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Body Ritual Among The Nacirema Analysis

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Body Ritual Among the Nacirema The article pretty much focuses on describing the sociology and rituals of a certain culture nicknamed “Nacirema”. As I began reading it, I had a hard time understanding what it really was about simply because there was a lot of words that I have never came across before. The article talked about the rituals and the way people behave and what they do in their own culture, in my understanig the person who wrote it must have been an outsider of that culture simply because of the way he was summarizing it. As I continued reading on with the story I began to realize that the word “Nacirema” might have a deeper meaning to it, and little did anyone know it certainly did and that was “American”. There were a lot interesting …show more content…

Some of these phrases included “Medicine men, Herbalist, Substantial Gift and highly formalized series of gestures”. As you can see that pretty much shows the fact that the person learning about this culture was an outsider and came up with names on his own about the things he saw people do that he might have thought were certainly unusual or maybe weird. For example let’s talk about the phrase “Highly formalized series of gestures”, from just hearing that no one could really figure out what the meaning behind it was because from that description anything a person does can really be a Metelanski 2 series of gestures but as you read on you realize that from the context of the sentence it really meant to brush teeth. The article as I mentioned above implements rituals. I honestly think the writer when he came in contact with our American culture thought that our daily activities were rituals which is a normal reaction in my opinion because that is pretty much the same thing all people do when they travel around the world and see how different cultures act differently. When i was reading the article and I was focusing on the meanings he was trying to illustrate by saying all these weird phrases I realized that it

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In Body Ritual Among the Nacirema, Horace Miner develops a weird, quirky society called the Nacirema that is made up of natives who go about their day doing odd rituals and tasks. The purpose of the story was to have people judge other cultures less harshly by making them step back and think about what they were perceiving. Additionally, Miner calls attention to how similar cultures are from region to region without even knowing. Sociologists from the perspectives of functionalism, conflict, and symbolic interaction would interpret Nacirema society differently and in a unique way. Throughout the story Body Ritual Among the Nacirema, many ideas that align with the three theoretical perspectives are blatantly displayed by the Nacirema natives.

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In this week’s reading, “Raramuri Souls” by William L. Merill discusses the unique way the small indigenous population, Raramuri people, practice the Day of the Dead ritual. The Raramuri people normalize and accept death unlike the mainstream society. They view death as an inevitable stage of life. The Raramuri people endure high mortality rates of death, therefore, they perform various burial rituals. There burial rituals depend on the type of death the person underwent, the sex of the person, and the age of the person.

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The characters in ‘Burial Rites’ by Hannah Kent do not feel powerless - regardless of their social position. Shown by the way that the Jonnsons act in front of Bjorn Blöndal and other higher-class guests, they value their social position highly, believing that the higher the position, the more power they will have. Consequently, social position can make one feel impotent. Another reason that social power is not unimportant is the idea that Bjorn Blöndal feels as though he is akin to God in his social position, therefore he feels all powerful by virtue of his social position, in juxtaposition to the characters with a low social position who feel powerless. Social position affects all the characters and in some ways contributed to Agnes’ execution, nonetheless,

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The author Horace Miner expresses his understanding of the psyche behind the unique yet horrible body rituals among the Nacirema tribe. According to anthropologists, human behavior is highly unpredictable and diverse, and different people react differently even under the same conditions. In this essay, Miner’s basic storyline is this very fact: upto what extremes can the human behavior endure. The main idea that he wants to express is not the horror of some body rituals among the Nacirema tribe, but the reason why and under which circumstances this tribe endures such rituals. He tries to understand this exotic custom to see the extremes of human behavior.

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This provided a great exigence for Miner to construct this article in his efforts to sway the general population’s opinion. Instead of taking a literal and more direct approach, Miner wrote this article as an argument very discreetly with the purpose to expose the American culture for what it truly is; narcissistic and conceited. By making the argument so hidden, the author allows for the audience to be vulnerable to the argument. Throughout the whole articles, readers think that the Nacirema is this radical, extreme society with intense rituals for their appearance. Once the reader realizes all of these rituals are coincidentally very similar to the ones Americans participate in every day, Miner captures the reader’s attention.

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These rituals also create a sense of moral community, in which people conform to, which furthers their purpose and meaning in

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We as the audience see this through undeniable evidence that there was no real cultural insight of the Nacirema. As well as language/description Minor uses in the essay to describe the natives. Because the Emic and Etic methods take two completely different approaches to anthropology you can clearly see how this essay approached a certain method rather than the other. In writing the “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema”, Minor followed the guidelines that a Etic would take in conducting research of a particular culture.

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Horace Miner, the author of “Body Ritual among the Nacirema”, used very interesting and descriptive choice of words to describe the routines that modern Americans go through from an outsider point of view. He gives different terms to describe mundane routines, like brushing your teeth, and exaggerate the details as something that is bizarre. Some rituals Miner described as illogical because there was a low rate of success in what they are trying to achieve. This reveals that what determines something to be socially acceptable is not through logic, but only though the popularity of the community. One of the rituals that Miner described as illogical but everyone still do the ritual was the fact that the people kept going to the “holy-mouth-man”, or also known as the dentist, even if their teeth are still decaying.

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In Miner’s essay on the Nacirema culture has many comparisons to the United States’ cultures. There are many examples that Miner provides in his essay. The first comparison is to a chest which in the United States’ culture is a medicine cabinet. The second comparison that is made is about the fascination with mouth some people in the United States fear the dentist in the Nacirema culture “They believe that their teeth will fall out, their gums bleed, their jaws shrink, their friends will desert them, and their lovers reject them (Nanda, Warms 2).

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Nacirema Body Ritual The Nacirema culture was a nation that originated by the culture hero, Notgnihsaw. Their culture was characterized by a rich natural habitat. Now while they spent some time working on economic pursuits, majority of their day is spent in ritual activity. They believe that the human body is ugly and that it has a tendency to debility and disease and that the only way to protect themselves is through ritual and ceremony.

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Nevertheless, the culture develops from the rich natural habitat known as the natural resources to develop the economy. The main concern of the people of Nacirema, is the human body and their health. The

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Also, in every community, the medicine men had a temple that has been built to treat the sickest people specifically. The only problem is that the only way to receive treatment there is by giving a rich gift to the custodian in order to be admitted. It does not matter how ill the patient was, basically they had to pay. The Nacirema people were not used to exposure their bodies, but for this rituals they had to take off their clothes and let the maidens bathing them and see them performing the natural function of their bodies into a sacred vessel.

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In the study called Body Ritual Among the Nacirema, the author calls the rituals and ceremonies the people perform “excessive”. They are insane rituals that people in America wouldn’t seem to think about doing. They sound so different, and unusual. As one reads the fieldwork, it raises a lot of questions and concerns. To anyone from another country it would seem these rituals are excessive because of the way they are performed, and the things they use to perform them.

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I believe that ritual is a personal experience and to those within the purpose is apparent, those outside are subject to cultural barriers such as the one described by Rosaldo. I also question the fact that denying rage within grief; one cannot understand these actions, like not knowing love in the matter we as members of a culture that includes non-arranged marriage do could cause those that support arranged

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