Body Ritual Among The Nacirema Summary

The first thing I noticed about the article, Body Ritual Among the Nacirema by Horace Miner is that Nacirema is American spelled backwards. That caught my attention right away and I thought to myself how interesting. Then as I started reading further into the article, I realized that the Nacirema people are us. What I found most interesting about the Nacirema people is how obsessed and focused we are on our health and body. There is always a fad diet that guarantees amazing results or a new cross fit workout that will mold our body like those on American Ninja Warrior. I was bothered by the statement that said “the fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease” (McCutheon, 1). After I read this sentence
Then I thought about back in the day when women went to the beauty salons and they would sit in the retro hair dryers. Nowadays women just sit around and wait for their hair to dry or they use handheld blow dryers. Personally when I get my hair done, it usually takes me around three hours so for the women to sit for an hour is not so uncommon. The rituals/behaviors that I am familiar with in my own culture are visiting the doctor for prescriptions, going to the dentist, and going to the hospital for emergency or medical procedures. The difference between the Nacirema culture compared to my culture is that in the Colombian culture we do not believe in the “listener” (McCutheon, 4). Our culture thinks of going to a psychiatrist as a sign of weakness and is not socially acceptable. I remember a particular situation when as a teenager my mother took me to our church priest. Rather than going to a psychiatrist to talk about our feelings, culturally we believe that a priest is better suited to solve our