Using Anthropology for World Building – Part 8 (Daily Life)

Daily life. And with that, we come to the end of this series on using anthropology for world building. As fiction writers, it’s not a stretch to say that our stories are reflections of the daily life of our characters.

Recall that there are eight elements which make up a culture, things that help define it as something different from something else. They are:

What is that last one? What could we possibly write that would make that daily life of our characters so different from another culture?

We all get up, eat a little breakfast, walk the dog, go to the store, do our chores. At least, that’s common, right? So our characters probably do much of the same thing. We don’t write that into our stories often, however, because very few people would want to read the details of a main character putting laundry soap into a machine.

Here I would argue that most cultures do some form of the above. Do they have washing machines in your fantasy world? Probably not, but they do wash their clothes (I would hope). Do they eat breakfast? Second breakfast?

So what could be different that would set one culture apart from another?

When I was a wee child (teen), I went to Mexico to help build a church. While there, I recall walking through a group of apartments–buildings, huts, what have you–and there were children playing in the street. They weren’t kicking a soccer ball as I would have expected, but tossing around a rock on a string. It was unique, something that set apart this culture from the one that I knew.

Later, in my twenties, I lived in a hooch in Honduras. It was a different world there, but some things were similar. I went to the barber, sat down at a wedding, purchased things in the shops, you name it.

But that wedding was different. Gone was the typical ceremony of a bride and groom standing at an altar in front of a judge/priest/officiant of some sort. Instead, the wedding was performed while the two were sitting down at a table to eat.

Basically, we all paused as the groom finished swallowing his food to say “I do” (or, in this case, “estoy de acuerdo” or something). When the groom was done, the bride did the same thing. At no time was dinner to be interrupted.

This is an example of a difference in culture. You probably wouldn’t find that same thing in your neck of the woods, but could you add a little something to your fictional world that shows how daily life is different?

As I said in the very beginning of this series of posts, as writers, we get to create things, from worlds to creatures to whatever you can think of. As readers, we get to experience worlds we never imagined might exist.

When world building, writers have a lot of fun creating animals or terrain that exists only in their imagination. But to embed the reader in that world, the writer needs to bring them into the culture itself. This is where anthropology can come into play.

You can do that in a variety of ways, but one of the easiest will be to show a difference in daily life, even if it’s slight.

That small change will make a big difference in how your world comes across to your reader.

If you would like to see what I’ve done with the daily life of the colonists on a new world, you can check it out in Sunshine and Shadow: Exodus, or The Second Transit.

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Using Anthropology for World Building – Part 8 (Daily Life)

Using Anthropology for World Building – Part 8 (Daily Life)

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