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SCA evolution: from re-creation to SIG?
I was at an event this weekend, my first since Pennsic. Pennsic, in turn, was my first event since before the pandemic. I think this infrequency of exposure has made me really notice some things that have been gradually changing for decades. Herewith a long ramble that could definitely use more thought (and probably editing), but this is where I am now.
I found the SCA when I was in college. For most of the time since then, the conceit was that at events we pretended to be someone from some historical period, and nonetheless we did not let the demands of modernity limit us. The SCA isn't a re-enactment society for a specific period where they inspect details of your clothing and kit before you can enter; it's much more flexible and "do what you're comfortable with", even doing stuff from several periods at the same time. (I have a 10th-century persona, perform renaissance music, and cook a variety of historical cuisines.) There has always been a very wide range of historical authenticity, interest in and scope of authenticity, "modern middle ages" factors, and so on.
Consider one end of that spectrum: Duke Cariadoc runs an encampment at major events called "Enchanted Ground". Within this space, people agree to make the effort to "be" people from history. Instead of talking about what "they" did 800 years ago, or about something you saw in a museum, or about your efforts to learn from Youtube videos how to make things like they did, you approach it from the persona side: we do this, I've learned that people in other lands do this thing, I once watched a craftsman do it this way, etc.
Now, there's an obvious problem that comes up: how can you have a 10th-century Dane and a 15th-century Italian actually having a conversation about cooking Islamic food? The common answer is to treat other periods, both time and place, like other places, and to not worry about some inconsistencies. I visited Cariadoc's bardic circle at Pennsic as a Viking playing a hammer dulcimer; they didn't do that, but that was ok. If I played a Playford dance tune (17th century) I didn't introduce it as "17th century" or even "Playford", but as a "dance tune I learned from an Englishman". Participants who are willing to work together and suspend a little disbelief can fall into a moment of "being in history", as opposed to being modern people in costumes.
Another thing about Cariadoc's Enchanted Ground is that modern things are kept out of public view (put your phone away, use a lantern instead of a flashlight, etc) but necessary modern things are quietly ignored. My obviously-modern eyeglasses aren't a problem. I imagine that a wheelchair would be reinterpreted somehow. The mindset is: don't forbid a necessary modern thing and also don't call attention to it.
I should mention that I'm not very good at any of this. I've visited the Enchanted Ground out of curiosity or to visit with people but a part of me is always a little on edge, not wanting to mess up someone else's game. I'm not trying to say the SCA should be like that; I'm pointing out one example of people within the SCA trying to be more historically focused within a larger organization that isn't so much.
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More typically, events are filled with modern people in historical clothing doing historically-related activities, mixing history and modern. If I have a conversation at an event about renaissance dance music, for instance, I'm talking as a 21st-century person, pointing out sources and maybe talking about how a co-author and I used digital music and the Internet to share our work and test-drive music with real dancers. Nobody in history would have had that conversation. Events are modern activities around historical themes.
Events are modern social activities, too. We catch up with our friends, we talk about work, we talk about all sorts of other things that have nothing to do with the SCA or history but have to do with each other. Sometimes events are the only chance to see non-local friends in person, so naturally people socialize. It would be weird if we didn't. But yeah, that means you're in the marketplace at Pennsic having a conversation about your software project or someone else's upcoming trip to Australia or that thing you saw on Twitter, and that's kind of odd too. In theory my persona interacts with my friend's persona, but really, I want to interact with my friend.
Participants in the SCA are, of course, modern people first and foremost. I was attracted to the SCA for the armored combat (I remember thinking "ooh, live D&D!" when I first saw people fighting), and we all quietly ignored the fact that women in the middle ages wouldn't have entered royal tournaments or been openly trained to fight. Nobody even expected me to take a male persona, i.e. pretend to be a male when fighting, though some people did that. I got to be me, and I got to put on armor and fight anyway. I also get to sing in a mixed choir performing music that would largely have been performed by men only.
