Nacirema

While reading the Nacirema I could not help to think how different they were and question the different rituals and customs they practiced. After finding out the meaning behind the allegory I was shocked and surprised. I was surprised int the similarities that are visible after knowing that the parable of the Nacirema was actually about America. My brain started making connections to the American culture. One of the first connections that immediately made to the reading was the part where Miner talked about how the human body was viewed as disease and an ugly thing. How could someone view this of their own body? But that is exactly the way Americans consciously or not view our bodys. The way that we go to the doctor often and take vitamins or shots against viruses and disease. Often we are even required by schools that we have certain vaccinations. This could appear different to people who do not get vaccinated as often as Americans do. People grow up viewing everything they do on a daily basis as normal and what's correct. That when we see different from one's ordinary practices we are alarmed, but our own culture or even habits are also different from others.

In 1956 a professor from the University of Michigan, Horace Miner, wrote an article in The American Anthropologist that has become a mainstay of learning for anthropology students. Miner published the article to show a fictional exotic society called “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” as an example of how one’s own limited perspective might affect the perception of a foreign culture (Miner, 1956, p. 503). The article uses subtle humor to make the reader more comfortable in examining cultural behaviors, physical appearance, and health as the reader soon discovers that the actual society being examined is the American society. To the reader, the article begins to sound very familiar after each paragraph is

In Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas weaves her analysis of religion and society around a very simple topic, one of which I honestly took for granted: dirt. Dirt, Douglas argues, plays a massive role in the formation of society and how societies understand their worldviews and conceptions of sacredness. With this constant pushing and pulling of purity and impurity, meanings can be assigned to all patterns inside and outside the symbolic classification system of a society. Unity of the sacred and the filthy is then achieved through these purity and impurity rituals (3). In this essay, I will discuss the paradoxes of her book, modern approaches with understanding ritual, and my insecurities over the “Primitive Worlds” chapter.

the pain that the readers must feel as they witness as the tribe’s erosion under the influence of the

In the essay “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema”, anthropologist Horace Miner depicts a group of people known as the “Nacirema”, but is referring to Americans, whose cultural beliefs are deeply rooted in the perspective that the human body is prune to sickness and disfiguration. Consequently, a substantial part of their lives is spent on unusual rituals and customs to improve conditions of the body that are filled with magical components. Moreover, Miner uses the Nacirema’s unusual culture to establish his view that we simply could not judge another culture that it is different from our own, as opposed to another anthropologist Malinowski’s point that we can judge another culture since we are

The Tchambuli personalities ideally “oppose and complement” the Arapesh and the Mundugumor (265). The Tchambuli women were unadorned, brisk and efficient, whether in childrearing, fishing, or marketing, while the men were decorated and vain, interested in art, theater, and gossip. Mead is speaking about the personalities, or the temperamental differences between these selected societies. She realizes that in most cultures male and female behavior does conform to their traditional expectations she had experienced in her upbringing.

In this article, Miner takes the role of an outsider and judges the Nacirema just as we judge other cultures. Miner does an exceptional job of wording things in such a way that we don’t even recognize our own culture. Miner wants us to realize that when someone, such as an anthropologist describes another culture, we can interpret that into being abnormal but in actuality, it is, by all means, very normal.

Prior to European influences, many indigenous religions did not dichotomize the world into good and evil, and, as a result, natives interpreted their deities as both good and bad. When the town council describes their indigenous beliefs as “wicked,” this diction represents how European influences affected and shifted how natives interpretation of nature.

This is about a culture called Nacirema that is practiced in many different place and was brought to the attention of the Anthropologist attention by Professor Linton to talk about this culture that was poorly understood. The Nacirema is a type of culture that is summed up as that these people that believe in this culture that the human body is ugly and that the natural tendencies are meant to debilitate and cause disease. They are also big believes in rituals and ceremonies in the household to preform these ceremonies either as a family but in most cases it was privately. Where they would receive charms and other items form the medicine man of the community that would help with a certain problem. They would use these magic items to help with

"Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" is significant as it establishes the issue of representation in ethnography. The purpose of the article is to raise the question of how can we study a different culture from the outside and how can we understand our own culture from within. Culture can be defined in many ways, Tylor (1871) stated that culture is; “…that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Therefore, the article presents the topic of cultural relativism, arguing that there is no impartial viewpoint from which to assess cultures, that every culture should be interpreted and understood from the

Horace Miner describes the people of the North American tribe the Naciremas as persons “devoted to economic pursuits (Body Ritual Among the Nacirema. Miner. 503.3.2)” and ritual activities of the human body. Miner uses a satirical style, play on words to abnormally describe such cultural upon this tribe. Throughout the text, Miner uses words and or phrases such as: “sadism, masochistic, neophyte, awls, and objects in the exorcism of the evils of the mouth involves almost unbelievable ritual torture of the client.” Horace Miner, uses those such words and phrases to describe the various everyday rituals conducted by the Naciremas by producing ethnocentrism through the readers of his text.

The terms and images Rowlandson uses signify black, hellish, devilish peoples who have no sense of civility. Furthermore the Indians, or "Others", who are not Christian, and practice their own spiritual customs, are viewed as barbaric and abnormal to Rowlandson.

The author’s purpose in writing this article was not to show the “Nacirema” as an example of how extreme human behavior can become, but how an outside perspective can affect your perception of an alien culture. If one were to look at the “Nacirema’s” cultural behaviors regarding physical appearance and health without any insight or knowledge of the specific beliefs or values of that culture, they might seem bizarre and even incomprehensible. By showing behaviors and “rituals” performed by this unknown tribe, Miner allowed others to see that the way studies were representing distinctive cultures was narrowminded and defective. Without the proper comprehension of the basis of any society, huge cultural misunderstandings could occur. Of

For us to properly learn about culture, we must understand the meaning of cultural relativism and ethnocentrism. The two concepts challenge one another. Reading the article, we must pull away from our ethnocentric views and think critically about the Nacirema people's. However, the description of the culture creates an ideology that is hard to agree with. For example, the Nacirema peoples take part in a rite that involves hog hairs and magical powders. The Nacirema rituals do sound strange and displeasing but, we have to learn to recognize our ethnocentric judgments.

Claude Levi-Strauss’s theory of binary oppositions was extremely influential in the anthropological world and fueled the reaction seen among the other anthropologists discussed here in this paper. Levi-Strauss proposed that binary oppositions are used to give things meaning; he argues that they act as organising principles of rituals and myths and construct the thought patterns of a culture. This can be seen, for example, in the way he examined and deconstructed myths: he asserted that every myth contained one or more sets of binary oppositions, saying that “all narratives have to be driven by a conflict that was caused by a series of opposing forces” (Levi-Strauss 34). This quote demonstrates how his believed all myths and rituals were based on universal contradictions. These contradictions within a myth are what it seeks to resolve within its narrative. In