Body Ritual among the Nacirema Essay Sample

Body Rituals among the Nacirema Its hard to analyze one or another society correctly. Nevertheless, sometimes, these attempts are quite successful. Weve written this essay to explain the article of Horace Miner under the name â€Å"Body Ritual among the Nacirema.† What is Nacirema? This term appeared not so long ago, after the publication of the article mentioned above. Nacirema means Americans (spell it backward). These days, this notion is widely used in sociology and anthropology. It describes different aspects of the particular behavior or society of the USA. It is a neologism, which is used with the aim to look at the American culture from the other perspective, to make sense of self-distancing. American anthropologists do this with the aim to explore the culture they live objectively. Historical Facts At first, it stands to learn when and why this term appeared and why it is still popular in the American society. For the first time, this notion was used in the article â€Å"Body Rituals Among the Nacirema,† written by Horace Miner in 1956. We are going to describe the Nacirema (or Americans), a small tribe, residing in North America. Those who study sociology should read the work of this writer. At first gaze, he describes an ordinary tribe. Still, in reality, this group of people is Americans of 1950th. All traditions entirely coincide. Very often scientists consider this article to be a real confirmation of a gestalt shift, relating to sociology. This simple, maybe even fantastic, article became very popular among the society. It was published in different textbooks, newspapers, books. Many scientists used it as the basis for writing their research papers or course works. The author of â€Å"The Bedford Reader† used it as an example of a process analysis. The article made Mr. Miner famous and now is regarded to be a constituent of the public domain. Main Characteristic Features and Rituals of Nacirema So, what is this article about? In sober fact, the main characters are people, called Nacirema and living on the territory of Canadian Cree, Tarahumare of Mexico and the Yaqui. Reading the article, you’ll be impressed with the Western oral cleanliness and their view on hospital care. Besides, the tribe has a prosperous and robust market economy. People, living in this tribe, spend the major part of the day working for economic aims. Thus, they also manage to spend lots of time in ritual activities. Such routine activities are critical for them. The central belief of this tribe is that the body of the human being is ugly. They can’t choose the body to live in, and because of this issue, they have one common target to defer to the power of different rituals. They spend lots of time engaged in various ceremonies. For this purpose they use shrines. Each member of a tribe has these shrines. The more shrines a person has, the more powerful he is. Mostly, their houses are poor, but the shrine rooms look very rich. It goes to show that the members of the tribe spend lots of money to make these rooms wealthy. Reading this article, you will recognize the traditional attitude of the society to medicines. Each shrine has a special box where people keep different magical portions. All medications are prescribed by a particular man who should always be rewarded for his work. This person just writes the prescription to drugs on a specific piece of paper in a language which is not understandable to ordinary citizens. Only herbalists who prepare them can understand this secret language. Each person has many magical packets, and from time to time they even forget which one should be used to treat a particular illness. One more body ritual of the Nacirema is the horror of their mouth. They believe that their mouth influences their social relationships. One of the rituals related to the mouth is that they think that their teeth can fall out. They care about their mouth, using different magical powers. One more ritual is avoiding exposure of the body. All excretory acts are done at home in secrecy. The society shouldn’t see it. Among other body rituals, we can mention the following ones: making thin people fat and vice versa, making the breast of women larger, attempts to avoid pregnancy, etc. Body Rituals of the Nacirema Summary To sum up the information, we should say that the author showed the citizens of this tribe as magic-ridden people. Besides, the author wonders how they managed to live for so long under the heavy burden. Besides, this burden wasn’t imposed by other tribes. It was imposed by them.