Body Ritual Among The Nacirema Summary

What is the Nacirema?
The reading, “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema”, shows the strange and torturous culture traits of the Nacirema of North America. This people are extremely barbaric in their practices, and often torture themselves just to look good. In our modern society, it seems nearly impossible to us to understand, or even partake in these horrific actions. But there is something hidden within the Nacirema culture that would shock the modern American world.
The Nacirema is a tribe that lives in North America, whose founder crossed a river and cut down a cherry tree for the spirit of truth. They are obsessed with their body, and feel they are inherently ugly and prone to disease. To help prevent this, they have a sacred box where they

take magic charms from, given to them by a medicine man and herbalists. In the same private, sacred room, they splash themselves with hole water of different temperatures, and scrub their teeth with hog’s hair. Once a year, they go to a magic mouth man, who pokes and prods their teeth and gums to prevent decay, while their teeth decay around them. When they get deathly sick, they go to a latipso, where they are defiled and tortured, and do not even have a full chance of leaving cured, or even alive. All of these things require a gift, often before and after. This sounds terrible right, well I really want you to look at the word Nacirema.
That’s right, Nacirema is American backwards.

The whole reading describes the American culture complex of Americans. A culture complex is a collection of culture traits in a society. Our American culture complex is our obsession with looking good. This is created by our culture traits of dental hygiene, medicine obsession, and often over reliance of doctors. We think there is nothing wrong with the way we leave and treat our bodies, but we really are not making them better. We subject ourselves to almost torturous treatments to look good, and we will still rot away. We even pay people to perform these tortures on us. Why do we allow this? Our own ethnocentrism lets us believe that us as Americans cannot do anything wrong. So, we do not see these things are torturous, because they have been passed from generation to generation to be seen as normal. It takes some sociologist and archeologist to come in and spell American backwards and change names like medicine cabinet to sacred box, or teeth fillings to magic inserts, for us to see the true nature of our own torture. The authors of this simple little research article are trying to show us that we cannot just act like what we are doing is not harming us as much as it is hurting us. We have to understand that our actions have consequences, and that we need to understand we cannot make our bodies, or even ourselves as wholes,

perfect.
So, should we as Americans change our lifestyles because of this shocking articles. The answer is different than you would think. This article, I feel, is just here to help us remember that we are not perfect, and to try and make ourselves perfect is idiotic and harmful. Americans are so obsessed with their look, that we have ingrained these terrible ideals into our own culture complex. Americans need to realize that we are harming ourselves my mindlessly taking medication, or putting randomness into your mouths, just as much as we are helping ourselves. So what are you guilty of doing American?