One of the nicest things that I've learned about linguistics is that, often, if you spend enough time around someone who has a different accent to yours and are enjoying yourself, your speech might take on aspects of their speech without you noticing. Like a hybrid accent between theirs and your own.
Conversely, according to the same linguistic theory people who don't like each other will often over-emphasize their accents to mark themselves as different from each other. Accomodation Theory btw. (I think I'm remembering that correctly.)
Ah, the concept of afterlife. That attempt of ours to battle the uncertainty of death and handle the fact we all, eventually, end. A marvellous concept, really.
I wish, though, to talk about very specific presentations of the afterlife. What came to mind originally was the similarities and differences between His Dark Materials and the Good Place in handling those topics. Spoilers for the HDM books and tGP TV series ahead, then - massive spoilers, as both works pretty much end with what I intend to talk about. Since I plan on writing long, I'll even be gracious enough to put it under the cut.
So, similarities and differences. My interest mostly piqued because of one particular trope both works have in common - the Door at the end of the afterlife that returns your particles to the universe as the solution to the afterlife. I suppose this idea isn't necessarily unique to those works, but I don't really know of any other work that does that. Except maybe Kaos, where it's the lie the Greek Pantheon has been telling people is true.
It would be interesting to remark that this same solution is applied to two wildly different problems: the HDM's afterlife is a bleak wasteland ruled over by lie-sniffing harpies, and is actually a prison - a threat held over mortals by the Authority. Only all mortals go there because the Authority is too lazy to actually reward his followers. Seriously, 90% of the premise isn't "if G-d is real and acts as Christians say He does than He's the villain", it's "if G-d isn't actually G-d and both Heaven and Hell are actually Purgatory/the Fields of Asphodel then the world is crap". I'm sure someone somewhere can correct me on how it still works as a criticism of organized religion - like, "with how these Fire and Brimstone preachers speak, practically everyone goes to Purgatory forever anyway, plus religion does try to restrict your enjoyment of worldly pleasures" or something like that. Or a way more educated version that mentions Paradise Lost and William Blake a lot or something.
I would say that I digress, but this isn't the only criticism with which I wish to inflict HDM today. Because,speaking of the freaking afterlife, this world's version of the ultimate judgement is very much not morality based. Which, hey, I suppose is fine. It just means extremely boring people are the ones damned to spend an eternity continuing to exist in boring conditions, while every interesting person, be they unfathomably evil or perfectly good or anything in between get to reunite with the universe. The additional people who'll have problems include compulsive liars and possibly amnesiacs and anyone with a memory problem. The deal only covered babies being free, after all - everyone else has to tell true stories about themselves. Sure, Gracious Wings and co. can choose if a given true story will get you through and they can choose who to punish, but we have no frame for their morality outside of truth and lies. So sure, go ahead and argue the afterlife judgement shouldn't be morality based and your morals should be based on other things. You still damned some particularly weak groups for eternity just because they can't tell stories. I'm exaggerating a bit. But we do know that fanciful tales are out of the question - would a work of outright fiction be fine if it's not technically lies? And I'm digressing again. This system is immoral - or, more accurately, morally neutral. It has no mortality to it. The exact opposite of the Good Place's system.
The Good Place uses the Objective Point System: the moral system to end all moral systems which, for some incomprehensible reason, is point based. And it's fine, right? Everything's fine... Oh, no, nevermind, consequentialist purity culture dictates that everyone goes to hell ever since the start of the Modern Era. Well, that and not receiving love and support from your surroundings? But Chidi, who stressed about the former and actually had the latter also failed because of his infinite attempt to find moral clarity? Clearly, my knowledge of moral philosophy is just as flawed as my understanding of classic English literature about Genesis. But that's not really the point.
After the entire system was reformed - not by getting rid of the Infallible Point System, but by adding another stage to the testing with as many repeats as you like - the Soul Squad find that heaven has a problem: they kind of turned into the Pullman version of the afterlife, only for the opposite reason: an abundance of pleasure had turned them numb and now they're bored for eternity. The solution, though, is the same as HDM only different: a final Door is added, but its point is to have an end in sight to the eternal paradise. It functions similarly, but not the same - as the Good Place has some time in heaven before reuniting with the cosmos. Which is more fun than being flown over a bottomless pit, I think.
A couple more notes, since we're at it: out of the Soul Squad, Jason will have the easiest time passing through Gracious Wings' test. Tahani will come as a close second. Chodi and Eleanor will have the most trouble - Chidi because of his indecisiveness, if the Harpies will tell him he doesn't need to stress out over complete accuracy of details he can be fine, and Eleanor because she can be a compulsive liar sometimes - I'm sure she and Lyra could bond over that and having crappy parents. She'll deal eventually, anyway - the Dress Bench story alone should be enough if recounted with honesty.
On the opposite side of the veil, I don't really know enough about how the new System of the Good Place works to judge how long will it take any given HDM character to go through it. I think Lyra's major flaws are her arrogance and self-assuredness, Will's is probably his ruthlessness, Lord Asriel's is his hubris and also ruthlessness (thank goodness he and Will never met), and Mrs Coulter's is probably her manipulativeness. But I'm not really the best judge of character. Putting the four of them in the same neighborhood is probably a terrible idea but it's fun to consider and I might try writing this fic at some point. Maybe.
I feel like this kind of lost its thread in the middle. I'll keep the title, because it still is about the afterlife in some ways even though half of it is random rambles. Maybe one day I'll delve into more afterlife systems. Until then - thank you for reading!
