Write my Essay on The Body Ritual of the Nacirema

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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.