world-of-vanatas

What they aren’t

Now, it should be noted that these two are not distinct groups, but subcultures of the larger native Eduran zeitgeist. They both eat the same food, they both celebrate the same holidays, etc. Two Edurans, one tuinmann and one bestuurer, from the same town of the same social standing (we’ll get to that,) will speak with the same accent.

As one last point of contention to drive home the fact that these two groups are part of the same whole, we must bring up the topic of social class. It is true that once, a tuinmann would (almost) always be an urban, unionized, labor-voting worker, and a bestuurer would have been a suburban middle class clerc, that just isn’t the truth anymore.

Today in Edury, it is possible to find bestuurer factory workers and miners, tuinmann bank managers, and every which one in each area and field. These are purely cultural groups, rather than the socio-economic ones they used to be; since the great kerfuffle of ‘72, they have been mixed. We’ll get to that in a bit.

History & Context

As with so many things in Eduran history, we must go back to the Revolution of 1801 to find the basis of both these groups.

After the death of Marshal Jager and the cementation of the political system of Edury, many people didn’t really know what to make of themselves in a socio-psychological sense. Before the Revolution, there had been strict caste denominations, with sumptuary laws and other regulations clearly defining who was where. Bonded peasants at the bottom, and the hereditary mercantile nobility at the top- mind, these laws were certainly less appreciated by those at the base than those at the pinnacle. However, come the new peace, people were adrift in terms of class definitions.

Many of the previous castes had been ripped asunder after the civil war and revolution. Many of the guild-member craftsman class were newly wealthy, taking a place as factory owners or bankers, but many of this same caste were forced into utter destitution. What's more, there was very little to legally define these new stratified peoples. Technically, everyone belonged to the same, one, new caste; citizen. However, as the second of the three revolutions- the industrial- marched on, it became clearer and clearer that this was just a pretty thought in the minds of the bourgeoisie.

The Electoral Commission broke people up into blocks for voting for their representatives, and determined who the new Lord-Magistrate would be. These blocks afforded the working poor very little representation, as this Commission weighted rural, agricultural districts nearly as strongly as urban, industrialized ones. As cities swelled in size, districts were slow to be updated with censuses and redistricting. And as time marched on to the late 1840’s and early 50’s, the ascendancy of Lord-Magistrate Johan Vorhees and his conservatives would only continue this trend. The anti-sumptuary laws of the revolutionaries were repealed, allowing the nouveau riche to wear splendid and fancy dress once more, flaunting their wealth; the poor were legally allowed to do the same thing, but no person who worked in the eastern mines or southern factories could ever afford the beautiful beaver hats or silk kerchiefs. What’s more, Vorhees and his cabinet would punish the working poor for their attempts to unionize and organize, until his grating personality, unpopular policy, and willingness to use violence to repress the workers movement would lead to his downfall.

In the late winter and spring of 1861, the new revolution swept the nation as a brushfire, not overthrowing the old system but appropriating it; the new unions would not only be workers associations for collective bargaining, but also social clubs, charities, political parties, and for a time, militias. The leader of this movement would turn out to be Barend de Boer, who is sometimes credited as the first tuinman. De Boer was born Martin Cain, in Lathadu. His family moved to Edury when he was a young man, and when he began his organizing career, he took the name ‘Barend’, the Bear, as a nom de plume (and then nom de guerre.) As he gained more notoriety, he also adopted the name ‘de Boer’, the farmer, as part of his idealization of the agrarian way of life. This will be visited again later.

Throughout the later half of the 1800’s, the tuinmannen, and their political party, the National Workers Association, would be politically and culturally ascendent. They gained their name, partly because of their idealization of the agrarian way of life, and partly for their habit of having small urban gardens in their backyards, windows, and rooftops. Until the first world war, they were the primary subculture of Eduran society; either you were a tuinman, or you weren’t. Ironically, many leaders of the NAV (Nationale Arbeidersverengening, or National Workers Assoc.,) weren’t Tuinmannen. Towards the turn of the century, many of the party leaders had been much wealthier than their partisan counterparts, which we’ll get to later. This was tolerated, however, because of the nature of the NAV (and later, its main opposition, the Liberal Union;) the local chapters and branches of the parties diverged in many ways, and so the party leadership was- and still is- beholden to the rank-and-file of the party membership.

