In Horace Miner’s Body Ritual Among the Nacirema, Miner demonstrates how the Nacirema’s culture and performed rituals are poorly understood. The Nacirema, whose roots originate from North America, are depicted as a group of people whose rituals revolve around the human body. The natives who belong to this group find the human body unpleasant. Consequently, the Nacirema are strongly in favour of seeking help from practitioners in order to improve the way they feel in their bodies. This specific group of people value substances such as magical potions in order to help their bodies recover. The Nacirema who are ill go to a temple called the latipso and seek the medicine men for help. They also see seek for other practitioners such as the holy-mouth-man …show more content…
and the “listener” in order to improve their body’s physical and emotional state. While some of the Nacirema’s practices may seem to have exotic customs and sound taboo, Miner tries to make the strange seem familiar to people of our present world.
The author, Horace Miner, uses a technique that is inaudible to the conscious mind and compares the Nacirema’s rituals to the rituals of present day Americans (Nacirema spelt backwards is American).
DISCUSSION
Miner describes shrines as a secret place where the Nacirema experience rituals without the company of others. A shrine is a chest that is built into the wall of their home. These shrines contain several magical potions and charms that he or she believes will help improve their body’s condition (504).
The author, Miner, subliminally compares shrines to a modern day medicine cabinet where medication and make-up are stored. Many individuals use these products on a daily basis and assume it will make them feel in good shape and look presentable.
When the Nacirema are ill, they go to latipso to meet the medicine men where they can potentially get cured. However, the medicine men expect a gift in return for their services (505). Many of them undergo practices that may not even improve their state and may even be the leading cause to kill them
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(506). This specific ritual is similar to the American health care system (latipso spelt backwards is hospital without the letter “h”). The medicine men refer to healthcare professionals such as doctors who receive patients at a cost opposed to a gift. Many Americans put their life in the hands of doctors hoping they will recover; however it is never promised they will. Patients who have cancer may go through several stages of chemotherapy and may go through procedures that might only make them feel worst. Like the Nacirema, both continue to visit doctors/medicine men in hope that they will fight through their illness. CONCLUSION Horace Miner subliminally demonstrates how the Nacirema’s rituals are similar to the rituals of many Americans.
Both the Nacirema and individuals of today’s society are culture obsessed with rituals that correspond to the human body. Most readers may find the Nacirema culture and the activities that they are engaged in are strange and unusual, however it is a matter of perspective.
Readers who cringed at the thought of their unusual activities might feel ethnocentric in the sense that their culture may seem a lot more “normal” compared to the Nacirema’s culture. Nonetheless, the study of anthropology teaches individuals to look at cultures through the cultural relativism lens. Cultural relativism raises the importance of analyzing cultures in their own terms before criticizing them.
Although, keeping valuable magical positions in shrines and giving gifts to the medicine men in hope they will recover in return may seem odd to the naked eye, they are all very similar to the activities many perform today. Not only did Miner predict the many rituals people would be engaged in today, he delivers the message that culture is based on rituals and that each culture defines its reality and acceptable behaviour through them. Thus, individuals should look at rituals in depth before judging them because what might seem strange to one may not seem strange to
another.
The focal point of the shrine is a box or chest which is built into
Miner does an exceptional job in disguising the Nacirema as Americans. Some of the things he disguises are the bathroom, which he says is a cleansing shrine. He disguises the medicine chest as the main device in the shrine, a bundle of hog hairs on a stick as a toothbrush, and magical potions as medicine (Miner).
Rituals help many people to feel more in control of their lives. Both American baseball players and Malinowski’s Trobriand Islanders practice some sort or ritual. In each case, the ritual is used to bring comfort in the face of
The main characters, the Hmongs, are a culture of refugee families that supported CIA efforts in Laos. Their culture embeds deep spirituality into its health care, by the doctors of the Merced County hospital. The notion that herbs were strictly to heal the spirit was of course a source of contention for the physicians of the hospital, though nurses might feel that the symbolic effect alone is worth seizing. In other words, whether the physicians ...
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.
In 1785, a Christ Child was said to have appeared. A shepherd boy from the village of Tayankani played with the child, but the child disappeared. The child was believed to have disappeared into a rock that was left with his imprint. This is the story behind the pilgrimage to the rock, but those of our community don’t pay much attention to it. Their purpose in the event is to ‘honor’ their supernatural beings. They pay homage to Rit’i (the snow), Taytakuna (Fathers), and the great Apus (Lord Mountains).
