Common Knowledge: A "tribe" is not a "character" in a book
CharlasIndigenous Peoples
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1Muscogulus
I have a favor to ask: In Common Knowledge (the LibraryThing info database), please do not list the names of entire tribes or nations in the "People/Character" fields.
Doing so tends to reinforce the habit of treating all members of an indigenous nation as identical — as all partaking of a shared mind, all taking orders from the same "Big Chief," or other primitivist clichés.
I feel sure that no one would insist on listing "the Dutch" as a character in J. Lothrop Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic, or "the Russians" as a character in Anna Karenina. It would be nonsense. For the same reason, don’t list "Cherokee" or "Choctaws" or "Comanches" as characters in your favorite book about Indians.
If you want to keep track of which books are about the Cherokees, use tags. That's the appropriate place to tag Lothrop's history with, say, "Dutch", "Netherlands", "history", and Tolstoy's novel with "fiction", "novel", "Russia", etc. The same goes for books about indigenous people.
Doing so tends to reinforce the habit of treating all members of an indigenous nation as identical — as all partaking of a shared mind, all taking orders from the same "Big Chief," or other primitivist clichés.
I feel sure that no one would insist on listing "the Dutch" as a character in J. Lothrop Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic, or "the Russians" as a character in Anna Karenina. It would be nonsense. For the same reason, don’t list "Cherokee" or "Choctaws" or "Comanches" as characters in your favorite book about Indians.
If you want to keep track of which books are about the Cherokees, use tags. That's the appropriate place to tag Lothrop's history with, say, "Dutch", "Netherlands", "history", and Tolstoy's novel with "fiction", "novel", "Russia", etc. The same goes for books about indigenous people.
2Muscogulus
FYI, I cross-posted this to the Common Knowledge discussion group, here, where it received agreement from LT staff.
In the ensuing discussion we gathered volunteers to clean up much of the cluttered CK, and we learned that, actually, some users do put the Russians or the Dutch under "People/Character," though they shouldn’t. Other head-scratching examples of the misuse of CK also emerged.
In the ensuing discussion we gathered volunteers to clean up much of the cluttered CK, and we learned that, actually, some users do put the Russians or the Dutch under "People/Character," though they shouldn’t. Other head-scratching examples of the misuse of CK also emerged.
