The Body Ritual of the Nacirema

    Description   While reading The Body Ritual of the Nacirema for the first time I considered their customs to be unusual and slightly horrifying (especially when it talked about women baking their heads in ovens). I also found myself wondering why this group of people continued to visit the medicine and holy-mouth-men when they would often make matters worse. Throughout the reading I also felt relieved that I never had to experience these rituals myself. This ended up being ironic once I found out that the entire article is describing American culture. The word "Nacirema" is simply "American" spelled backwards. This was the first clue that the article wasn't what it seemed, and it was right under my nose the whole time. I had been reading about my own daily "rituals" without knowing it. This article was also worded in such a way that I automatically ruled out my own culture as the one being discussed. Part of this was because of the language used. For example, the "Nacirema" are called "unusual," extreme, and "still very poorly understood (Miner, 1956, p. 1)." Most people wouldn't think this of their own culture which helped to fool the audience. Once I realized the critical and satirical intent behind this article I read through it a second time, with much more understanding. The women baking their heads in ovens were actually drying their hair at a salon, and the ominous holy-mouth-men were actually dentists. The Nacirema didn't seem foreign to me anymore, and as a result I no longer considered them to be "unusual." People, as a whole, tend to be critical of things they don't understand, and I think this article illustrates this well. If we try to view things through other peoples' perspectives we'll better understand them. Horace Miner is calling our attention to the ways in which anthropologists (and people in general) have viewed and described "foreign" cultures in almost primitive ways.