vashoth for the third, since without explicit descriptors I can assume ox-man. If it was a former Fereldan convert who left, I could specify Fereldan Tal-Vashoth if necessary.
In the Italian example, I could say Roma-Italian (an Italian citizen of Roma ancestry), Italian-American (an ethnic Italian of American citizenship), or Italian (someone who is identified with the Italian nationality, regardless of their nationality).
It has the potential to be just as confusing as that. Without even trying.
So do all collective groupings, including Kossith. The solution to the potential vagueries of language is... more language.
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