Horace Miner's "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema"

Have ya ever felt happy and u didnt know why?
haha, yeah that sounds strange and yes it might happen to u, and i assure you that's the best feeling ever ;)

Have ya ever tried to learn about others cultures besides yours?
Have ya ever heard of Horace Miner's "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema"?

"In Horace Miners article,'Body Ritual Among the Nacirema', he talks about a tribe and describes their odd behavior. He tells about how the tribe performs these strange daily rituals and how their peculiarity is extreme, but in fact he is actually speaking of Americans as a whole (Miner).
Miner uses this style of writing to more effectively prove his point: that Americans are ethnocentric.

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).

In this article, Miner gives a few hints that the Nairema are indeed Americans. The fact that Nacirema spelled backwards is American is a huge hint by itself. "

Comments

Robert said…
Sonjiala Carella has an interesting post on the miner article hereBloody Flag: Who Loves Paris in the Summer? >

She has a site on world culture www.thebloodyflag.com