In a similar vein, we have people with dietary restrictions (vegetarian, gluten-free, various allergies), and we generally expect those restrictions to be accommodated at feasts even though a meal in the target period wouldn't have done so or even had some of those concepts. Sometimes you can "translate" a modern restriction into a persona thing, like the vegetarian I know who casts his food needs as a penitential vow, and I ended up adopting a Jewish persona to align with my modern needs because it just felt easier. But if I'd continued as a Viking-age woman who somehow has kosher food restrictions, I wouldn't have gotten any grief for it because we are still modern people with needs.
All of what I've said has been the case for a while in my experience. We try to strike a balance between "doing history" and "being our real selves". We don't exclude people from things on the basis of historical accuracy. Support for same-sex rulers (instead of a king and a queen) is even in SCA law now.
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What I've noticed more recently is a move from ignoring the inauthentic modern thing to highlighting it. We've highlighted modern technology for a while, for example people receiving awards in court for their work with web sites or photography. Sometimes the presentation is more oblique ("communication across the land", "detailed records", etc), but often it's not -- that's not seen as important. The move to highlighting modernity really jumped out at me at a Pennsic peerage ceremony that included a Pride flag. And I'm also seeing a lot of highlighting of modern gender identity, for example neopronouns in award scrolls, where careful crafting of text can in many cases make it a non-issue without offending.
I don't know how I feel about some of these changes. On the one hand, you certainly shouldn't have to pretend to be something you're not, like how I didn't have to pretend to be a man in order to fight or perform. On the other hand, I wonder if we're striking the right balance between ignoring and highlighting. On the third hand, core identity stuff is really important to a lot of people.
If being Jewish is a core part of my modern identity (hint: it is), fortunately I can already express that in the SCA -- there were times and places where it was ok to be openly Jewish. If being specifically a Reform Jew were a core part of my identity (it's not), I might be able to cast it as "another place" a la the Enchanted Ground, but it would be difficult because it's a pretty modern idea. If being Israeli (I mean the modern state) were a core part of my identity (I'm not, so it isn't) and I wanted to express that identity by hanging an Israeli flag in as a banner in the feast hall, there would be no way to "spin" that as anything but modern.
If that Israeli flag were important to my modern identity, should it be part of an event? Does it matter if it's more passive (banner in the feast hall) or active (used in a ceremony in court)? Or should I be content to express that identity in 99% of my life and not bring it to central event activities where we're theoretically roleplaying? Does it matter how controversial the item in question is? For example, an Israeli flag would probably bother more of the other modern people at an event than a Pride flag would.
The answers, I think, depend on whether -- as a primary focus -- the SCA is about history or about modern people with a shared interest in history -- a special interest group (SIG). If it's the latter, then people should bring their "whole selves" and be modern people not personas, and it should be clearly ok to have wholly modern stuff that's SCA-flavored like filks about Pennsic to the tune of "Mary Ellen Carter" or -- as I'm now embarrassed to admit -- a performance of "Deo Gracia Anglia" with a Calypso beat. (Yes, I did that once at an event, a long time ago.) If it's the former, we should expect our personas, our "characters", to represent a subset of ourselves, a large-enough subset to feel comfortable at events but not necessarily every piece.
I don't know if it was ever really the former, but I have the sense that it's more clearly becoming the latter now. This isn't a matter of "good or bad", just evolution. Change in any organization this old is to be expected, and we each have to figure out how we feel about that change and adjust to it. The SCA hasn't been long-term tenable for a while (I'm not convinced it'll survive another generation), so maybe it needs some large changes in orientation like when they dropped the "European" part of "European history". I'll be curious to see where the organization goes and how I end up feeling about it.
no subject
- certain political leanings/philosophies on culture essentially rule out SCA participation: opposition to the idea of "roleplaying" as another culture, at its very base. When I first heard about the SCA it was from people my own age (college in the 2010s) expressing horror that it was ever a thing, like blackface minstrelsy. The removal of "European" from "European history" seems to *increase* this effect, as it means people (ostensibly white people) are free to choose personas from cultures whose peoples would not be considered white today. I'm not white, so my choices would have been to keep my participation secret from my peers, choose a persona from my own ethnic background (not terrible, but not my first choice), be mocked as aspiring to be white, or become the subject of censure for being seen as "cosplaying" someone of another non-white race. There may have been people at my school who participated in the SCA, but considering that there was an event where people debated whether white students should be allowed to take courses in "ethnic studies" fields, I can certainly see why those people would have kept it on the down low.
