Nacirema When I read Body Rituals Among the Nacirema by Horace Miner the first time‚ I couldn’t imagine how a culture could behave this way and live their daily lives following these rituals. They believed that their bodies were ugly and its natural tendency was to debility and disease. They devoted much of their time trying to prevent these characteristics After observing the Nacirema customs‚ I found it to be crazy that they had shrines with a box or chest built into the wall full of magic
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Body Ritual among the Nacirema” tells the story of the “unusual aspect” lifestyle and the rituals of the Americans. Miner uses a unique approach to describe not Nacirema but the Americans by using an outsider’s view‚ a person who does not understand American’s lifestyle. Nacirema is American spelled backwards Miner writes about is every household having a “shrine room” and those individuals with more power contain more than one. He remarks that the shrines rituals ‘are not with family but are
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Body Ritual in Nacirema When I started reading Miner’s “Body Rituals among the Nacirema” I wasn’t really ‘reading’ it. By the end of the first page‚ it “hit me” and I had to start reading it over again. Realizing the essay was speaking of Americans gave me a whole different perspective. I found some of it quite amusing as well as enlightening. My feeling is that the author intended the reader to see our own ethnocentrism and question our own acts towards others with whom we are not familiar
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Cultures‚ Belief and Behaviors. In review of the article by Horace Miners “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” I would evaluate this culture’s belief and behaviors provides a direct evident that the attitudes or characteristics of human body has an extensive influence on variety of institutions in Nasiriya society. Throughout the reading‚ he provides the reader an understanding perspective of the American rituals from a different point of view. The key word that is emphasized is the word ritual and
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In Nacirema‚ Horace Miner uses satire and wordplay to teach us how easy it is to judge cultures that we don’t know much about. Miner is sneakily describing American culture‚ their entire way of life including both material and symbolic elements‚ the whole time77. Miner is trying to teach us that ethnocentrism‚ using your own culture as a standard to evaluate another‚ leads to the belief that other cultures are inferior78. Instead‚ we should be using cultural relativism‚ understanding other cultures
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Nacirema‚ American spelled backward‚ is a satire paper attempting to force Americans to evaluate their culture and look at it in a different way. By using words that are obscure‚ atypical and abnormal to describe very common American practices‚ the paper offers a strange way of defining our culture. One instance in the paper was how Americans hold importance in oral hygiene and use tooth brushes and tooth paste to brush our teeth daily. The author describes this as a “mouth-rite” and a “revolting”
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“Body Ritual Among The Nacirema” As I started to read “Body Ritual Among The Nacirema” by Horace Miner I was really confused. You told us that the homework was to write what was the real true meaning of this reading but I had to reread the pages over and over to find the true meaning to the reading that Horace Miner was talking about. It is a culture named Nacirema and that no one really know much about this culture. And also that they come from the east. He talks about the rituals they have
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Nacirema and Its Sociological Effects Rachael L. Smith SOCI 111 In Horace Miner’s “Body Ritual among the Nacirema‚” the reader is introduced to an interesting group called the Nacirema‚ whose culture is then described and dissected in very tribal and primitive terms. At first‚ it is unclear as to where or how this culture exists under the guidelines and practices and beliefs its society maintains; but‚ the reader soon discovers‚ with contextual clues and a bit of pondering‚ that
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The author’s purpose in writing this article was not to show the “Nacirema” as an example of how extreme human behavior can become‚ but how an outside perspective can affect your perception of an alien culture. If one were to look at the “Nacirema’s” cultural behaviors regarding physical appearance and health without any insight or knowledge of the specific beliefs or values of that culture‚ they might seem bizarre and even incomprehensible. By showing behaviors and “rituals” performed by this unknown
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point has‚ in fact‚ been expressed with respect to clan organization by Murdock (1949: 71).[2] In this light‚ the magical beliefs and practices of the Nacirema present such unusual aspects that it seems desirable to describe them as an example of the extremes to which human behavior can go. Professor Linton [3] first brought the ritual of the Nacirema to the attention of anthropologists twenty years ago (1936: 326)‚ but the culture of this people is still very poorly understood. They are a North American
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