Horace Miner's Body Ritual Among The Nacirema

In Horace Miner’s “Body ritual among the Nacirema.” Miner writes about the strange customs and rituals practiced amongst the Nacirema tribe. These rituals revolve mostly around the human body which is seen as “ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease” (Miner, 1). In order to treat their natural afflictions, the natives put themselves through a daily series of seemingly sadistic and brutal rituals that include visiting a holy-mouth man who ”opens the client's mouth and enlarges any holes which decay may have created in the teeth”(3) and “scraping  and lacerating the surface of the face with a  sharp instrument.”(3). Upon closer inspection, the reader soon realizes that the exotic Nacirema tribe that Miner describes is in fact our own culture (Nacirema is American spelt backwards) and that these bizarre rituals are daily actions that we ourselves take part in regularly.

One of the main points that Miner makes in “Body ritual among the Nacirema.” is that our belief system, daily rituals and our code of ethics correspond to our cultural setting.

What we accept as norms are only norms because they make sense within out society whereas they wouldn’t if they were placed into a different society. Unfamiliar rituals only make sense when you look at the society as a whole and not when you take them out of context. By forcing the reader to be introspective about their own rituals, Miner reminds us that while rituals from other cultures may seem strange to us, the rituals that we partake in would seem very strange to an outsider as well. Using a language that makes our rituals seem foreign to us: describing the act of brushing one’s teeth as “inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders”(2) and getting one’s hair dried in an old fashioned hair dryer as “bak[ing] their heads in small ovens”(3), Miner makes the familiar seem

unfamiliar.
According to Miner, looking at cultures objectively is a necessary part of making anthropological observation. By describing the Nacirema tribe as “a magic-ridden people”(4) and the doctors as “magical practitioners” (2), Miner attaches a supernatural meaning onto our rituals even though most people would not admit to being motivated by magic. Miner demonstrates that by projecting our own ethnocentric tendencies onto other cultures, we aren’t able to understand other cultures. By explaining the Nacirema’s ritual motivations as magical, instead of scientific, Miner shows the importance of looking at a culture as a whole and the danger of looking at things from our point of view instead of looking at them from within the framework of the society in question.
In conclusion, it is easy to judge the Nacirema tribe but through introspection Miner successfully reminds us that as anthropologists we must look at societies objectively and avoid comparing them to our own. Miner’s “The Body Ritual of the Nacirema” is a very significant article that introduces readers to the concept of cultural relativism and that we all have ethnocentric tendencies. The reader is enlightened to the importance of looking at a culture as a whole instead of taking their practices out on context and making judgements.