Body Rituals

In the story, “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema”, by Horace Miner he talks about the Nacirema tribe and describes the body rituals that their society does on a regular basis that they view as the norm in their society and culture. While reading about these strange and unusual rituals, one can’t help but think that what these people are doing is totally and completely ridiculous. Ethnocentrism comes over and judgment takes place, but in reality some could view our American culture as just and crazy and strange.

With every group of people comes their culture, every group has behaviors and strategies within their society that they practice and that is their norm. To understand a cultures norm, you must first understand why they do the things that they do. In “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema”, Miner writes about the extreme rituals that people do in America. It brings out the idea that what they are doing is only to improve the looks which are actually unnecessary. Although the writer does not use the word America at all, we can tell from the content and the examples that it is reflecting the Americans. Actually, if the word “Nacirema” in the title reverses, it is America. He uses some events and makes them sound crazy and extreme that may be trivial and happen in our every day lives to describe them as “rituals”. For example, he talks about the ritual that we spend so much time to get ready in the morning. I agree that he makes a good argument to the American about always do things to pretend and only care about the looks.

The author makes use of countless comparisons to primitive native culture to explain the obsession with health, hygiene, and anti-aging. Miner refers to dentists as holy mouth men and bathrooms as shrines for odd ritual practices. His language is clearly satirical and creates the notion of the "Nacirema" as vain and self obsessed. Also, they seem to be a masochistic society built around willingly subjecting themselves to pain and torture. The sociological standpoint is that culture is based on rituals and that each culture defines its reality and acceptable behavior and chooses its authorities by rituals. These rituals help us discover our knowledge because it makes the rituals the authority and those who follow it the ones that know the truth as our society defines it. Sociologists define rituals as what you do on a regular basis, repeated over time; that which binds people together; shared beliefs; assigned roles; loyalty. Structural-functional sociologist Emile Durkheim theorized that rituals support social order and roles and shared sets of values holds people together. Since rituals enforce these roles and values, they create social solidarity.

Sociology is not the only view from which to view rituals. However, the point is that rituals hold together a society…not all societies. Rituals are part of what makes a society; therefore, in order to understand someone of a different sociological background, one must think outside the box that is America’s way of viewing things. In conclusion, we must mention certain people and their practices which have their base in their native ways but which depend upon their view to the natural body and its functions. There are ritual fasts to make fat people thin and ceremonial feasts to make thin people fat. Still other rites are used to make women's breasts larger if they are small, and smaller if they are large. General dissatisfaction with breast shape is symbolized in the fact that the ideal form is virtually outside the range of human variation. A few women afflicted with almost inhuman hyper-mamrnary development are so idolized that they make a handsome living by simply going from village to village and permitting the natives to stare at them for a fee.