This would continue until after the first world war. At this point, tram lines, interurbans, and subway metros had allowed for suburbs to be set up and flourish; in fact, these suburbs were endorsed and planned by tuinman and NAV leaders, who saw these suburbs as a way for the workers to get to live out their agrarian fantasy, away from the city, and with the ability to retain their employment. However, as these progressed, there soon came to be a moment of national reckoning for these suburbs; many of the ones based upon streetcar lines or urban metros had grown so much that they became part of the city they had split off from, and indeed many of our largest cities started annexing these suburbs as wards or districts. Further afield from these, a new type of suburb came about, based on one invention; the automobile.

Of course, this is part of each group’s story. In actuality, while many of these streetcar suburbs were amalgamated, many of them are independent politically and culturally today, and these ‘auto-suburbs’ aren’t actually much different from their older cousins. In fact, the automobile was much, much older than even some of these streetcar suburbs. That was part of the problem.

Largely, before WWI, automobiles were eye-wateringly expensive, both to purchase, and to upkeep; they required an inordinate amount of fuel, as well as daily cleaning and maintenance that required their own mechanic. Cars were such a status symbol, that some people put off buying one until they could afford both a mechanic, and a separate driver, the eponymous Bestuurder. Of course, the people of the class that could do this were certainly not tuinmannen, and were in fact largely despised by the primary subculture. That is until fuel, maintenance, and cars themselves became affordable enough for common people to own.

After WWI, this began to happen; shopkeeps, clercs, bank managers began to buy cars, and as they got cheaper, even bank tellers began to buy these now plain and simple cars that were, unmistakably, still status symbols. These people were derided as chauffeurs, bestuurder, by the main Tuinman politicians. Soon, these people began to form social clubs in the guise and aesthetics of the salons and etc. of their former economic betters, but in function were no different from the associations of the workers and laborers. Eventually, in 1920, these would form the Liberale Unie, or Liberal Union, which derived much from their older NVA counterparts.

While you would get Bestuurder members of the NVA and vice-versa for quite some time, these two groups would remain distinct until ‘72, when the great coal collapse rendered the NVA asunder. For decades, there had been a growing rift between two factions within the NVA; the dominant one, the ertes, enacted policies of top-down regulations and state-owned enterprise, whereas the other faction, called simply the anderen (others,) wanted regulations decided by groups of industries, and worker-owned collectives which would compete rather than single state owned industrial blocs. When March 12th, 1972 happened, and the final three anthracite mines in Edury closed, there was foaming discontent in the NVA, which to this point had been a dominant party, and had only lost the Magisterial chair once since the revolution.

Due to both human and institutional error, a cabal of moderates had held a choke-hold on the party leadership of the NVA. It is regarded by many economic historians that this cabal’s handling of the anthracite industry led to its collapse; in trying to run it both in a centralized, top-down and decentralized, competitive way, they ended up killing it and setting off the economic domino effect that would last years. The Lord-Magistrate and executive chairman of the NVA, Beucephalous Paardman, had an uproar on his hands, and he handled it poorly. Scores of anderen chapters of the NVA would declare their succession from the main body, some forming their own associations. Many, however, elected to join the Liberal Union, in what seemed to the Bestuurer leadership to be a splendid idea in taking members from their great enemy.

For various reasons, this backfired; as the former NVA partygoers were largely unionized laborers, and the splinter parties of the NVA collapsed and melted into the LU, all of a sudden there were as many Tuinmannen as there were Bestuurderen. The ideals of the splinter-chapters and the liberals merged; while the LU to this day still desires for less government regulation and more competitiveness in Eduran economics, they argue for worker-owned collectives, industry unions to set regulations, and other such policies. Today, you are as likely to find a Bestuurer in the NVA as the other way around.

The Similarities

In order to talk about what separates the two cultuurgroepen, we must first establish what unites them. In addition to both being aspects of the wider Eduran psyche, they are also both capital P capital R Post Revolutionaries, in the sense that their machinations are in response to all three great Eduran revolutions; 1801, 1861, and Industrial.

Relating to the first two revolutions, both groups have an almost pathological desire to look humble in dress and manner. The Tuinmannen define themselves by their proletariat beginnings. The Bestuurder define themselves by the fact that they are common folk, not the pre-revolutionary aristocracy that the Tuinmannen accused them of being. However, both of these also inherited the large importance of ceremony and pomp in Eduran culture, which is far older than either group, going back (as some archeologists say) to pre-Ayekist times. As such, both groups put an emphasis on non-ostentatious, but still formal clothing, as well as other aspects of Eduran life. However, interestingly, there is another love that both groups have which they imported; an idealization of rural, agrarian life.

