Culture. A more loaded, more debated word in academia might be hard to find! I distinctly remember doing readings in graduate school where one author would extoll the virtues of studying the vast cultural differences to be found around the world, and the next would scoff at the very existence of such a notion. Regardless of where one falls on the spectrum of cultural belief, one thing, I think, remains sure; it takes physically experiencing another culture in order to truly see one’s own.
“Why?” you might ask. To which I’d answer that without holding up another culture, without subjecting someone—anyone—to another way of doing the most mundane of tasks, another way of thinking, another way of living life, it is all but impossible to separate those things you do because you’re you, from those you do because your culture has told you “this is the way to do it.” I’ve long felt, in other words, that one cannot truly see their own culture until they’ve lived in another.
And I don’t mean simply experiencing another. Living in Chinatown in San Francisco is not the same as experiencing Chinese culture. Likewise, simply living on a U.S. military base in a foreign country is not exactly living in a foreign country. As I’ve told people from Yongsan to Yokota, you’re not really living in a foreign country … but you can easily get there, you just need to go out the gate! Still, until you’ve lived under the host nation’s laws, subjected yourself to public scrutiny and social mores, held yourself to a set of standards you yourself don’t really ascribe to, you probably haven’t truly experienced another culture … and so might still be confused about your own.
Yet all pedantic arguments to the contrary set aside, culture is a very real thing, isn’t it? It shows up in the most interesting of places. My favorite realm to discuss when pointing out the existence of true cultural difference is in storytelling. Most of you might think you simply start at the beginning and work your way through to the end, but it’s not quite so simple, is it? People in different parts of the world, coming from different cultures, like their stories told in different ways.
Back in the U.S., we generally like to see a happy ending. Even a horribly tragic ending can be made “happy” by limiting the scope of the viewer. Most famously, perhaps, the terrible tragedy of the sinking of the Titanic had a happy ending in the movie because the rich girl—and her stolen necklace—survived. Really? The Titanic!? That we can reduce such a horrific historical account into a good-guy, bad-guy story where the good guy gets the girl in the end, more-or-less, provides some indication of what we like to see in a story. Heck, I’m still waiting for the sequel, “Happy Hindenburg”!
In Korea and Japan, however, viewers tend to prefer sad endings. My favorite example has to be the movie that all but launched modern South Korean cinema, the film “Shiri”. Spoiler alert, in case you hadn’t yet seen it, but the movie climaxes with one of the two engaged lovers shooting the other dead in the name of national security. And in a long, drawn out, maximally tense and overly dramatic scene, of course! Blockbusters like “JSA”, and “Tae Guk Ki” in Korea and “Hachiko Monogatari” in Japan all follow a pattern designed, it seems, to make you cry into your popcorn. Yet these are not outliers, its how they prefer to have stories told to them and reflects a certain view of the world around them. A view that is heavily influenced by their respective cultures.
I run into the same problems, it seems, in writing fiction novels, especially historical fiction. How much of a given culture can one really express without totally confusing a reader? Things like clothing, weapons, and religions make for easy expressions of cultural difference. But attitudes toward life, expressions of emotion, and their view of outsiders can be more difficult to weave into a story without painful—and often off-putting—exposition, something that authors are urged to avoid like the plague.
My current work in progress takes place in ancient Illyria, mostly along the coast of what is now Croatia. Portraying the Croatian culture of today would be difficult enough to do justice. But I’ve saddled myself with the added difficulty of trying to portray the culture of the ancient Illyrians, a people long ago wiped from the world’s ledgers, their beliefs, their language, and their way of life absorbed into the cultures of the Slavic peoples who later settled the area. As such, even researching what my book’s world should look, sound, smell, and feel like has been a truly complicated chore and I’ve been stuck making a lot of assumptions based on the scant evidence that remains.
More to the point, what little historians seem to know about the ancient Illyrians was written by non-Illyrians. Romans, Greeks, and Macedonians left behind records of what these people were like, but they—like us—were all outsiders. They were limited in their ability to truly understand the traits they observed and so passed on to modernity a partial, or worse a culturally biased, account. Nowhere as yet discovered did any forward-looking Ilyrian leave behind a tablet or scroll that said “Look, I’m tired of all you idiots misinterpreting our culture. Here, I’ve laid out for you and your great, great, great, great grandchildren how we conceive of the gods, how we treat each other, why we wear the clothes we do and eat the foods we eat…”
This type of documentation simply doesn’t exist, and so we’re stuck taking clues from the ancient historians, putting them together with what archaeologists dig up, and try to form a more complete picture of this ancient and intriguing people. Too bad, because the Illyrians appear to be a fascinating people indeed!
Most famous for raiding and acts of piracy, consolidated groupings of Illyrian tribes—sometimes acting under a single king—challenged Rome three times, nearly all of the Greek city states at one time or another, kept a near running state of conflict with Epirus, and invaded Macedonia more times than I can count! As well, the Roman fleets that would come to dominate the Mediterranean Sea for the next six hundred years would for a long time consist of ships modeled on Illyrian vessels. Not bad for a “barbarian” people far from the beacon that was Roman civilization!
Famed for ferocity in battle, especially in the highlands beyond the coast, they lived in hill forts much like the Celts to their north. They loved to make brandies out of the various fruits that still grow wild along the coast but also made—and you can still find it there—a localized version of ale which they reportedly consumed in vast quantities. They also learned the delicate art of goldsmithing from their Celtic neighbors, making use of extensive deposits of the precious metal throughout Illyria. Yet despite this wealth in gold, the Illyrians preferred amber adornments, imported all the way from the Baltic Sea!
An alluring people with an all but forgotten culture, researching the Illyrians has at times been a truly eye-opening experience. Yet this is true anytime we dedicate ourselves to placing another culture under the microscope. Trying to put ourselves into the sandals and heads of a truly different people—to say nothing of those who walked the earth over two thousand years ago—is always a difficult chore, but one that continues to draw me to historical fiction as a genre.
But don’t take my word for it, if you’re at all interested in the ancient Illyrians you can sample the culture—and many, many others—with Philip Matyszak’s wonderful “Forgotten Peoples of the Ancient World”. If you’re intrigued there, or just want to dive straight into the deep end, the only serious work on the subject that I’m aware of—in English, at least—is John Wilkes’ “The Illyrians”. Regardless, I can promise you won’t be disappointed with either one.
In the meantime, and in case chasing down ancient, long-forgotten civilizations isn’t your thing, I’d still recommend visiting other countries, immersing yourself in other cultures, the stranger and more distant from your own the better! The experience is almost always rewarding and more often than not, for me at least, not only leaves me with a new and interesting take on my own culture, but helps me to more completely separate who and what I really am from what I’ve been taught to be.
And isn’t knowing ourselves the key to knowing virtually anything else? I’ve always thought so.
M. G. Haynes