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The Nacirema Culture

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The Nacirema is a society that despite of possessing a highly developed market economy, they dedicate much of their time to numerous rituals every day. They believe that the human body possess a high propensity to debility and disease. It is said that they perform rituals and ceremonies to avoid these characteristics.
In the Nacirema culture, there is at least one or more shrines in every house. This sanctuaries are built into the walls. They consist of a chest that contains many magical potions and charms. These items come from the medicine men. They are the ones who decide which ingredients must contain the potions, and they write them down in a language that only they and herbalists would understand. The help of these specialized practitioners …show more content…

Four times a month, the ladies had to place their heads in small ovens for about an hour as part of the ritual. That also makes me question why they feel the need to perform this ritual. Was it for physical appearance? At some extent, this ritual resembles today’s society where some women gets under a hair dryer for an hour or more every week to get their hair done and look more attractive.
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. This is how the medicine men would deduce the nature of their illnesses. Again, this is how modern medicine is nowadays with the difference that doctors do not use magical powers to guess an illness, they actually use scientific methods to diagnose a disease. On the other hand, women had to let the medicine men to analyze, touch, and stimulate their naked bodies, but people that attended these ceremonies had a truly faith in these

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