

Body Ritual Among the Nacirema (1956) [pdf] - vkb
http://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Miner-1956-BodyRitualAmongTheNacirema.pdf

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daveloyall
My mother brought a photocopy of this home for me from community college back
in ... Probably around 1996 or sixth grade.

It was illuminating. I think one of her long-term goals was to inoculate me
against advertising. I guess she more or less succeeded.

~~~
hellameta
I know you said "more or less" and I know I'm nitpicking - but the only way to
actually inoculate against advertising is to be dead :)

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mikeash
The Sacred Rac is another bit of great reading along these lines:
[http://www.abstractconcreteworks.com/essays/teaching/Composi...](http://www.abstractconcreteworks.com/essays/teaching/Composition-111/70-c-sacred-
rac.html)

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tantalor
I always thought of this as an excellent satire of anthropology rather than a
criticism of culture.

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Unpopular_here
What is your particular criticism of Anthropology as a whole? The point of the
article is to express the idea of 'making the familiar strange' or viewing
things 'through the looking glass.' If you propose satire because the
description sounds too colorful or too foreign to how you would describe it,
you have missed the point of taking another's perspective.

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tantalor
I gather a bathroom might look like a shrine to the unfamiliar anthropologist,
but a bathroom is a bathroom, and the activities therein are not rituals. It's
an indefensible and incorrect conclusion.

Words like shrine, ritual, etc. have specific meanings which the author
skillfully distorts to make the point, and I take it well, but it also casts
doubt on anthropology in general when those words can be so easily misused.

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brenschluss
> but a bathroom is a bathroom, and the activities therein are not rituals.

Why not? It's only because you bring your own bias of what a ritual is that
you don't view bathroom rituals as a ritual. Either that, or you're so steeped
in bathroom culture that you fail to understand it as a ritual.

It's as if I said: "A wheel is just a circular object, a shape. It's an
indefensible and incorrect conclusion to say that it is a technology."

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thomble
If you enjoyed this, check out David Macauley's 'The Motel of the Mysteries'.
This illustrated book describes the interpretation of a motel as excavated by
archaeologists in the year 4022: [http://www.amazon.com/Motel-Mysteries-David-
Macaulay/dp/0395...](http://www.amazon.com/Motel-Mysteries-David-
Macaulay/dp/0395284252)

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vkb
What I also thought was interesting as I was reading it (surprisingly my first
time being exposed to this piece) was how strange the rituals described
sounded, even though it was supposed to be a lighthearted parody of ordinary
life. For example, "When pregnant, women dress so as to hide their condition."
A quote comes to mind: "The past is a foreign country: they do things
differently there."

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lackbeard
I remember a social studies teacher reading this to my class in high school,
and thinking the language was ostentatious but it all sounded pretty normal
(except the stuff about the dentist... and now that I re-read it, I don't
remember what I thought seemed wrong about it.)

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tbrownaw
His informant on the secrets of the family shrine is clearly from a perilously
lax sect.

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jowiar
This was the first thing we read in freshman World Cultures class in high
school -- the context was to make us aware of our own ethnocentric bias when
studying "other" cultures.

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smithkl42
There was a point in my life when reading something like this, I would have
thought, "Silly Americans." Now I think, "Silly anthropologists."

~~~
hosh
This story was introduced to me in high school to illustrate historiography,
so I get what you mean.

