In his essay titled "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema," Horace Miner introduces us to a mysterious tribe of people and their strange daily rituals. According to the author, the Nacirema tribe members subject themselves to various daily tortures and ritualistic behaviors in hopes of achieving the ‘perfect' body. The article mentions several comparisons of the Nacirema tribe habits to the actions of today's society. One of the easily recognizable elements is the extreme mouth rituals referring to today's obsession with oral hygiene. Another example is the fixation with medicine men; a reference to today's fascination with doctors, psychiatrists, and the use of various medications. One of the aspects of today's culture that is similar to the ones …show more content…
As a notorious insomniac, I have struggled with sleep for many years. In today's busy world, it seems that everyone wants to experience what we think is ‘normal,' healthy, and restorative sleep. I think that it is interesting that the sleep industry brings an enormous profit each year, yet most of us do not realize that we might be chasing a goal that we were never programmed to achieve in the first place. Learning that it might be natural for our bodies to wake and ‘meditate' every few hours in the middle of the night was quite fascinating. Upon experiencing such ‘awakenings' myself, however, I have never felt rested or fully restored the next morning as the author suggests our ancestors did. I wish the sleeping routine described in the article would produce a restful night. Unfortunately, however, it does not work in my case. I might some day try the techniques described in the article but for now I will continue to focus on getting a solid and continuous …show more content…
I did not grow up learning English. My first major experience with the English language was at twelve years old when I visited the United States for the first time. I did not start ‘officially' learning English in school until I was fifteen. However, visiting the US every summer greatly contributed to my acquiring of the language later on in life. The only language that I used and was exposed to growing up was Polish. Nowadays, there are only a couple of my family members that live in the US and speak fluent English. Most of my family still resides in my Motherland, and my mom who does reside in the US does not speak English. Due to these circumstances, I am exposed to both languages on almost daily basis. Speaking fluently in both languages and using them frequently has been an interesting experience in my life; one that still puzzles me, especially when I visit my family in Poland. As mentioned in the article "The War of Words," by Mark Pagel, our native language helps us "affiliate with people with whom we share a distinct identity." This feature is one that I tend to experience quite a bit every time I go back to visit. Not only speaking Polish helps me connect on a deeper level with my family (sharing stories, memories, etc.), but it also helps me feel and remember how it 'feels' to be Polish. Being able to communicate in my own language every time I visit makes me feel 'at home and close to my fellow
The focal point of the shrine is a box or chest which is built into
He describes the American health system and many aspects of the an American’s personal health as inhuman and uncivilized. Simply changing the way a word is spelled makes this culture seem far away and distant but in reality it is the culture in which we live every day. The article, “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” by Horace Miner makes the readers think about what they know to be true and evaluate how strange the many aspects of their lives
Human needs are similar- health, physical appearance, human body and economic resources to meet these needs. Nacirema culture bears some semblance to more civilized culture. While reading this article it seems most of the practices are similar with modern culture. A major difference is the magic, ritual and the crude method of doing things. One of the cultural practices that stood out for me is the “holy-mouth-men” ritual, which seems like what a dentist will do. I also find interesting the diagnostic ability of the diviner.
Most people who grow up with a foreign language spoken in there house grow up with an advantage in society. This advantage can only occur once the individual learning that foreign language also learns the dominant language spoken in that country. Once both of these languages are learned and mastered, the individual has now placed them se...
One of the fundamental beliefs of the Nacirema is that “the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease.” According to the Christian tradition, the human body is fallen and is therefore prone to disease and weakness; so in that respect, I do not completely disagree with the Nacirema. However, they seem to take the ugliness of the body to a whole new extreme. Their fascination with the mouth is extremely interesting. In today’s society we don’t necessarily see the mouth as an evil device, but more as a tool for communication and sexuality. The relationship between oral and moral characteristics is an interesting way to see the world. I had a lot of cavities before the age of 16, and I can honestly say that I wasn’t an overly evil child; it’s just a byproduct of not brushing and too much sugar. The Nacirema seem to read a lot into things that are just repercussions of a life lived.