- adding to the "kids these days spend less time outdoors" aspect is the fact that some places may theoretically be in a barony, but actually be hours away by car from all the events or other participants. Gas is expensive, many college kids can't justify the expense of a car (and when car ownership/even having a license at all is too diluted, carpooling doesn't work either), or they just can't fit any participation into their schedules when there's too much transit time.
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Personally, I've never really gotten the "cultural appropriation" thing: as far as I'm concerned, humans are humans, and if humans have come up with a song, a dance, a culinary dish, a costume, or whatever, it's fair game for other humans. It might be tacky and disrespectful if I were actively mocking it, but that doesn't depend on my own ethnic background: an ethnically Ojibwa person is at least as capable of mocking Ojibwa culture as I am. And if I'm not actively mocking it, what's the harm? Then there's the question of where to draw the borders: how much Persian would I need in my ancestry before I'm allowed a Persian persona -- 50%? 5%? 0.5%?
There have been people in the SCA with personas of different cultures, and different physical appearances, from their own since the beginning. I've known several Japanese personae "played by" white folks. Cariadoc is a Moslem Moor (with a Celtic name -- SCA onomastics was less developed back then) "played by" a white guy of Ashkenazi descent. Chingir al-Baghdadi is a Baghdadi "played by" a strawberry-blonde white guy. Hossein ali-Qomi was a devout Shia Moslem from the Middle East "played by" a white guy -- who happened to actually be Shia Moslem. Duffy (I've forgotten his full name, but it ended in "an Dubh") was an Irishman "played by" a black guy. And I know at least two women whose personae are male -- not cross-dressing women, but male in every sense. Of course, some people do such a portrayal superficially, but most people who pick a foreign culture for their persona do it as an opportunity to seriously learn about that culture. In many cases they end up as Society-wide experts on aspects of that particular culture.
My current persona is Catholic (although he wouldn't use that word -- if the question even occurred to him, he would say "Christian"). I have never been Catholic, nor religious at all, but I can't easily justify a 14th-century Englishman who isn't deeply and sincerely Catholic. So I take that as an opportunity to try to get into the mindset of such a person. If I'm already playing a character who lived 600 years ago, and is much more religious than I am, whether the character also has a different skin color from mine seems trivial by comparison.
On your last paragraph: I didn't own a car for my first twelve years in the SCA, during which I lived on or near five different college campuses. I generally went to events that I could get to on foot, or by public transit, or with a ride from a friend. And yes, that restricted the number of events I could get to, but we had non-"event" stuff happening too: musical rehearsals, fighter practices, dance practices, etc.
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Thank you very much for sharing your experience! I hadn't considered the chilling effect of possible accusations of cultural appropriation in the SCA context. :-(
When I was starting out in the SCA, people were told "you can be anyone you want to be". While there were sometimes good-natured comments about the blond blue-eyed samurai, nobody I knew of tried to put real boundaries around personas. I had a Norse person, despite my actual Italian ancestry -- dark hair, dark eyes, very much not a "fair" complexion. It never would have occurred to me that I might be stepping on the toes of people really from Scandinavia and I should "stay in my lane" and do Italian despite lack of interest. As![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hudebnik said, people taking personas that don't "match" their physical traits was just not a problem, so long as it wasn't done to mock. This was in the 1980s.
I've been concerned for a while about the effects caused by the mere possibility of being accused of {appropriation, bigotry, insensitivity, you name it} that is now so prevalent in American society. It seems like people are more likely to see -- and jump to accusations of -- ill intent instead of presuming good intent and inquiring before judging. This trend of jumping to negative judgement can do a lot of harm when the judgement is wrong or the situation is more complex than what fits in a tweet or a sound bite (as it usually is). The trend concerns me, and even though I'm aware of it I never thought about it in the context of SCA personas and the accusations that might result until now. I'm saddened by your experience.
For the people of my SCA "generation" who I know, choice of persona was mostly about interest in a particular time and place. I chose a "Viking" persona because the culture was interesting (loved the sagas I'd read, loved the fighting, loved the strong women I'd heard about). I was (and am) interested in lots of other things too, some of which don't fit with being a Viking; the persona was a focus, not a limitation. Nobody cared that I wasn't blond and fair, and nobody would have cared if I'd been Black or Asian or indigenous. Somehow I missed that this had changed.
