Backstage - OOC Forums
EVE-Online RP Discussion and Resources => EVE OOC Summit => Topic started by: Isobel Mitar on 15 Sep 2010, 07:01
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Minmatar Republic is an union of four to seven (depending on how you count) tribes. Do you think the Minmatar Republic has such a thing as citizenship that is not linked to tribe membership? Can one be a full citizen and member of the society without being part of a tribe?
What is your take on this question?
( Inspired by: http://backstage.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?topic=1102.msg12740#msg12740 )
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From what I have understood recently, my impression is that you can be a citizen without tribal membership, but it's impossible to get anything of consequence done. Sort of a second-class citizenship, if you will. But I also have the impression that you can switch tribes, possibly by being sponsored into a particular clan by existing members.
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From what I have understood recently, my impression is that you can be a citizen without tribal membership, but it's impossible to get anything of consequence done. Sort of a second-class citizenship, if you will. But I also have the impression that you can switch tribes, possibly by being sponsored into a particular clan by existing members.
Presumably marriage would be one way of switching tribes
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Interesting, i always though the Republic was a political mechanism or tool to ensure all Minmatars regardless of tribe, had minimal rights and duties. Health, education, military training, in short what a government does to look after its people. Something quite needed after they rebelled against Amarr and had to rebuild their civilization.
However the tribal structure was to create jobs, opportunities, a place for an individual to "grow". Almost like belong to a megacorp in Caldari Terms. It explained quite a few things for me at least.
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I think that the value of belonging to a clan and a tribe is that when you need a hand, you have people with contacts to help you. If you want a job in the local government, then belonging to one of the local clans is going to help a lot, when it comes time to fire some people when a department shrinks, the ones with strong clan support are not likely to be fired first. Are you having some problems with a legal case? Maybe it will go better for you if the judge is in your tribe...
That's some of the practical effects of being in a clan.
(and incidentally, some of the stuff I have most problem with OOC)
I think you can be a citizen without being in a clan, especially if you're a returnee, but without that clan and tribe support, you'll have fewer opportunities than other people.
I do think that given the recent timeframe of the rebellion (in cultural terms) that lots of people will be getting back to the republic who aren't in clans. I think that there will be active programs to try to find people clans either through genetic testing, or just adoption, as well as groups of people creating clans out of whole cloth. In this sense, the clan is essentially a group of people who are looking out for each other, using a structure that the republic recognises and understands.
Which is also why I think that it's really difficult to say "Matari clans are like x" without beinig wrong at least some of the time.
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Interesting, i always though the Republic was a political mechanism or tool to ensure all Minmatars regardless of tribe, had minimal rights and duties. Health, education, military training, in short what a government does to look after its people. Something quite needed after they rebelled against Amarr and had to rebuild their civilization.
However the tribal structure was to create jobs, opportunities, a place for an individual to "grow". Almost like belong to a megacorp in Caldari Terms. It explained quite a few things for me at least.
thats rather what I was thinking.
of course, the tribe could also be to an extent like belonging to a political party or ethnic group.
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I've wondered: is it possible that the Minmatar have seven major tribes, with other smaller niche tribes existing in limited locations?
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I've wondered: is it possible that the Minmatar have seven major tribes, with other smaller niche tribes existing in limited locations?
Maybe, but everywhere it says (iirc) THE seven tribes - ergo anything below is a clan or less... it might appear their idea of clan is merely a fancy structure to keep all of one bloodline under one 'roof' - Brutor Tribe for Brutors, etc.
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I've wondered: is it possible that the Minmatar have seven major tribes, with other smaller niche tribes existing in limited locations?
Maybe, but everywhere it says (iirc) THE seven tribes - ergo anything below is a clan or less... it might appear their idea of clan is merely a fancy structure to keep all of one bloodline under one 'roof' - Brutor Tribe for Brutors, etc.
QFT
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I'm fairly confident that tribes consist of clans, somewhat analogous to alliances and corps in EVE.
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I'm fairly confident that tribes consist of clans, somewhat analogous to alliances and corps in EVE.
Given that a Tribe could be billions of people, it feels like a tribe is a very impersonal thing.
I'm playing that there are sub-tribes that are made up of collections of clans, so that there can be something that's bigger than your clan, but smaller than billions of people. The subtribe has the clans you look to first when the aunties think it's time to marry some eligible person off...
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idk, I feel like the tribes are more broad then that, tribes in minmatar society are basically analogous to their nations and ethnic groups. the word tribe is probably fairly inaccurate in judging the actual thing.
think about it this way, the minmatar were not a unified world when the amarrians invaded, they still had their countries, which would be the tribes. Now that the rebellion has happened, the government is essentially unified, but homogenization hasn't had enough time to break down the social barriers the way it has in the other empires, the people still can trace their ancestry back to their parent "country" basically, imagine that Europe is invaded by imperialist catholic Russia, eventually, they push russia back out, and unify themselves together as one government to present a strong enough front to resist the russian slavers who just want to burn them all. But the old countries are still there in a sense, the people still claim to be part of them. Thats sort of how I see the matari tribes.
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Tribe seems a huge division, somewhat impractical.
What mentions are there of clans? And how big are they? And what does it mean, compared to how the word is currently used? What other divisions are there?
Like,
Tribe
???
Clan
???
Family
Individual
I've read of things in other situations of a term "sept" which appears to consist of a number of clans.
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I've read of things in other situations of a term "sept" which appears to consist of a number of clans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sept
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What other divisions are there?
Like,
Tribe
???
Clan
???
Family
Individual
I've read of things in other situations of a term "sept" which appears to consist of a number of clans.
I play that there's a subtribe: a clumsy term which is a translation of "sept" or "hapū".
I don't include nuclear families within Mata's clan: certainly they're not typical, although some of the outworkers who don't have clanhouses where they're posted might form them, and it's not uncommon for those who've left the clanways. There's a particular tie to your "house", whether that's the named great-hall at the centre of each of the compounds on the clanlands or a clanhouse in a town or city. In the communal child-raising that's typical of the houses there's recognition of "milk-kin" as well as "blood-kin". There are ties to your cohort: essentially the kids of a similar age.
Bonds of affection exist, and may be recognised; they may even recorded in the clan register to define an outsider as someone known to the clan. They're fluid, though: made and unmade at will. (This is the "perano" relationship "bound by affection and not by contract"; source of the affectionate term "pera".)
Formal marriages are a whole other thing: they're to form alliances, they're relatively rare, and they're political.
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Mata, that sounds fascinating. Do you have anything already written which describes this in more detail?
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I have played it so that there are several ways clans can be affiliated to groupings of subtribes; by kinship, by geographical location, by occupation, by other traditional ties and so on. PF also describes subclans.
My character's clan is part of a subtribe, but also has a few traditionally allied clans they frequently do business with and sometimes marry with.
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Mata, that sounds fascinating. Do you have anything already written which describes this in more detail?
Er, two years of RP? :)
It gets touched on in the blog, but it's all kind of assumed there. Are there bits you'd like me to write up as if to explain it to outsiders? I may have some time for writing soon.
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It gets touched on in the blog, but it's all kind of assumed there. Are there bits you'd like me to write up as if to explain it to outsiders? I may have some time for writing soon.
I was thinking about some sort of description, yes. It sounds to me like you've taken a really interesting direction with Minmatar family traditions, and I'd like to understand it further. That's all. :)