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Summary Of Body Ritual Among The Nacirema By Horace Miner

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Response to Nacirema 05/08/2018“Body Ritual Among the Nacirema “by Horace Miner (1956), is a parody of America’s development of today’s society. I read this article twice, with the anticipation of understanding it by the second time. It finally took my third time of reading the article to catch what was going on. For beginners the tribe called the Nacirema, is American, spelled backwards. As a culture hero who cut down a cherry tree Notgnihsaw is also Washington spelled backwards. It was confusing at first but when I understood the article and its meaning, I began to laugh as I was reading. My first reading I believed that this article was about a specific tribe, perhaps an Indian tribe called the “Nacirema”, that practices old rituals and …show more content…

They also used “holy-mouth-men”, who ranked below the medicine men in social status. These holy-mouth-men took care of the mouth. The Nacirema believed that the mouth has “supernatural influence on all social relationships”, and children were brought up on the “mouth-rite”. Miner (1956) also explained how Nacirema also went to a witch-doctor that they called “listener”, who would exorcise the demons that were in the heads of people who been bewitched. And the thought was parents were the ones to bewitch their children …show more content…

Egocentrism begins in early childhood. According to Jane Piaget (website), during the preoperational stage; Egocentrism refers to the child’s inability to see a situation from another person’s point of view. And in Miners (1956) article, rituals are taught only to their children and to prepare them for socialization, this in my opinion is very egocentric as well as ethnologic. My theory is that we as adults/role models take our egocentric ways and display them to our younger impressionable children, who grow and emerge through life as being ethnological. Our teachings inhibit children from seeing outside of the box and keeps them zoned in on what society thinks, such as vanity, wealthy, and perfect. We will never develop as humans because of the rituals that we continue to pass

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Horace Miner’s “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” has many rituals that seem bizarre but are a reflection of their beliefs and what they think is the proper way to address their imperfections be it the way they look, the condition of their health, or their beliefs in attaining luck or fortune. In my opinion, these rituals are, to some extent, similar to our own daily practices and rituals. Their daily rituals seem strange but these rituals and practices are somehow similar to our own daily rituals in terms of what they are trying to achieve. One similarity is how they believe that the human body is ugly so they use the powerful influences of ritual and ceremony. The more powerful members of the society have many shrines in their homes and

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