In reading one, Body Rituals Among the Nacirema, since this is my second time reading this article this year I have a clear understanding of what the Nacirema tribe believes to be deviant and how they seek to get the deviance out of their daily lives. This community believes that their bodies are deviant, hence men and women would visit a godly like medicine man to perform what we would consider as deviant medical
In “Body Ritual among the Nacirema”, Horace Miner (1956) revisits the rituals of a North American group, the Nacirema, as first described by Professor Linton in the early 1900s. Miner depicts these people as quite vain; obsessive over money, appearance and health. While the economic status of a Nacirema individual is extremely important, nothing compares to the significance of the rituals of the body. These rituals tend to involve various steps that allow the Nacirema people to present themselves to the world in their fittest, most beautiful form. The majority of these rituals are performed by the individual in their own home, in extreme privacy. The body is viewed as a disgusting vessel, in need of constant upkeep to be presentable to others. The Nacirema home contains one or more ‘shrines’, devoted to transforming the body into the definition of health and beauty. The main purpose of the shrine is to hold charms and magical potions, bought from
In the article, Body Ritual among the Nacirema, by Horace M. Miner, some of these same problems are faced.
In Horace Miner’s article, “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema”, he talks about a tribe and describes their odd behavior. He tells about how the tribe performs these strange daily rituals and how their peculiarity is extreme, but in fact he is actually speaking of Americans as a whole (Miner). Miner uses this style of writing to more effectively prove his point: that Americans are ethnocentric.
The author Horace Miner’s article “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” is a comment on the vanity that is present in the American culture. He focuses on a North American Group, which he considers Naciremas which is Americans backwards. Horace Miner demonstrates that attitudes or daily rituals have a convincing sway on numerous establishments in Nacirema society. The writer uses many metaphors to describe this vanity including his statement that “women” try to cover up their impurities by applying makeup in addition to getting surgeries and other things to fix what they think is wrong. However, in reality Miner uses this metaphor to show that the American culture is vain and always tries to fix its faults and mistakes. Basically, Miner uses the
Many studies of the role of sleep are partial or total sleep deprivation studies which support Oswold’s restoration theory. One of these supporting studies was Dement’s. He deprived participants of REM sleep and consequently found that they increased their number of attempted REM stages from 12 to 26 over 4-7 nights. During their first uninterrupted night, participants increased their REM sleep by 10% which is known as REM rebound. This suggests the importance of REM and the possibility that the purpose of sleep is to get into REM sleep. The participants reported anxiety, irritability and difficulty concentrating which shows that REM sleep is needed to avoid these affects and enable brain recovery which corresponds with Oswold’s theory. Even so, Dement’s study has low ecological validity, it has low population validity because there were only 8 participants and they were a self-selected sample. Participants would probably have shown demand characteristics because the experiment took place in a lab. It also has low mundane realism because people would not usually sleep in a lab and be interrupted repeatedly.
Sleeping is something that is an essential part of human nature and is a must in order for one to be a functional human being. Sleep is an idea that is accompanied by many wives’ tales, including the idea that one needs seven to eight hours of sleep each night and alcohol helps one fall asleep and sleep more soundly. One myth about sleep is that during sleep, one is in a state of nothingness. In truth, however, it has been discovered that during sleep the brain is active, variations in heartbeat and breathing occur, and the eyes and ears are active throughout the time of sleep. These activities during a person’s sleep are important because they help that person be more aware, awake, and alert during sleep.
Historical archives record famous short sleepers and notable insomniacs—some accounts reliable, some not. When Benjamin Franklin counseled, “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” he was using sleep habits to symbolize his pragmatism. Important public policy issues have arisen in our modern 24-hour society, where it is crucial to weigh the value of sleep versus wakefulness. Scientific knowledge about sleep is currently insufficient to resolve the political and academic debates raging about how much and when people should sleep. These issues affect almost everybody, from the shift worker to the international traveler, from the physician to the policy maker, from the anthropologist to the student preparing for an exam.
“Twelve Simple Tips to Improve Your Sleep.” (2009, Dec. 18). The Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Healthy
Thus we see how medical anthropology studies and provides analysis on the issues of the body, bodily perception, and the representation of the body, as well as meaning and symbolism. Also we see how medical anthropology takes these interpretations and uses them to critique the system’s practices. The biomedical system largely ignores the social aspects of illness, and this does a disservice to the suffering individual it seeks to restore. It emphasizes a biological reductionism which limits the care it can bring to the person it reconstructs as a patient, and in doing so, it discounts the multiple meanings medical symbols can hold for the patient.