Evolutionary psychology is so very interesting and I really wish that it's massive overlap with archaeology had been covered in my course like, at all. For those who have never heard of it: in a nutshell, evolutionary psychology seeks to understand how modern humans came to be and the origins of our ingrained behaviors. For example: early humans evolved to work together because individual survival was far likelier as a part of a group -> because of this we're biologically incentivized to want to be a part of a group -> this can manifest as feelings of depression and loneliness when we aren't a member of a group or feel disconnected from our community. Then maybe asking what it is about the modern day that is making it difficult for a need to be met -> are there clues to a solution in how our ancestors used to live. And things like the development of fear and anxiety as survival tactics and how we can deal with those feelings when we aren't facing the dangers that those instincts developed for.
There's also a lot of stuff going on looking into the origins of language and whether we can tell from archaeological evidence if Neanderthals had the capacity for verbal speech (the evidence strongly suggests that they very much could.)
Thinking about how there's a weird bias in archaeology to over-identify maleness in human skeletons. In "The archaeology of death and burial" by Mike Parker Pearson, he talks about how there was an infamous case of an excavated medieval cemetery where something like 80% of the skeletons were being identified as male.
Now, historically speaking, male skeletons are the ones which are generally less likely to show up in cemeteries, since large portions of them died in wars and enemies don't typically bother to bury opposing soldiers in nice, marked graves. If the cemetery had been an unmarked communal grave where the skeletons showed signs of dying from violence- then yes, you'd expect them to be mostly or exclusively male. This was a regular cemetery that served a town though, where you'd expect the ratio of female-male skeletons to be roughly equal, or for there to be marginally LESS male skeletons due to the whole wars and unmarked graves thing, so what gives? If there was a war going on you'd expect less male skeletons in a town's cemetery, not more, because their bodies would have been buried elsewhere.
Well, it turns out that the archaeologists on-site just couldn't tell the difference between female and male skeletons, so when they weren't sure they just went ahead and assumed male.
This prompted other researchers to look back at their own work and oh, would you look at that, decades of over-identifying male skeletons and skewing research in an entirely incorrect direction! How could this have happened?
Despite what some people may want to tell you, sexing the human skeleton isn't actually that easy. There are certain markers that lean one way or the other, sure, but the majority of people actually have a mixture of both. Prominent mastoid bones, for example, are generally taken as a point for a male skeleton, but females are perfectly capable of having them too. The sciatic notch can sometimes help indicate one way or the other- but it's shape can also be indeterminate. If you go to the effort of estimating what height the person would have been in life then you can make a guess because women are generally shorter than men, but short men and tall women exist, so that's not a catch-all, either.
The truth is, humans are so diverse that it's genuinely impossible to have a checklist for one sex or the other because the features of our skeletal structure often aren't exclusive to one sex. With research you can give a very educated guess about what sex a person may have been in life, but unless you do a DNA test on the skeleton to have a look at their chromosomes chances are you'll never know for 100% certain- it's not like you can wake up a dead person to ask them.
Instead, what helps archaeologists more confidently sex skeletons is what they're buried with (if anything at all.) Most cultures post Neolithic have different customs for the burials of members of their societies based on their status within it- like gender, age, political power, and occupation. If you can identify that this culture buries their women in a certain way- differently from the way it buries their men and children- and the skeleton is buried like that AND has typically female skeletal features, hooray, you're probably correct in sexing that person as female. We generally call this using contextual evidence.
However if there is no contextual evidence and you can't afford an osteologist or (as unfortunately semi-frequently happens) some of the bones were lost in transit... maybe be careful that you aren't unintentionally skewing your data. Your colleagues who use your research to prop up their own might get very upset with you otherwise.
You know, when I was a teenager and heard people in passing talking about feeling lost in your 20s, I somehow thought that it was hyperbole. Nope! Graduated university last year, haven't been able to find permanent work and discovered that I REALLY don't cope well with being bored. Like I had to putting active effort in trying to prevent my mental health from slipping and sliding like my brain is a tiger pacing its sad little concrete cage as soon as the short-term work that I managed to somehow snag ended. No one warns you about how severely going from enforced structure to your days from ages 3-18/whenever you stop doing school to having none at all fucks with you. Like it's not even money anxiety because I'm living in my childhood home/not paying rent and have savings from the aforementioned work to last me a while.
Adding on to that is the somewhat existential knowledge that I am swiftly approaching the age that my parents were when they had me, and while logically I know that trends have changed a lot and that people are generally settling down and having kids in their early-mid 30s now instead of their early-mid 20s, it doesn't help the feeling that I'm uselessly spinning in place. When they were my age my parents were saving up for a down payment on a house with the jobs that they'd had since like two seconds after they graduated high school. Meanwhile I can't afford to move out and likely won't for the foreseeable future because even all the minimum wage jobs want a Master's degree and 5+ years of experience. Like what do I do now.
Pro of being archaeologist-adjacent: Having a deeper understanding/appreciation of a lot of things that you see in museums and in historical documentaries, also sometimes being able to bitch about inaccuracies in movies.
Con of being archaeologist-adjacent: telling literally anyone what you studied in university is like playing Russian Roulette of whether they'll try to convince you that history is fake and all historians are actually brainwashed by signals sent by aliens in deep space. Who want to control what humans learn about their own history for. Reasons.
Most people in my life are generally no longer baffled by my ability to have no idea who celebrities are but occasionally someone will be like "How can you not know who Rose Flower is?? She was literally in Summer Blockbuster of the year! Her break-up with Tom Whatshisface was all over social media!" like buddy I don't know how to tell you this but I don't become interested in the personal lives of people that I don't personally know until they've spent at least 40 years being dead. I just don't have the energy to keep up with the new developments in the lives of people who I'll never speak to. You know? But someone wrote a biography about all the supernatural stuff that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was into that I can read at my leisure.
