A Louella response to respond to: yay!
First, the usual disclaimers: It's a big cluster. The main tribes probably have trillions of members (certainly lots of billions). Tribal is not the same as primitive--one of the attractions of Minmatar is the chance to play high-tech tribal--but the economics of things mean the future is
very unevenly distributed. There are people getting by (or not) in camps and shanty-towns. I know at least one podder from a very "nice" well-off urban clan who got her first civilian implants as an adolescent, was expected to study hard and succeed academically, and went to the local equivalent of ballet classes with other children from "nice" clans. There are lots of ways to play Minmatar.
So some of the things I'm going to talk about here, while they work for parts of society that Mata knows, would have some other Matari characters I know turn up their noses at the idea of sex or (spirits!) pregnancy with someone who wasn't an appropriate match for their social position.
Given what we know of Minmatar society--from the situation in the refugee camps to the fancy nightclubs for ritual sex--I also expect there's a reasonable amount of "father unknown" in certain sectors. "Maternity is fact: paternity is conjecture", especially in an environment where making paternity testing freely available isn't a priority over vaccinations and other basic healthcare. Therefore, I expect that if things get to being decided at Republic level they will default to following the mother's affiliations.
something about this, made me think.
It was along the lines of, a Minmatar woman would tend to have the idea that 3 children is something to aim for.
And the choices of fathers for them would be quite different.
This would not be frowned upon, because the culture has an entirely different view of "promiscuity".
Anyway, the idea was along the lines of:
1 child for the Tribe.
1 child for the Clan.
1 child for Me.
The child for the Tribe would have father suggested by the Tribal leaders, for overall benefit to the Tribe, to stir the gene pool, and whatnot. There may or may not be a Tribal ritual thing like a festival of fertility or whatever, for this sort of purpose. Random encounters with other Tribe members in the nightclubs could be another method of stirring the gene pool of the Tribe.
The child for the Clan would be to benefit the mother's Clan and its position in the Tribe.
The child for Me, would be mother's free choice.
And this would lend itself to various playground insults between children, depending on their ancestry. "Mum's child" could be used to suggest that the childs mother made a bad choice. "clanny" could suggest derogatory things about "social climbing" or other such things. "Tribey" may insinuate things too.
Children can be so cruel...
A simplified version of this is pretty much what I play as the norm for Mata's sub-tribe. I skip the "Tribe" level, though, because the tribe is just too big to comprehend in that way. Tribe is more like... an ethnicity, or a network of clan chieftains advising sub-tribe chieftains advising tribal councils advising the clan chief. The things that affect the direction of your life come from closer by; from the elders of your clan. In Mata's case that's from "the aunties".
One of the (many) things I threw into the character of Mata was a desire to play a
Natalist. It's something I didn't "get" IRL and wanted to explore. So from Mata's cultural viewpoint having children is good. Having at least one child (in Mata's matrilineal clan particularly a daughter) to continue your line and to perform the ancestor rites for you once you die is Very Important. Having more, to strengthen the clan and bring you support and mana, is a Good Thing. The custom is to have your first child young, for the clan to raise, and to continue on with your studies and finding your place. (RL connection: one of my friends had a fight on her hands when her husband's mother expected to take the first grandchild to raise. Big clash of cultures.)
To support this practically, and because it tied in with the kind of communal living I wanted to explore, Mata's clan does communal child-rearing that draws on aspects of kibbutzim, marae and 1980s-NZ-communes.
Remember that up until about 12 years ago the clan was sending young people--mostly young men--into the meat-grinder that was the Vindication Wars. That's had a huge impact on its age profile and gender balance. (The current less-lethal level of military activity is probably going to cause some re-thinking of a few things. We really need to work out what to do with our men now that more of them are surviving to adulthood.)
Among Mata's people the main local "festival" you refer to would be the gathering of the clans of her sub-tribe that's called every few years. That contributes to a spike in the birth rate of the clans which defines the beginning of a new age-cohort of children. That's a political and cultural event as well as a chance to mix up the gene-pool, but I imagine that when it comes to trying to get the young women pregnant there's a blend of young hormones, elderly advice and machination, and some outright throwing of flowers before the sub-tribal leaders. It's generally not something Mata will talk about in front of outsiders, because they don't understand.
You can tell from the naming customs, by the way, which children have acknowledged fathers and which don't. "Festival" children get pretty words usually associated with natural or seasonal phenomena in the place where a father's clan-name would otherwise go. (Trinominal system: <given name> <father's clan name or festival name> <(mother's) clan name>.) Mata's choice of names to use on her CONCORD licence turns out to be significant.
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Topic: Gender in New Eden (Read 14380 times)