Choosing Your Own Adventure: My Life as a Teenage Dungeon Master and How It Prepared Me to Become an Anthropologist

In many ways, Dungeon Masters are the ethnographers of their own worlds. Granted, we’re not exactly interviewing the people who populate them, and we’re inventing most of the traditions and customs out of the content in our own imaginations. But when it comes to building a narrative about people and their ways-of-being, there isn’t all that much difference between narratives of “a” world and narratives of “the” world. This is something we actually have in common with fiction writers as well. Ethnographies share, to an extent, certain characteristics of novels; such that both the author and the anthropologist are setting out to involve their readers in a particular time and place, with a particular group of people (set up as pseudonymous dramatis personae), all who will hopefully tell us something about ourselves in the end.

Ep#63 Culture Shock, Storytelling, Pungent Masculinity & Rule Based Imaginations: This Month on TFS

The Familiar Strange · #63 Culture Shock, Storytelling, Pungent Masculinity & Rule Based Imagination For the panel this week we welcome Luke Corbin from Myanmar Musings and Familiar Strange alumnus Jodie Lee Trembath!   Simon starts us off [1:31] by discussing his recent culture shock in moving to Germany from Australia. Simon thought that experiences during … Continue reading Ep#63 Culture Shock, Storytelling, Pungent Masculinity & Rule Based Imaginations: This Month on TFS

Anthropologists and Dragons

I surprised myself by not hesitating. Spinning around, I headed straight back toward one of those that had followed us into the alley—a woman in dark robes, eyes barely visible beneath a dark hood. I barked a threat, telling her to turn around and walk away. She snarled a retort that we should hand over the object or else. Seeing no other choice, I drew my sword and plunged it deep into her chest.