Transportation is a big factor, yes. When I was in college, and for a while after, I went to things if I could walk or bus there or if I could hitch a ride. At the time my local group had a center of activity on my university campus, plus it was in a city, so this was possible. Being on campus made a huge difference for the SCA. We no longer have that campus access and we also no longer have many students. These facts are almost certainly related; the causality runs in both directions, a vicious circle.
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It could be (well, I hope) that this tunnel-vision approach to culture is endemic to a specific subset of college populations. Unfortunately it might be the subset that was historically most interested in the SCA: socially progressive and interested in the humanities. I think my high school classmate, distressed that only Indian students would join her Indian classical dance club, felt similarly that this environment is detrimental to both "polite observers" and the cultures they are trying to protect. But unfortunately for the SCA, she was also much too busy with Indian classical dance and a demanding career in science for any such hobby in college.
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Definitely. I was lucky that my first fun exposures were free: fighting practice with loaner armor and events with loaner garb that comped a few people in exchange for some labor made a big difference. By the time I was even thinking about going things that required access to a car, I was already involved. As my first Pennsic War approached (which was then a long weekend), somebody with more experience and a sewing machine organized "mass production" basic garb so we newbies would have more than one tunic. The barriers to entry -- logistical, social, and financial -- were lower and more easily overcome then than now.
I agree. I think we are all better when we can interact, genuinely and respectfully, with people not like us. This is true diversity. I learn things from people with different backgrounds. I like to think that, by being open, I help others learn a little more about my culture. I don't want to live in a bubble surrounded by people like me who think like me and act like me. There's a whole world out there to learn about and meet people from.
Early in my time in the SCA, the person running the local dance practice asked some of us fighters if we'd like to learn Bhangra, a traditional Indian dance form (high-energy, athletic), and do a performance at an upcoming event. She was white like all of us at the time; her husband, who didn't participate in the SCA, was Indian, and that's where she learned it so she taught some of it to us. I thought that was really cool and loads of fun, and I never would have had a chance to try it otherwise. Your comment about your classmate reminded me of this. (I would have totally joined an Indian dance club to learn, had there been one and if it didn't give off obvious "outsiders not welcome" vibes.)
no subject
This one's actually an interesting lens on the subject, because one of my SCA friends does specialize in Indian temple dance, and is very much not ethnically Indian.
But I don't recall it ever being an issue from a cultural-appropriation viewpoint, because she is extremely serious and respectful about it: it's not a casual little sideline for a tall white woman, it's something she has put many years of hard study and practice into, to the point of studying under expert dancers and even doing a "graduation recital" that was one of the most physically demanding things I've ever seen.
Cultural appropriation is a big topic in LARP as well, and this is the approach I've seen for thinking about it. If done in a respectful manner, there's a lot of room there -- unfortunately, that's often not at all true.
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I think you might also be describing the "in" perspective -- how LARPers and SCAdians view it. But there are college campuses and online communities that are full of people on the outside who call it appropriation without having any of the inside perspective. Or at least that's my read of the comment that started this thread. If you are someone considering SCA or LARP participation, and you know your cohort has this view and is likely to accuse, malign, or ostracize you for it, are you going to do it anyway or find another hobby?
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In my observation (as very much a privileged white dude, but one who has been paying a fair amount of attention to this), it's not at all consistent from group to group, or even person to person.
And I believe there's a lot of white-knight syndrome that plays into it: I've found that it's often white, college-age kids or a bit older, who scream most loudly and uncritically about cultural appropriation if they see the slightest hint of something, whereas many members of the group being appropriated from want to see that respectful conversation (and real listening), rather than flat-out forbidding it. So for example, in the LARP world it's increasingly considered best practice to bring in appropriate sensitivity readers pro-actively if you might be coming near this sort of issue.
But again -- varies enormously. It depends on what you're trying to do, how you're approaching it, and who your interlocutors are. And even if you're doing it well, there are going to be a lot of folks who aren't interested in hearing the details.