Body Ritual Among the Nacirema

Essay #1: Body Ritual among the Nacirema

The article entitled Body Ritual among the Nacirema by Horace Miner provides an intricate glimpse of the American culture through a bold and unusual lens. By making the American culture look more like a “voo-doo” ritualistic society, Miner shows the reader that cultures often view other cultures based upon what they view as “normal” in their own day-to-day lives. It is through this strange take on typical American practices that Miner develops a bold statement on how cultures are judged based on ethnocentrism, culture relativism and material culture.

Body Ritual among the Nacirema sets the stage for a “North American group” who is “characterized by a highly developed market economy,” is “devoted to economic pursuits,” and who spends “a considerable portion of the day [on] ritual activity” (Miner, 15). Miner goes on to explain that the Nacirema have an odd obsession with “body rituals” and that there are many practices that go along with this keen obsession. After one read of this article one very well may just assume that Miner is analyzing a strange tribe of ritualistic North Americans. It is after one realizes that Nacirema is in fact American spelled backwards that a connection is drawn between the two. Once this imperative epiphany is made the article comes alive with a mocking sense of American Culture. Miner states that the Nacirema built their nation upon a “culture hero” named Notgnihsaw, or Washington spelled backwards. From here begins Miner’s profoundly strange view on American culture; specifically, the American infatuation of bodily hygiene.

There is an impressive amount of “ritualized” daily activities that Miner has decided to include in the article. The bathroom, medicine cabinet, the brushing of teeth, dentist and hospital visits, and plastic surgery are just a few to be mentioned. When describing the American view on body image Miner states that “the fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease.” Miner goes on to explain that the “shrines” (bathrooms) are where “private rituals” occur. The simple act of brushing teeth, or a “mouth-rite,” is depicted as people “inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures” (Miner, 16). Another example of this view of typical practices includes Miner’s Nacirema description of a dentist visit. The dentists are considered “holy-mouth-men” who are visited “once or twice a year.” After explaining the “impressive set of paraphernalia,” Miner states that the magic-mouth-men perform an “exorcism of the evils of the mouth,” otherwise known as the filling of a cavity, and that the Nacirema “return to the holy-mouth-men year after year, despite the fact that their teeth continue to decay”(Miner, 17). Just these examples alone reveal the style and interpretations Miner presents which are carried throughout the whole article. Miner provides many more examples of “typical” American activities and finishes the article by concluding that the “review of the ritual life of the Nacirema has certainly shown them to be a magic-ridden people” (Miner,18). This profound take on American culture can be analyzed to show American culture in a different way and to make a statement on how different cultures judge one another.

Throughout the article Miner makes suggestions that the Nacirema are quite honestly oddly obsessed with bizarre body rituals. When reading the article assuming that Miner is truly discussing an indigenous tribe of North Americans, it is easy to judge this abnormal culture and make bias assumptions about it’s people. However, when the fact that Miner is really writing about American culture becomes clear, it almost seems shockingly insulting at how Miner describes “us.” We are used to our culture and believe that we belong to a relatively “normal” society. It is with this subconscious belief that we, as an Americanized culture, are quick to judge any culture that is not similar to our own. This naïve outlook is considered ethnocentrism, or the fact that “people often make judgments about other cultures according to the customs and values of their own” (Tischler 2014, 52). With an ethnocentric view on cultures it is inevitable that one would assume their culture is the “right” culture while another culture is “wrong.” Horace Miner is making the point by writing Body Ritual among the Nacirema that our bias view on other cultures is not an accurate or fair way of looking at other groups of people. “Ethnocentrism can lead to prejudice and discrimination and often results