how not to welcome the stranger

[cellio]

The situation I'm writing about occurred in an SCA context, but the principles generalize at least to any "unusual" community.

The SCA is organized around both specific activities and broader social activities. We have general get-togethers like events, but we also have fighting practice, dance practice, choir rehearsals, brewing guild, costuming workshops, archery practice, and so on and so on. Sometimes people are attracted to the SCA as the SCA, and sometimes they come in through a specific activity. Of the latter, some then broaden their interests and become part of the society, and others remain focused on that one activity and (often) drift away because it can be hard to pursue just the one thing. (Eventually you've got to start going to events, which can be a shock if you haven't been prepped.)

Except for fighting, most of the activities that people enter through have non-SCA analogues. My husband, for example, was an experienced folk-dancer and entered the SCA through dance practice. Our choir has had several people over the years who wanted to sing in a choir and renaissance music was fine. We've gotten people who do costuming at SF cons who want to learn about medieval clothing. And so on.

The important thing to remember, when dealing with such a person, is: this person isn't already sold on the SCA. He just wants to fence or dance or make beer or whatever, and if the SCA turns out to be hospitable he'll stick around. But it's not as sure a thing as when, say, someone moves in from another group and is looking up the locals. (Yes, you can blow that too. That's not the focus of this essay.)

I was recently contacted by someone who participates in a particular activity mundanely, had heard we do it, and wanted to be hooked up with someone local to him. I talked with him a little about the activity (how the SCA tends to do it) and about the SCA in general (he already knew what you can know about us without actually meeting us; in fact, he'd even done research on the medieval forms of his activity of interest). The activity has a weekly gathering local to him, so I then sent two pieces of email. The first was a private message to the person in charge of that activity saying (essentially) "yo, I've got an interested mundane for you" with a little more background on what I knew. The second was a message sent to both of them making introductions and asking the SCA person to include the newcomer on his distribution list for activity-specific announcements. In that message I was careful to use no SCA jargon, and I used mundane (not SCA) names.

The SCA person responded and welcomed the newcomer (good). He also said something akin to "practices are at the duke's house" and suggested the newcomer join the local group's mailing list (which is a discussion list, not an announcement list, and covers many topics not related to this activity). He signed his SCA name.

*cringe*

I suspect that wasn't the best way to make a good impression. Was it so bad that the newcomer will punt? No, I doubt it -- but it would have been easy to be more accessible, and seeing this reminded me of just how bad many SCA people are at being accessible. Newcomers who show up at events don't fare much better; we assume they share a context, know what the jargon means, understand the social norms, etc. We've gotten better at arranging for loaner garb and telling them to bring their own dishes, but we still have a way to go to bridge that gap between committed SCA folk and not-sure-about-this curious visitors. Sigh.

I'm not suggesting that we hide what we do. The SCA is about much more than any specific activity; we should not over-compensate for fear of weirding people out. But you can ease them into it and increase the odds that they'll think this is interesting. And small changes can be immensely more welcoming: for instance, when sending out announcements about practices, is it so hard to send it both to the group list and the small set of people who want to be directly notified? Especially if the alternative is to bury the newcomer in discussions of Robin Hood movies, BoD antics, the new rules about children's activities, and the college of arms (to choose just a few)?

I can, of course, take this up with the specific individual involved (who is a good and generally-clueful person). But while one incident prompted this ramble, the issue is much broader. How do we encourage SCA people, as opposed to this SCA person, to put themselves in the shoes of the newcomer before responding to inquiries? Are there lessons we can learn from other "weird" subcultures, like fandom? (Fandom is probably a bad example because it very much organizes around the convention, not the sustained local activity. But there might be sub-fandoms that are different, or other groups.)

Comments

[jducoeur]

But I've also seen people who turned out to be key contributors who were drawn in through dance practice (for some reason it was always dance practice), people the society would have been poorer for missing.

Be careful here to distinguish your populations. I mean, I understand the dance practice equation quite well: it's quite possible that I've been to more dance practices than anyone else in the Society (nearly every week for almost 25 years), and I've run it for over four years. Dance practice has always been my home in the SCA.

The thing is, the people who really get into dance practice are *rarely* specialists, in my experience. Some are -- but those are precisely the ones who tend to get fed up with it and leave after a modest period of time, because a well-run dance practice isn't aggressive enough for them.

The ones who stay are usually the people looking for the *social* side, not the dance-specialty side. The thing about dance practice is that it is the most social practice the Society has, in most cases. That's true of us, just as it was in period: dance is social lubricant, and folks who are into dance are usually half there for the dancing, half for the people.

So it's true that I *do* push dance practice as the place to start -- but not because of the specialty. I push it as a place to meet people and get to know them, and to learn an SCA art in a very forgiving environment. It's true that dance practice isn't too threatening: it's not in garb, and it's missing the trappings of an event. But half of us still call ourselves by our SCA names, and the conversation is, to say the least, pretty geeky. So I don't try to sugar-coat the weirdness. Rather, I try to pre-screen at the point of recruitment, make a snap judgement of whether this person is plausibly going to enjoy the SCA as it is, and if so I encourage them to try out dance practice. (Or fighting practice, or whatever seems to suit them. Dance practice is basically my default if there isn't a more obvious place to send them.)

(cont'd...)