Body Rituals Among the Nacirema

“Body Rituals Among the Nacirema” is quite a hard passage to understand. It talks about exotic cultures of a tribe called Nacirema, and the Nacirema seem to have traditions which are not quite understandable. They have cultures such as having the ritual ablution of the mouth of children, or men scrubbing their faces with metals. This looks very strange and very barbaric.

N-A-C-I-R-E-M-A

A-M-E-R-I-C-A-N

This is what the real Nacirema tribe is.

At first looking into the short essay “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema”, the text is filled with full of new words and some customs which are quite difficult to understand. Almost no one would ever look at the Nacirema like if it were a tribe with highly developed culture. We try to view everything in a “so American” way. It is written 1956, also going through great industrial development, so it might give some impression to the readers that some customs have changed compared to the past.

It first was very astonishing that the Nacirema is the American spelled backwards. Looking at the cultures written in backwards, it looked very barbaric. However, after knowing that the shrines symbolize the bathrooms and the medicine men stands for the doctors, it looked somewhat different. It shows us the prejudice that we have toward the new cultures, especially the ones which are small tribes.

Prejudice always leads us to thinking in a wrong way that our culture is better than the others. However, we are now in the era of globalization. The Nacirema was written in 1956, but now we are in 2013, which means that we need to have more objective view toward other cultures than 50 years ago.

We think we are living in such a highly developed culture by going to hair salons and laying our heads in under a hot machine to perm or dye our hair. However, from others’ perspective, it might look like if we are baking our heads. Men shaving can also be seen as being sadistic since in other words, it is same as rubbing knife pieces onto their skin. What will happen if the aliens up there look at the earth? I think they will think us just as what Horace Miner wrote.

If we don’t know about something, we normally end up in a thought that the culture is inferior. However, what we just thought as another inferior tradition was ours. Even though some details differ since it was written in 1956, still, it makes the readers to be astonished and disappointed at themselves.

So, what we should do now, is to not to end up of in this Nacirema way of thinking. We should rather stay in evitcejbo point of view and try to dnatsrednu.