Nuaaā Ethnographical Questionnaire

Dr. Zahir’s Ethnographical Questionnaire was compiled by David Zahir to help in the description of concultures, and can be found in the files section of the Conculture group at Yahoo.

Questions of Place

What foods are considered exotic or expensive?

The Swamp Kids originated in a warm climate with a dense population and moved slowly northward into wide-open countryside with snow on the ground for about six months of the year. Throughout their existence they never discarded their cultural appreciation for the tropical foods, particularly spicy foods, that they had been familiar with in their original homeland. Fighting war after war did not stop the Swamp Kids from spending large amounts of money to import spicy foods from the old homelands in the south into the remotest parts of the Empire.

What forms of alcohol are common? Rare?

Despite being the descendants of the world champions of alcohol production and consumption, the Pabaps, the Swamp Kids banned alcohol early on and never wavered. For the most, they kept alcohol out of the hands of all the minorities in their Empire as well until they got to Baeba Swamp, where there were too many possible sources of fermentable beverages for even a government as strict as the Swamp Kids (and their oppressed people who were also strongly anti-alcohol) to control.

The total prohibition of alcohol was one of the few areas where the Swamp Kids and the Raspara people who preyed upon them actually cooperated willingly instead of the Raspara pushing the Swampies around and calling it symbiosis.

Are the borders secure? In what way?

Definitely not. However, Anzan is unique among empires in that most of the invasions it suffered were uprisings from within rather than formal wars started by foreign powers.

Questions of Sex and Family

How many spouses may a man or woman have?

Polygamy is allowed, and the culture is so militaristic and yet so militarily delicate that its male population was constantly getting cut up and turned into juice by the peoples around them, leaving very few men for the women in the cities. Thus polygamy is common.

How are boy and girl children treated differently?

Gender roles are defined strictly. Boys are prepared for military service, girls are prepared for a life as a mother or nurse. Since this division of labor leaves literally nobody to do the actual work required to keep the society functioning, the Swamp Kids have at times enslaved populations around them, considering them outside the gender system because they were not Swamp Kids. They have not always been so lucky, however, as to have slaves, and they have also had the far greater problem of seeing their male population stolen from them as slaves for the parasitic Raspara minority, leaving their labor force even weaker. The result of this is that the military has had to take over farming operations, and women have to had to take over urban maintenance jobs such as cleaning up waste. The Swamp Kids had overthrown a government that enslaved the entire population from the age of 3 years old onward, and abolished child labor the day they seized power. From this, they never wavered even when their child population soared so high that the median age of their population was in the single digits and they had become literally a nation of kids.

However, in practice, a very mild form of child labor did exist, since children needed to get their own food, clothes, and so on, rather than having their mothers run all around the city doing it for them. This simply was not considered to be a form of work since the children were choosing what they wanted on their own (though the Swamp Kids offered them very few choices).

How do the genders dress?

The Swamp Kids inherited a cultural fear of sharp objects from their ancestors. They tended to cover more of their body than would be expected for the climate they lived in, and to put thick clothes on top of thinner clothes. All of this was intended to protect the Swamp Kids from being cut by sharp thorns on bushes and flowers and other everyday objects such as wooden crates. Often they also wore kneepads for extra padding in case they fell down and hurt themselves on the ground.

Questions of Manners

How do younger adults address their elders?

The Swamp Kids refer to all of their males as boys , reserving men for their leaders. Ethnic minorities' males are also called men. This has led minorities to feel that the Swamp Kids have an inferiority complex.

Questions of Faith

What superstitions are common? What kinds of supernatural

events/beings do people fear?

Questions of Government

Who cannot rise to positions of leadership?

The original founders of the Swamp Kids party (called the Tinks at that time) were men aged 50 and older, and they did not allow anyone younger than them to hold any power. This is because they realized that their people had been oppressed so severely for more than forty years that nobody any younger than 50 would have remembered anything else, and would not understand how to run a government properly. They preferred people that were at least 60, but realized that their nation had a very high birth rate and a very high death rate, and that their generation would entirely vanish soon. Thus, within a few years, the elderly Tinks were replaced by teenagers, and they remained a nation run by teenagers for the rest of their existence.

Questions of War

Who declares war?

The Swamp Kids were at war for their entire existence. The people in charge of adding a new war to the wars they were already fighting were an elected class of military generals. However, the Swamp Kids were more commonly the victim of an invasion rather than the author of it.