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Body Ritual Among The Nacirema By Horace Miner

565 Words3 Pages

Horace Miner in 1956 wrote the satire piece, "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" describing the natural human in the 1950s as a tribe that were obsessed with what their bodies looked like going to the what seems as the extremes for perfection. Two of these satires were the "shrines" which in short are bathrooms and describes going to the bathroom as, "the rituals associated with it are not family ceremonies but are private and secret. The rites are normally only discussed with children, and then only during the period when they are being initiated into these mysteries." The underlying belief to why the bathroom is kept a secret to others it’s a way that a human can get the "disease" and ugliness out of them without facing anyone. Miner talks about the medicine cabinet behind a mirror describing it as box or chest built into the wall. The tribes people will fill these chest with magic potions(medicine) that they get from herbalists (pharmacist) that the medicine men(doctor) instructed them to do. Miner goes on to give plenty more satires including the imposing temple(hospital), a mouth-rite (brushing teeth), the holy mouth man(Dentist), The listener(therapy), and shaving. All of these satires relate to how humans think that the body is ugly and all of the steps they take to prevent …show more content…

Instead, he wrote about a tribe, the Nacirema, which is backwards for American in a way that made people think that they are insane but in reality, it's what humans do every day just worded differently. A problem solution problem is evident in this satire. The problem is the humans view of the human body being, "ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease," is the Nacirema's idea of themselves at. Miner uses this view as the problem and gives all of activities that humans do as a

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