Co, Camille Ira

1411457
Miss Josefina Tondo
INTHROP
September 19, 2016
The Body Ritual among the Nacirema is an article written by Horace Miner for the
journal American Anthropologists in 1956. There, he writes about the culture of a North
American group called the Naciremans how they are very obsessed with perfecting their
physical appearance that they perform certain private rituals everyday of their lives.
According to Miner, the people of Nacirema have a fundamental belief that the human
body is ugly and weak, and so to counter this belief the people have made shrines in their homes
to perform their everyday ritual of obsessively treating their vanity. These shrines are prominent
in the homes of the families of Nacirema, and in their shrines is a chest or box attached to the
wall containing charms used for their rituals. Beneath the charm-box is a font where the
Naciremans would bow down and wash themselves with holy water, each member of the
family going one after the other.
Mentioned are only some of the rituals Naciremans do in the shrine with their obsessions
with vanity. Other rituals include scraping and lacerating the face with a sharp object for men
and baking their head for an hour for the women. These obsessive acts that seem masochistic
has led then to the theory that it gave other Naciremans the ability to develop sadistic
specializations. Such specialization include the holy-mouth-men whom they visit once or twice a
year. These holy-mouth-men place magical materials in the decayed teeth of the people in the
fear of the teeth falling out or being rejected by their loved ones.

By this point in the article I have noticed something different about it, and so before
reading further I Googled what the article was about. Upon finding out that what Miner wrote
was a satirical article of the American culture (which is actually Nacirema backwards), I re-read
everything from the top again and found myself decoding what some terms meant like how
the shrines were actually bathrooms and that was why Nacirema people did their rituals there
privately and the holy-mouth-men were dentists.
With the knowledge that this article was written in a satirical manner about modern
American culture and how they are obsessed with attaining the perfect image, I read further
into the article. It dawned on me that the author was also targeting the ridiculous system of
hospitals (which in the article was spelled backwards called as latipso) and the subtle message
that you need to be rich just that you could be properly medicated (having to give substantial
gifts to be administered and another just to be released).
After reading the entire article, I found it to be very entertaining and terrifyingly real at
the same time. It entertained me that Miner was able to write about American cultures obsession
with vanity without directly naming names and pointing fingers. Keeping in mind that the article
was made more than have a century ago, it seemed that what he wrote in an exaggerated manner
is actually a bit understated in our modern times. It baffles me that half a century ago, and even
more so now, people have been obsessed with how their look like, going through dieting
programs or weight gain programs, makeovers, surgery and whatnot when really, all that
matters is our own morality.