From: ddfr@quads.uchicago.edu (david director friedman)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Travel,Persona
Date: 7 Apr 92 00:25:16 GMT
Reply-To: ddfr@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations


          Travel Distances and Small Samples

"Chicago (which he told me has at least four large ones within the
metro area.)" (Arinbjorn)

Word from afar is seldom sooth. I would have said that Chicago has
one medium sized group (the Province of Tregirtsea) and three small
groups. 

In general, the thread on travel distance seems to suffer from the
tendency to take a single sample as evidence of what people in some
faraway place do. I would guess that, in almost any kingdom, there
are some people who go only to very local events, others who
routinely travel many hours, and many others in the range in between.
It is very easy to talk to one or two people, and reach strong
conclusions about how their kingdom differs from yours. I expect
there are differences--that in some places a larger fraction of the
population is willing to drive five hours to an event than in
others--but they do not seem to be as extreme as many in this
discussion suppose. 

              Views of Persona

"As indeed I did not - I have naught but praise for this approach, so
long as it  doesn't entail withholding knowledge on such specious
grounds as that advanced by the teacher mentioned in the message to
which I was responding." (Fra Tadhg Liath)

Since Fra Tadhg has finally expanded his original comment on my story
about Schola into a recognizable argument, it seems a good
opportunity to respond to it. For those who have by now forgotten,
what I had posted was:

"On one occasion a lady was teaching a class in Anglo Saxon poetry.
She mentioned the existence of one type of poem, then explained
apologetically that she didn't know anything about that type, because
it was always done in the hall after the women had left."

Tadhg's objection to this seems to be that the result of the
teacher's deliberately staying in persona was to keep the students
from learning what she could otherwise have taught them. I think
there are two problems with this argument.

1. You cannot teach everything known about every type of Anglo-Saxon
poetry in a one hour class. If she had spent ten minutes explaining
that particular sort of poetry, she would probably have had to leave
out something else. 

2. By saying what she did, she taught the students a different and
valuable lesson--that a culture looks different from inside than from
outside. Someone who learned about wars by playing board games would
have a badly distorted picture of what they were really like, because
he would see everything from above, rather than from the much more
limited and detailed perspective of someone actually in the battle.
Similarly, someone who learns about Anglo-Saxon poetry from a modern
book is likely not to realize that it looked very different from
inside--in part for the reason the lady was pointing out.

"My persona is not *who I am* but rather *who I was* before I got to
the Current  Middle Ages. That is the only approach to "persona" that
can be successfully implemented in the SCA, because it's the only one
that possesses a theoretical basis to cope with anachronism." (Fra
Tadhg Liath)

This quote, combined with your earlier comment about my efforts
("I've watched His Grace the Duke Sir Cariadoc push that particular
rope for years; ... it's doomed to failure by inherent structural
weakness..."), seems to imply that you think I disagree with this
view--that I believe one's persona should be unaffected by life in
the Current Middle Ages. Since I have said the opposite repeatedly,
both in print and on the Rialto, I am curious as to how you reached
that conclusion. To quote an example from a recent posting, I wrote
(in response to Vajk):

"My own compromise on this is to do some things inappropriate to my
persona, with the excuse that I learned them from the foreigners
among whom I am now living, but to try on the whole to concentrate on
things appropriate to my persona--learning stories from al-Tanukhi
and the 1001 nights instead of the Mabinogi." (Cariadoc)

Cariadoc
From: Stephen.Whitis@f4229.n124.z1.fidonet.org (Stephen Whitis)
Sender: FredGate@ocitor.fidonet