Nacirema Tribe Research Paper

The Nacirema tribe has many strange rituals in regards to the cleanliness or beauty of the body. They believe the human body is ugly and debilitating. Everything they do is in response to that thought process. They spend a large portion of their day in rituals to cleanse their body. They go to medicine men or witch doctors in order to perfect their body. One such horrific ritual is that they go to a medicine man that performs the decorative body rite.
The Decorative Body Rite
The Decorative body rite consists of women going to the medicine man and stripping down naked which is very shocking to the Nacirema people. They are extreme in the covering of the body, but in this ritual, they realize they must be naked in order for the process to be performed. The medicine doctors put war paint on the body parts that the women have come to have
There are many medicine men that can perform these rituals, but some of the medicine men are perceived as more gifted then others, almost godlike in their abilities. These medicine doctors can only be afforded by a smaller majority of the women. Those women are often the wives of other medicine men in the tribe or other high ranking members of the tribe. These men often require their wives to have many rituals performed as it makes the status of the man even higher. The medicine men that perform these rituals have an extremely high ranking in the tribe as they often have the best shrines, more than one. They live in the nicest homes made of stone instead of wood. Many women hope by undergoing these torturous rituals, they will be able to become one of the wives of the medicine man or another important man in their tribe. The Nacirema women truly feel that their whole life will change, that it will be immeasurably better with one or more of the Decorative Body Rituals