"Body Ritual Among the Nacirema"(link for text summary) is a sarcastic account of the none-existing
"Nacirema" tribe which is actually American culture (Nacirema in
reverse is American). Miner uses this satire to say a few things about the
nature of ethnological work (and American culture).
In
Miner's article the special domestic shrines the Nacirema use are bathrooms.
The special charm-box is the medicine cabinet. Medicine men are obviously
doctors while holy mouth men are dentists. The latipso is a hospital and
the listener is a psychologist. Finally, the men scraping their face are
shaving while the women baking their heads are putting them in salon hair
dryers.
The
meaning of Miner's "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" is that if we
distance ourselves and our point of view, a culture will always look peculiar
to us. On the other hand, looked at from within, even the strangest customs and
practices might seem completely reasonable and justifiable. "Body Ritual Among
the Nacirema" is important because it demonstrates the problem of
representation in ethnography. The purpose of article is to raise the question
of how can we study a different culture from the outside and how can we
understand our own culture from within. The article thus demonstrates the topic
of cultural relativism, arguing that there is no one objective viewpoint from
which to assess cultures, and that every culture should be understood and
interpreted from the native's point of view.
Following
Miner's article we can ask ourselves, as anthropologists, how should we
approach the study of a particular society. If we are to distance ourselves and
look at it as if we were aliens (like Miner does in regards to the Nacirema) we
might gain one perspective that notices the hidden obvious and asks questions
only someone from the outside can ask (see for example Alfred Schuzt's "The
Stranger"). On the other hand, if we don't have the inner context of a
society we might fail to understand the meaning of different things we see in
it.
Many
American will be insulted by Miner's account of them, and will justly claim
that he fails to account for many factors in what he describes. On the other
hand, an American reading "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" can gain a
new interesting understanding about body culture in American society and see
banal everyday practices in a new light.
see also: The Nacirema Culture explained
see also: The Nacirema Culture explained
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