Body Ritual

Fatih Elmali
Body Ritual and Witchcraft Many native males and females from a highly developed culture in Nacirema engage in a body ritual almost daily, which involves from leaving their homes at various times in the morning or afternoon and engaging in activities that strain the body as well as the mind. This ritual usually encompasses males and females of ages 18 and older. In this strange place, the ritual is a requirement to keep their bodies as well as their families’ bodies functioning. Since human body is prone to malnutrition if not given the necessary substances, this body ritual is carried out to keep the body healthy and used to prevent such cases from happening. This ritual is something that cannot be devised just by anyone. There are certain requirements to initiate a body ritual and to allow males and females perform that ritual. That’s why certain people, called owners, create certain places to carry out the body ritual, given the males and females performing the ritual have the proper qualifications. Sometimes the ritual creators don’t like the way their rituals are being carried out and send away the person with improper qualifications for performing their body rituals. The person driven away from performing his daily body ritual must find another place as quickly as possible to perform a body ritual of either the same or different kind in order to keep his body functioning. Although there are many types of body rituals, the one I had the chance of observing was a type of body ritual that mainly focused on the body rather than the mind. This ritual starts off with contracting with the ritual creator and his qualifications for performing this ritual checked. Afterwards, the person is given a chance to start the body ritual. This ritual involved pushing the body to its limits. A big part of this ritual was enacting monuments of extreme size. Therefore, in order to fully carry out this body ritual successfully, a group of people, rather than a single person, was required to completing the ritual on time. This body ritual that requires extensive body movements can be performed anywhere given the opportunity. After certain long hours of performing the body ritual, the person performing must return home and prepare themselves for tomorrow’s body ritual by performing either another type of body ritual that requires the use of body cleaning as well as food ritual. The ritual of body cleansing includes the use of an item constructed using witchcraft. The ingredients used for the body cleansing charm are hard to come by for regular people and require a high level of knowledge in order to mix the ingredients correctly and create the charm without problems, since error prone charm may result in bringing harm to the body during cleansing. The food ritual is something that the individual person can perform themselves without consulting a person with expertise. The food ritual also requires certain ingredients, which can be acquired from a specific place solely built for such rituals. Later, the ritual takes place by combining and using secret family techniques to carry out the ritual. Thick description is a way of understanding a culture from the behaviors of the humans living in that culture. However, thick description does not just explain human behavior. It also explains the content of that behavior, such as the meaning of human behavior associated with their activities or social interactions, which becomes meaningful to an outsider observing them. My description qualifies as a thick description because I focus on explaining the human behavior involved in a specific body ritual that I observed and I also explained the content of that behavior, meaning why it was necessary to carry out that body ritual, which is to keep their bodies functioning properly. This description also gives meaningful insights to an outsider because the human behavior associated with the ritual becomes meaningful since it is performed to keep on living.