Body Ritual Among The Nacirema Horace Miner Summary

Anthropologists learn about a culture through participant observation. They often experience cultural shock when encountering with different cultures. Horace Miner in his essay Body Ritual among the Nacirema wrote about the unusual rituals and beliefs of the Nacirema. He describes the Nacirema as a North American group whose rituals originated from their magical beliefs. When I first read the essay, the practices of Nacirema seems ridiculous to me. However, I was amazed when I found out that Nacirema turns out to be the word American, but spelled backward. I then reread the essay and realized that the culture hero, Notgnihsaw and the temple, latipso are also the wordplay of Washington and hospital. After all, the essay was a satirical essay

Some of them include the substantial gifts and the overflowing charm box. By referring the gifts that the natives supply to the medicine men and the herbalists with the exorbitant prices we paid to get prescriptions, Miner illustrates our willingness to pay to obtain the right medicine. The overflowing charm box of the Nacirema symbolizes the expired medicines in our medicine cabinet. Miner also discuss the relationship between dentists and the people when he writes “the natives return to the holy-mouth-men year after year, despite the fact that their teeth continue to decay” (505). Miner make fun of our ignorance because we believe what the professional said without a single doubt. When the dental professional recommend teeth cleaning twice a year, we visit the dentist regularly. Toward the end, Miner indicates our obsession with perfectionism when he wrote “There are ritual fasts to make fat people thin and ceremonial feasts to make thin people fat. Still other rites are used to make women’s breasts larger if they are small, and smaller if they are large” (506). With this, Miner emphasizes that we are constantly influenced by the society’s false assumption on the perfect and ideal body