Icebreaker Questions

I'm working on the story of the humans' first contact with the felinoids, at one of the felinoids' colonies; at one point, the humans send a series of questions to the aliens. Most of them are from their biologists, whose original purpose was to survey the system's planets to see if any could support a colony; one set was from their anthropologist (they only brought one, since they didn't expect to encounter intelligent life, but you'd still want someone along to handle it, if it came up).

But what questions does an anthropologist ask an alien civilization? They already know the aliens have two sexes, and what they look like, and that they're carnivores; the two species explained such basic things during the initial contact.

But, knowing one's speaking to a sexually-reproducing bipedal carnivore, there are still several questions. I thought it might be of help to other writers for me to put them up here, since it was hard for me to research the issue—I eventually had to look for "what questions do you ask for worldbuilding" to know where to start. Being able to answer these questions for a species will help with worldbuilding, even if you never have to portray first contact, of course.

1. Subsistence
   • Foraging (hunter/gatherer)—not very likely for a spacefaring civilization, although my felinoids do have many professional hunters. Anyway, the main questions about foraging are "for what" (are they more hunters than gatherers, or vice-versa?) and "how territorial" (land-tenure predates agriculture by a significant margin)—although there might also be a question of if the tasks are divided, like how early humans delegated hunting to males and gathering to females.
   
   
   • Horticulture—may not occur on a large scale for a carnivorous species, but "on what scale" is one of the questions. Others include "how do they irrigate" and "what's their concept of land-tenure".
   
   
   • Animal Husbandry—do they raise animals for meat, milk (or equivalent), or work? Do they keep pets? How extensively have they modified their domestic animals? How much of a factor has mounted warfare been in their history? Are there any animals they don't domesticate, like how Muslims essentially forbid pig-farming?


2. Economics
   • Gift—most Westerners don't seem to even know that this form of economy exists, even though it was a major element of feudalism and, before that, of the Germanic tribes' culture. Arguably, Roman patronage was also a form of gift economy. Polynesia and the Pacific Northwest still have a gift conception of economics. This would also involve questions about the aliens' concept of obligation, another thing most Westerners barely know exists.
     
     My felinoids conceptualize their government as a gift-economy, with power held in feudal gift from the people.
   
   
   • Redistributive—very highly-advanced and very primitive societies both often have this system, where everyone pools their resources and then they're doled back out. East Asia, apart from Japan, had this system, with the Emperor or King owning everything; arguably so did later Rome and Byzantium. Many subsistence-living hunter-gatherers, in the New World and Africa, use a system like this, to ensure maximum survivability for all their members. Also, communism—"from each according to his ability, to each according to his need". Questions regarding this system include "who does the redistributing" and "are there any forms of property that aren't returned to the common pool". Many subsistence tribes that use this system often have each warrior "privately" own his weapons, possibly to have a "market" style incentive to prowess in battle.
   
   
   • Market—odds are good, you're standing in one of these. However, there are several questions about such economies, like "is ownership exclusively individual, or by kin groups, or can unrelated individuals incorporate to own property jointly"—and, since there's likely to be a mix, "what sort of mix". Another important question is "are there any regulations on markets aside from competition and supply-and-demand?"
   
   More general questions about economics have to do with whether they regard manufacturing and service as economically equivalent, and what their concepts of intellectual property are. Speaking of, apparently service economies are older than commodity ones—monkeys "pay" each other for sex and food with grooming.


3. Kinship
   • Family structure—do they use nuclear families, or polygamy, or serial monogamy, or promiscuity? Humans are (with a few exceptions) mostly nuclear families, with a few polygamists; most cultures aren't tolerant enough of divorce for their arrangements to qualify as serial monogamy, and polyandry is highly unusual (it's essentially unknown outside India and Tibet).
   
   
   • Lineality—is descent, and family-membership, traced through the mother, or father, or both? Also, is raising children primarily the responsibility of both parents, or some larger kin-group? E.g., is the main male presence in the children's life their father, or their mother's brothers?
   
   
   • Locality—assuming the family structure is not completely promiscuous, which spouse joins the other's household? Or do they choose one or the other, or start a third completely independent one? There's actually a lot of gradation in here.


4. Control Structure
   • Stratification—basically, any large population is going to be stratified; egalitarianism only works with a small population. The question is actually, what's the basis of the strata, e.g. are the classes divided purely on the basis of wealth, or by their religious or military role, or something else? Another question is how strict the divisions are; medieval Europe had the same basic classes as India, but intermarriage between the classes wasn't remotely as difficult.
   
   
   • Locus of Power—basically, is the model of government used polity, aristocracy, or monarchy? Most people would actually be wrong, if they answered this question; Americans tend to think our country is a democracy (or rather, polity) or republic (which, again, is Latin for aristocracy), but it's actually a mix of both with monarchy, in the form of our strong executive. Most people from Britain would brag that they're a republic or a polity (which, of course, they'd call democracy), or (illiterately) lament that they're a monarchy, but actually Britain, like most of Europe, is an oligarchy, and no, not because of the House of Lords—technocracy is just as much oligarchy as plutocracy is, and European countries are dominated by "experts", most of whom have no check on their power to speak of.
   
   
   • Model of Power—not sure that's the best way to put it, but the question means, "is power personal or impersonal". Does office rule, or personage? Obviously there's gradation here; the office of president or judge or senator is obviously aided by a charismatic personality occupying it.

Note, too, that aliens would likely be answering these questions for their dominant culture, since pace Star Trek they wouldn't be homogenous. E.g., humans would be answering the last question for the Western-style "republics" that dominate most of the world, but nevertheless Saudi Arabia exists. Huh, I wonder, speaking of—does the Franco-American presidential or semi-presidential system, common in most Romance-language speaking countries, predominate over the Anglo-German parliamentary one? Because a presidential system may be said to be semi-monarchical, while a parliamentary one is aristocratic/oligarchy.