Fantasy was founded on the tension between the individual and the nation. In the past, authors have described that tension with theories from anthropology, but the art has disengaged from updates in this science. For example, fantasy and science fiction both craft scale-model nations with language, crops, and religion. This is a supposed basis of civilization inspired by the structural functionalist school of anthropology. This school was first developed by the uncle-nephew duo of Durkheim and Mauss in the late nineteenth century. Structural functionalism was preoccupied with explaining culture through group dynamics, especially through language, religion, and agricultural practice. While many of these methods are still current, anthropology has grown further since then.
C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien's most popular work blended the pioneering techniques of Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) and Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), which combined identifying cultural systems within given societies, with their own youthful interests in princesses, knights, and dragons. Their use of aesthetics as decoration informed the actions of their characters in a way reminiscent of a case study. Authors working within fantasy still justify using antiquated anthropological techniques through the prestige of Lewis and Tolkien, who were both academics in related fields while such techniques went without criticism. Even their immediate inheritors moved beyond their methods: Diana Wynne Jones prodded gentle holes in the edifice of her mentor, Tolkien; Pratchett, though a reverent adherent, turned fantasy tropes into jokes. But the temptation to reduce fantasy to a genre within which a world can be built through climate, language, religion, and government remains strong, and nurtured in a genre designed to entertain its audience by alienating it.
Likewise, princesses, knights, and dragons persist as familiar touchstone in a genre formed at a time when the public’s relationship to monarchy and mythology was upended by industrialization, colonialism, and democracy, and fantasy’s subsequent use as a tool for nostalgia or deconstruction depends on the user. Tolkien and Lewis grew up with adventure stories about goblins kidnapping princesses which, though aimed at children, were pared down versions of the avant-garde art of the era. Popular artists from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, for example, drew from myths and legends to create a body of dreamy, pseudo-medieval imagery. And The Lord of the Rings (1955) itself began as a pared-down version of Wagner’s Des Nibelung, or Ring Cycle (1876). In Wagner’s magnum opus a gnome steals gold from the Rhine to form a magical ring that helps him conquer the nation of dwarves. When he is separated from the ring, he curses it to inflict unending suffering until it is returned to him. The Hobbit (1937) began as a bedtime story for Tolkien’s son, Christopher, with a plot similar to the third opera in Wagner’s series, Siegfried, except for one important distinction: The hero is not the wyrm slayer but a dithering little pacifist.
While Tolkien and Lewis were both educated in the final throes of the British Empirical directive for the social sciences, designed to generate managerial reports of colonial outposts, their generation were already in the process of deconstructing their labor by the time World War One ended. Thus, the worlds of Tolkien and Lewis are a blend of techniques that define their characters by their individual temperaments as well as the physical attributes associated with their kin and race. Criticism has fallen on Tolkien’s depiction of the dwarves as a clear Semitic caricature, the orcs with highly racialized features, and the very existence of a whole group known only as “Easterlings,” but the story’s heroes are also racialized. Hobbit society has no need for shoes; dwarves mine because they are short. Elves are creatures in between mortality and divinity. While Lewis did not implement the same fantasy race system as Tolkien because Narnia had no intellectual debt to Norse mythology and the levels of the Yggdrasil, his books were populated by a more dreamlike world of symbolic magic and British Catholicism.
In the anthropological school that itself was emerging during the time at which Lewis and Tolkien both wrote, structural functionalism was building flexibility into the study of people by describing cultural formations as taking a utilitarian role. Durkheim called these identifiable features in a cultural landscape a “social fact … capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint.” They are a synthesis of factors that are part of everyday life, and therefore have coercive power. As an example, Durkheim studied suicide and found that sufferers lapsed into a few related categories of thinking that made life feel unviable. These seemed paradoxical on the surface, such as suicide taking place during periods of strong economic growth as well as with collapse, but the underlying causes were as related to a person’s environment as their ability to address their circumstances. The noteworthy feature was the cultural significance of suicide: Durkheim noted that, in upper-middle-class Parisian circles of 1897, there were fewer Catholic suicides than Protestant ones. He attributed this less to direct intervention from a spiritual leader than to how religion created a worldview that rendered suicide inaccessible.
