: Re: Non-fictional ideology in a fictional culture One of the themes in my book is Good vs Evil. I have chosen to portray the south African Idealogy of Ubuntu in a fictional culture in my book.

@Correia211

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I think you walk a dangerous line here, especially considering your subject position (by your profile picture, at least, you appear white, and while there are certainly white South Africans, their presence is due to a long history of violent colonial oppression). You come dangerously close to engaging in cultural appropriation; by being, as lea writes above, a "dabbler," rather than someone immersed in that culture, you run the risk of dangerously oversimplifying the philosophy, especially considering the truncated description that you offer here.

It's also important to remember that, at least to some theorists, ideology is not simply a set of ideas, but one that has the ability to shape (or even determine) the way in which people recognize themselves as individuals, and in lifting the Ubuntu philosophy from the culture, you run the risk of mass marketing the cultural ideas to people for whom they do not bear the same sort of cultural significance. In essence, you are taking something from a group of people by using the name Ubuntu for what you are describing, and by taking that set of complex cultural phenomena out of the culture from which they originate, and putting it into a culture of your invention.

I thus have two recommendations:

Call it something else, something that does not have the same sort of cultural meanings and regional specificity.
Go for it, but be very prepared for people to find fault with your analysis, and to go so far as to call you racist for doing what you're doing. Because that will almost certainly happen, especially given the climate surrounding contemporary identity politics.

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