Essay On Nacirema Tribe

After realizing “Nacirema” is American spelled backwards, it becomes evident that Miner is criticizing American culture. He describes the “tribes” behavior with a focus on changing personal appearance and magic-based rituals. Everybody goes to the “Latipso” to see “medicine-men” when they are sick and often are given potions or end up dead. This is like a looking glass into American culture. In our culture, there is a huge focus on physical features, but we don’t pray to fix it. Instead we take vitamins, apply make up, shave and wear nice clothes. Oftentimes when we are sick, hospital visits result in doctors writing prescriptions or performing surgery. We usually don’t know what the pills do for us, but are told it will correct the ailment and invest a lot of trust into the doctors no matter what. The Nacirema tribe is large, yet no one knows there exact origin. They believe they are ugly and need to devote much time and resources on changing their looks. They hide thier body and never show it off. If people are fat they want to be skinny and vice-versa. It seems they will never be happy. Everyday they pray to
With this article, Miner attemped to make American culture inferior and criticized it by pointing out what is wrong with our actions. By making it seem like a native tribe, he removed American bias and was successful in bringing attention to the overlooked notion of 1950’s American culture. Not many people realized that there was a great focus on appearance, but the article gives us “access to a world beyond our own immediate sphere, where we can discover radically different ways of…interepreting reality” (Ferris and Stein 13). The Nacirema is a great use of sociological imagination and gives insight on the focus of