Franz Boaz, a founding father of the discipline, wrote in 1920:
It is also beginning to attract the attention of students who are no longer satisfied with the systemic enumeration of standardized beliefs and customs of a tribe, but who begin to be interested in the question of the way in which the individual reacts to his whole social environment, and to the differences of opinion and of mode of action that occur in primitive society and which are the causes of far-reaching changes. [2]
This new model inspired generations to explore new methods of practicing the social sciences. By comparing Tolkien’s and Lewis’s output to their inspiration, the unique concepts underpinning their worldbuilding becomes clearest. As students of culture and its development, they were concerned with farming techniques and handicrafts more than Wagner or the great bards of chivalric literature. Lewis and Tolkien developed a preoccupation with the invisible social institutions behind the stylish pseudomedievalism of their childhood, drawn from Durkheim’s arguments that there was a function to the form of collective organization. This presupposition challenged the social Darwinist assumption from which fabulists like Wagner drew. While Tolkien and Lewis were both deeply committed to their religious beliefs, folding in Christian morality to their stories remained true to their belief that ideas change rather than die. The idea of a society’s values adapting rather than going extinct was a contemporary concept that contradicted Wagner’s central thesis of the death of the Gods. As Durkheim wrote:
If … the categories [time, space, class, etc.] are, as we believe they are, essentially collective representations, before all else, they should show the mental states of the group; they should depend upon the way in which this is founded and organized, upon its morphology, upon its religious, moral and economic institutions, etc. [3]
Durkheim’s argument was that the concept of time as an immutable force was not materially different from time as a rational consciousness that could be argued with. Conceptualising a force within a given framework manifests a shape in which it operates, and that model shapes subsequent thought. The belief was that these logic models would produce repeatable results in the fields of agriculture, medicine, and astronomy. Durkheim’s model made sense for the irrational logic-models that served as a cultural fabric in many nineteenth-century societies (and still today); and so did Lewis’s and Tolkien’s, despite their condescending authorial voices.
The colonial bones of anthropological methods in fantastical fiction have been softened or contradicted in the years since Tolkien and Lewis. Many authors foster a cozy sense of nostalgia in fictional cultures. Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler offered their readers respite from plot-driven conflict through the creature comfort of meals and sleep, even in alien contexts. Others exploit the glory of artisanal craft or extravagance: R. F. Kuang’s Babel (2022), for example, was an experiment in confronting the voyeuristic colonial gaze of fantasy through an imaginary Oxford where the very act of translation served as the means to extract power.
But fantasy remains preoccupied with imagining worlds in which the dynamics between the dominant lifeform that populates the narrative—whether that story is told by humans, talking mice, elves, or dragons—and their environment create new perspectives for the audience to explore. There is a voyeuristic exoticism in fantasy, with a range of dehumanization throughout the genre: Audiences revel in the sight of mice using acorns as hats and sewing needles as spears, or of demons wielding the jawbone of an imaginary beast on an imaginary continent.
In the twenty-first century, there have been many questions raised about the foundational beliefs in both fantasy and anthropology, and whether each could survive adapting to a pluralistic lens. Both have, but in different ways. For its part, fantasy’s inherent voyeurism still stems from curiosity in the human experience and celebration of our collective creativity, but there remains the leftovers of a structural functionalism lens that believes all culture is nothing but language, religion, and material needs.
The persistence of this simple, sugary belief that fantasy readers could build worlds from a handful of institutional structures comes more from the prevalence of the tabletop game industry than Tolkien or Lewis. Extracted from an earlier form of wartime strategy games, Dungeons and Dragons (1974-) and subsequent copycats combine storytelling elements with games of chance. The work of building a system that allows a player to craft a purely self-indulgent power fantasy, and then face challenges in a group storytelling environment, is an impressive act of labor. Subsequent manuals have continued the work of adjusting the mechanics of the game. Copycat companies and game creators often spring from house rules that worked well for the creator and their friend group. New concepts, mechanics, and avenues of gameplay lore have all grown a flourishing industry of fantasy genre media without a traditional narrative structure. Video games, too, draw from the mechanics of analog tabletop war strategy games and the half-forgotten aesthetic inheritance of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It’s no surprise that innovation alone can’t erase the charge that fantasy’s role is to draw from history: The sheer scale of work poured into speculative fantasy scenarios exceeds the labors of the many generations who have contributed to it. But a consequence of this work has been to calcify elements of the genre that were never meant to be as standardized as they are, such as racializing the heroes.
For example, in tabletop gaming the elements of a character hinge most on the player’s improv skills, and next on the stats written down on their chart. These numbers usually relate to skill subclasses that have evolved their own associations free of the framer’s intentions. Players are given parameters of what is possible by the hard numbers, and these can be levelled up in gameplay. In origin, the very structure of these pre-determined racialized statistics harkens back to an antiquated view of race that was contemporary to Lewis and Tolkien. These “race” elements have come not always to connect with human ethnicity, however, but to inhere in an exaggeration of biological features that aligns more closely with Lewis’s animistic fairy-tale cosmology. This began with the inclusion of Dimensions, Space, and Time as new frontiers for fantasy to explore, in the contexts of which sentience could be attributed to practically anything. This was played as a joke in Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott (1884) with a square trying to understand the concept of a third dimension, but can include the Barsoom books and the Planeswalking in Magic: The Gathering (1993). As a creative playground, this movement freed creators from maintaining any fidelity to terrestrial biology.