“The contents of Vodou rituals – from private healing consultations to public dances and possessions-performances- are composed from the lives of the particular people performing them. When I began to bring my own life to the system for healing, I began to understand more of what it meant for Haitians to do that (Brown, 134).”
He then states that man 's only hope is to change their unwanted characteristics with the help of various rituals and ceremonies. In order to perform these ceremonies a shrine which is present in every household is necessary. This leads one to believe that as individuals, we are going to make mistakes and have imperfections in life. However, through our beliefs, church, and faith; then we are able to get through or survive our circumstance. Miner later becomes more in depth in his thinking and reporting. He discussed various “rituals” performed daily by the Naciremas. An example is the use of shrine. Miner states, “The family enters the shrine room which I see as a bathroom. In the bathroom each member bows his head before the font or sinks and begins a rite of cleansing”. Shrine use can be interpreted as the daily routine of waking up, entering the bathroom and removing items from the medicine cabinet to wash face, and brush teeth. Miner continues using cliché’s throughout his article. In another part of the article, he describes “holy mouth-men” in my opinion, viewed as medical or witch doctors. A phrase used in the article, “Were it not for the rituals of the mouth, they believe that their teeth would fall out, their gums bleed, their jaws shrink, their friend 's dessert them and their lovers reject them.” Basically, he is referring to a dentist. Most of Nacirema culture makes it a routine/ritual to make sure a dentist is seen yearly to make sure their teeth are clean, cavity free, gingivitis free, etc. The Nacirema’s might take this for granted other cultures or (outsiders) may not have this opportunity and see it as a need. The few examples sighted would illustrate the vanity side of Nacirema’s in which so much is expected and taken for
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
The article “The Body Ritual among the Nacirema” gave me a different perspective of how humans look at the human body. I was very shocked and upset because of how much we think the human body is ugly. These people see the body as ugly dirty, and a thing that needs to be hidden and covered. They don’t only think the body is ugly but they think that they must continuously change their body image may it be their teeth breast, whatever it needs to be changed to be seen as prettier. I was able to make distinct connections with the article about some of the changes but I could wasn’t able to connect the painful rituals with body change. I love learning about different cultures and I’m usually not too harsh however, I thought they were much more abusive to their body and unappreciative of it. I could usually watch a video about a Malaysian rural tribe that put metal rings around their neck that makes their neck so thin and long that usually when they are removed their neck snaps however I thought that the Nacirema people’s rituals were worse than that. The Nacirema people practically go to medicine men and can sometimes end up dead because of the extreme changes their trying to do to their bodies and that is just considered to be a part of culture. I was also shocked that the Nacirema people would go to the temple the
In fact, Native American medicine men belief is firmly grounded in age-old traditions, legends and teachings. Healing and medical powers have existed since the very beginning of time according to Native American stories. Consequently they have handed down the tribe's antediluvian legends, which i...
A spiritual ritual would be performed while the ill received medicine. A spiritual ritual would be performed to rid the ill of bad spirits and cleanse the spirit. Native Americans believed that a person became ill when a bad spirit entered the body. It is the shaman’s job to try to purify the ill’s spirit. Every tribe across the nation has a shaman. A shaman or medicine man/woman would perform this ritual. A shaman uses the spiritual world to help heal the sick. Shaman were highly regarded as chiefs and tribal spiritual leaders. Shaman were often born into a family with many generations of shaman. Shamans who were not born into, they had visons that lead them to study medicine. Being the shaman was a full-time job. In return of their services to the tribe, the tribe would provide food, shelter, and any assistance needed to the shaman.
In this essay I will include the relation with anthropology and the disorder. The striking similarities between the form and content of normal ritual and the ritualistic behavior of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
Ethnocentrism and cultural relativism are two contrasting terms that are displayed by different people all over the world. Simply put, ethnocentrism is defined as “judging other groups from the perspective of one’s own cultural point of view.” Cultural relativism, on the other hand, is defined as “the view that all beliefs are equally valid and that truth itself is relative, depending on the situation, environment, and individual.” Each of these ideas has found its way into the minds of people worldwide. The difficult part is attempting to understand why an individual portrays one or the other. It is a question that anthropologists have been asking themselves for years.
While is a common conception that pre-modern societies are primitive compared to their modern counterpart, this is not often the case, theses societies have complex systems within their society especially within their spirituality and religion. It is this complexity that has allowed aspects of pre-modern societies to evolve and adapt into modern societies. Myths, rituals and sorcery have been terms to describe the activities of pre-modern societies, but these activities have also been found to exist within modern society as well. This essay will further discuss the connections between pre-modern and modern societies that has allowed for myths, rituals and sorcery to exist in the modern societies.