Body Ritual Among The Nacirema Summary

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In his article “Body Ritual among the Nacirema,” the author, Horance Miner, tells us about a North American tribe living in the territory between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tarahumare of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles. The Nacirema has shown to truly be a magic-ridden culture. It is hard to understand how they have managed to exist this long under the burdens, which they impose on themselves everyday. The Nacirema must follow such exotic rituals that we are not used to experiencing and anyone who encounters this will often have the same opinion as myself In this paper I will be discussing why the rituals that the Nacirema perform daily appalled me. All cultures are completely different and I can understand that but it doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with what every culture does. “The Nacirema have an almost…show more content…
The Nacirema believe the mouth to be very sacred but the next ritual I’m going to tell you about some people have called revolting. “It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures,” just like the article say I was completely disgusted to hear about this. I don’t understand how someone could do this to themselves. But to be honest that doesn’t sound nearly as bad as the mouth-rite. The holy mouth man is anything but holy in my eyes. I mean seriously how does one go about respecting what that man does to people. To think they actually go back to him because they feel it’s working. While I was reading about what he does I was most disturbed by this “If there are no naturally occurring holes in the teeth, large sections of one or more teeth are gouged out so that the supernatural substance can be applied.” The amount of pain these people put themselves through on purpose is just crazy to
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  • Body Ritual Among The Nacirema Summary

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    paper by Horace Miner “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” is considered one of the most popular articles in social sciences. It even has its own page on Wikipedia, which increases its popularity among not only anthropologists and scholars, but also ordinary people. There are certainly some reasons why this article became so illustrious, and the major ones are the direction of satire, language choice and academic validity. Undoubtedly, the author wrote “Body rituals among Nacirema” in a satiric way in

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