In today’s fantasy markets, then, “races” now feature any combination of physical traits: blue skin, wings, antennae, fur. Some are cats. Artists and writers are free to design any type of creature with any amount of connection to the human experience. They can be humanoid, mutually intelligible, or neither. A special game that creators like to play is to stretch how far a character can be situated outside our sphere of understanding, and this diverse kingdom of sapient, agentic “races” plays a complicated role in the “play” of fantasy. Features like horns and fangs act, ultimately, as decoration: Attributing supernatural abilities to them stirs the imagination, and yet fantasy is still full of bog-standard human characters with no extraordinary flair. This creates a visual lexicon outside Pre-Raphaelite imagery that constructs meaning for these physical traits and then playfully deconstructs them. Cat-people can be silly, playful companions, mysterious wild cards, or apex predators. Elves can retain their regal splendor for comedy or for horror.
This construction and de-construction of character types within the “character-build” paradigm hasn’t sparked much reflection on the implications of sapient races with their own customs and language. Most fantasy properties simply choose to treat each group as a modern-day nation, with thorny diplomatic issues and internal tensions between tradition and modernity which the protagonists have the chance to observe. Danjon Meshi (2014-2022) by Ryoko Kui plays with this inconsistency by creating a cast who are willing to kill, eat, or befriend monsters depending on the situation. With homages to medieval alchemical texts and the cooks who served as the first biologists in real-world history, Danjon Meshi shows the cast carefully recording, dissecting, cooking, and eating creatures like mandrakes and kelpie. As a modern participant in the fantasy genre, Kui has clearly heard the criticism and rebuttals for fantasy racism: Danjon Meshi includes discussions about what it means for characters to demean others for their bodies, or for the past politics of former rulers. There are certainly nations for halflings and elves; but what sets the manga apart from similar properties is that there is also a secondary cast ripped straight from an Edo-period fantasy, whose characters walk confidently into the DnD-inspired world of elves, orcs, and halflings. The dichotomy between a cast drawing from typical Japanese fantasy tropes and another informed by English ones opens a light-hearted interrogation of the key concepts of fantasy.
The underpinned tropes of fantasy are not deconstructed in Danjon Meshi—it’s still set in a pseudo-medieval Europe—but the inclusion of pseudo-warring states characters with appropriate attire opens the sandbox to include more toys to play with. This attitude towards play, and the manner in which it is increasing the availability of tropes and images, has also been the response of video game and tabletop companies for years. Companies have offered character art with darker skin and a wider variety of facial features, regardless of fantasy-race: In summer of 2024, for example, Dungeons and Dragons made Mexican orcs part of their campaign.
This creation within fantasy gaming of fantasy creatures with non-white features has become a standard. The real-world impact has been that more people feel invited to create characters with tusks, horns, or scales. Yet the question of what this means, geopolitically, inside each world is normally floated as a joke among fans. No one thinks there’s an easy answer to the question of what it means for there to be a Mexico, if there are Mexican orcs. It’s just a game, after all—and at least the approach separates the genre from the Tolkien-esque overconfidence which creates a culture from the bare mechanics of food, shelter, and community, instead allowing the genre’s participants to be honest about borrowing from real life.
Moreover, it helps emphasise that the hubris of creating the terms that would necessitate a culture of the author’s own imagination is based in itself on a fallacy. Paul Rabinow, in his article on “Fieldwork and Friendship in Morocco,” wrote:
Culture in all of its manifestations is overdetermined. It does not present itself naturally or with one voice. Every cultural fact can be interpreted in many ways, both by the anthropologist and his subjects. […] It should be clear that the view of the “primitive” as a creature living by rigid rules, in total harmony with his environment, and essentially not cursed with a glimmer of self-consciousness, is a set of complex cultural projections. There is no “primitive.” There are other men, living other lives. [1]
Perhaps instead there can be a re-negotiation of how these creatures originate, rather than using antiquated formulas of race and ethnicity. The folkloric origins of fantasy blended the spirits of the dead with the spirits of nature and a far stranger reflection of divinity. Perhaps that’s not the right vibe for a game, but fantasy has other aspects where these tropes can mature and change. For both readers and creators, fantasy can serve, as it always has, as a sandbox for fearless exploration.
Endnotes
[1] See Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. University of California Press, 1977, pp. 142-162. [return]
[2] See The Methods of Ethnology, pp. 311-321 from American Anthropologist 22(4), Oct.-Dec. 1920. [return]
[3] See Les Formes Elementaires de la Vie Religieuse: le système totémique en Australie, Alcan Press, 1912. [return]