Body Rituals Nacirema

In the article “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” by Horace Miner, he writes about a North American group known as the “Nacirema”, who were described by Professor Linton in the early twentieth century. In the article described, the “Nacirema” are a cultural group who seem to be obsessed with rituals they perform in regards to the human body on a day-to-day basis. These people believe that the human body is ugly and debilitating and are described to waste great portions of their days performing the daily rituals in order to keep their bodies in clean and appealing. The “Nacirema” people Miner describes are actually in reality regular modern day Americans. In “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema”, Miner writes about the extreme rituals that people perform in America. Although Horace Miner does not use the word America at all, someone reading the article can quickly understand the content and the examples that it reflects are everyday Americans. The word “Nacirema” is actually American spelled backwards. Miner takes daily processes for an average person and makes them sound bazar and extreme and calls them “rituals”. An example he talks about is the ritual we spend so much time to get ready in the morning. Horace Miner makes good points to the fact that Americans spend so much time caring about their appearance. Horace Miner describes the many obsessive rituals the “Nacirema” perform that have to do with health, hygiene, and anti-aging. Miner refers to dentists as “holy mouth men” and a bathroom as “shrines” for odd ritual practices. He depicts them as a vain group of people who are self-obsessed that even seem to be willing to subject themselves to pain to achieve what society sees as aesthetically appealing. Within the cultures shrines is a box built within the wall that contain “charms” and “magical potions”. In our society the box would be considered an average medicine cabinet within our bathrooms and the charms and magical potions within them can