The Tuinmannen get this largely from their founder, Barend de Boer. A Lathadun immigrant himself, he kept close contact with his homeland, writing letters and perhaps even meeting such figures as Pol Cambuc and Carmac Kneale. As de Boer was leading a movement of urban laborers, however, this love of all things rural was really a romantic light to shine upon city life. The eponymous gardens were a method for de Boer to get his followers (both tacit and fanatical) to become more food independent, as well as to go back to an idealized simpler time. His final appeal to idealized romantic rural life was the notion that each worker should have the ability to retire, and move onto their own little farm to sustain themselves in the twilight of their life, and so that their children might be able to grow up in a pastoral paradise before moving to the city to make something for themselves. As the decades marched on, the suburbs that sprouted out along tramlines became a way for workers to live a little bit of this rural fantasy before they could actually settle down on their own acre and a half of land.

The Bestuurder, having formed much later, had a similar but slightly different idealization. For them, the focus was not on the individual farmer living on their own little acre and a half, but on the rural village life. Many suburbs set up in the 1920’s-30’s would bill themselves as villages (despite being within a 20 minute train ride or drive of a large city,) and advertised themselves as a way for middle class families to own their own little hill cottages, and still work in the metropolises.

The Differences

Now that we know how the two groups are part of the same culture, we can talk about what truly makes them different. In a word: minutiae. In a sentence: not a whole lot, but details of daily rituals and idealizations that mean a great deal to the people who live within these two groups.

In regards to their love of rural life despite living in a quite urban country, the Tuinmannen have this idea that a perfect acre-and-a-half of land is how a person should end their life- although in the modern day, this ideal retirement is more of a rural vacation home, rather than a permanent dwelling. The Bestuurderen, however, treat their ideation as a way of life; it’s an ideal to have your own little slice of the countryside in the form of a single home somewhere, which can be your own little cottage. This subtle difference can be traced back to how the two groups were founded; the Tuinmannen were first an organizational and political group, which over time became a cultural one, whereas the Bestuurderen at first were social in nature, and only came to politics after they had developed their own distinct cultural identity.

This develops further. While both groups are in love with the supposed rural past, the Tuinmannen are unmistakably an urban, industrial culture. Most people who self-identify as Tuinmannen live in cities with population densities above 2,000 people per square kilometer. Most people, in fact, live in such dwellings; 80% of the population lives on 50% of the land in Edury. The Tuinmannen typically live in urbanized areas where rowhouses, townhouses, and apartments are the norm, and where you are more likely to walk or bike to work or the shops. As such, most of their daily rituals which have major import in Eduran culture are based around this urban, industrial lifestyle. The most popular example is how for the Tuinmannen, lunch is the most important meal of the day, with most Tuinman places of employment offering up to 2 and a half hours off for lunch breaks to go home and eat (60 minutes is the usual legal minimum in Edury.) They are also of the persuasion that simple button-up shirts, no ties, and cloth flat caps are appropriate attire for work and professional life, stemming from the days where most Tuinmannen worked in hot, dangerous workshops and factories, where wearing a tie could get you decapitated and a suit jacket would cause you to get heatstroke.

With all that in mind, you may think that the Bestuurderen are the rural counterpart. Not so; they’re more suburban, as a generalization. What ties they have to the Eduran agrarian past are things that their ancestors did not need to give up when they started industrial work. For example, breakfast and dinner are more important for Bestuurder families, as largely, these middle-class descended worked shorter hours. Today, most Bestuurder workplaces average around 1 hour and 15 minutes of lunch break, although this varies as these establishments tend to offer multiple shorter breaks, with one longer one in the middle of the day to eat in the break room. In most other cases, Bestuurder rituals are modeled after the ‘professional’ middle class; workplace attire is at least a waistcoat (yes, even at the time of writing,) and formalwear must at least include a jacket and tie. Bestuurder also typically lead urban or suburban lives, but tend to prefer municipalities where detached housing is the norm, and are more likely to take a metro or bus to work than walk or bike. Of course, all of these are generalizations for both groups.

At the end of the day, the Eduran preoccupation with ritual- both public and private- is a topic for another essay, involving the rise and fall of the Ayekist churches, as well as, of course, the Revolution. Which is in itself a topic of another one. To close this essay out, we call attention once more to the fact that the primary differentiators between these two groups are which Eduran rituals they place the most importance on, and what they are descended from. These is, of course, one more great unifier of both groups: