shadow-spires:

cmdrcody2224:

shadow-spires:

cmdrcody2224:

ironmyownpants:

cmdrcody2224:

Somebody come talk to me about poc Mandos

OR!!

POC Jedi

I would say that the Jedi are all inclusive. But there are so many of them that we only see a limited number on screen. 

Oh I’m sure they are, I suppose I was just wondering how the cultures we have here on Earth might present themselves in a setting like that, and how would the Jedi who come from them respond to their different cultures

To be honest, I kinda got the impression that the answer to ‘how do the Jedi respond to different cultures’ is ‘really badly.’ Not, like, that they don’t respect other cultures and people from other cultures. They train their entire lives as diplomats, and learn about other cultures and how to interact with them. But that Jedi themselves are supposed to let go of attachments/their past/family, so I assume this was also including their cultural heritage. We’re talking like, being expected to completely detach themselves from their home cultures, because to do otherwise is indicative of attachment.

(I’m trying to prevent my brain from going full-on ‘removing Native American children from reservations and raising them in schools specifically to prevent them from embracing their heritage’… But I’m also in a really pissy mode about the whole Jedi Order right now, so I’m sure that’s not helping.)

But to be completely fair, I haven’t read pretty much anything in the expanded universe, and it’s been a long freaking time since I’ve seen the movies, so maybe I’m missing something.

Buuuuttttt I’ve now officially diverged, so yes, to go back to your original post, I would love me some POC Jedi. Are you thinking reflections of earth cultures showing up in the Star Wars Universe? Because I suddenly simultaneously got a hilarious(ly hot) image of Obi-Wan in a kilt as Anakin watches in confusion, and like, hmmm, clones with fantastic full face tatoos like the Maori do, or one of the Jedi learning the traditional dance of their home and incorporating it into a moving meditation that is simply beautiful to watch.

Listen, that is exactly what I was thinking

Okay, so apparently I have more feeling about this, so I apologize in advance.

Lets talk about language.

Language is so intrinsically bound up in culture that it is impossible to separate the two. 

Now, I‘m speaking to you as yes, one of those American who really can only speak English, but I’m also from a Hawaii, a place where there is a huge revitalization of the native language going on, and I have made efforts to learn about the languages of my own cultural heritage (Gaelic and German) so I’m not completely shouting out of my ass here when I say that *there are things you can never understand about the way a culture thinks or approaches the world without being able to speak the language.* Ways of understanding the world, deeply embedded metaphors, things that you either have too many words for, or don’t have one at all. All of these things tell you things about what a culture values/doesn’t. For example, an absolutely gorgeous book was recently published by a Hawaiian woman about the rain names. The *hundreds* of different names for rain in Hawaiian. 

Now I know there are posts that go around sometimes about ‘native peoples that have hundreds of names for things that only need one, haha, isn’t that cute?’

No.

Sit down, shut up; these people were amazing, and had such incredible attention to detail and observation of nature that they identified different behavior of rain and wind depending on time of year and season and time of day, and what direction it was coming from, and were able to give individual names to each one, and watch it be repeated over and over. This was fucking amazing science and culture and art and language all tied up together. They don’t ‘have 100 different names for rain,’ they observed and identified and recorded *100 different kinds of rain,* and if you don’t see the incredible difference there I don’t even know what to do with you.

But I digress again.

The point was, what a culture’s language has words for shows a great deal about the values of the culture. And it’s hard, bordering on impossible, to be fully integrated into a culture without having that language be your first language, let alone not really knowing it at all.

How does this relate to the Jedi?

Basic.

There is no way that these tiny babies all coming into the temple – some of them not speaking yet, but some of them babbling their first words in their native language, some of them all the way up to simple sentences – are not immediately expected to stop speaking that language, and start speaking Basic instead. Sure, sure, that’s convenience, creche masters certainly can’t be expected to be speaking 60 different languages at once.

But it’s also awful. It feels way too much like all the skeevy cultural colonialism that happens all over the world; where people are first disconnected from their language, and then disconnected from their culture as a result/at the same time.

So Jedi who were raised in the temple, even if they want to reconnect with their culture of birth, even if they learn the language somewhere in their crazy schedules, will always find themselves on the outside looking in. They have been discouraged from all outward expressions of their culture, and are quickly discouraged from even the inward expression that is language as part of cultural understanding. These babies and young children go from a place where people speak around them and to them in comfortably familiar tones and cadences, to someplace where the words sound strange. They are discouraged – gently and with patience, but firmly nonetheless – to speak with these strange new sounds only, until they start to forget they ever knew anything else.