Critical Analysis of the Article Body Ritual among the Nacirema

I think everyone can agree that many other cultures study in America. The, “target population for the study included 1,140 international students (567 undergraduate and 573 graduate) who were pursuing degrees at a university with an enrollment of approximately 24,000, with international students accounting for about 6.4%. International students were defined as individuals born outside of the United States, who came to the United States to pursue higher education (Urban and Palmer, 2016). Some may question why students want to study in American, but I think people have to first attempt to understand their point of view. Miner (1965) tries to help us better understand an outsider perspective in his article Body Ritual among the Nacirema. The number of students studying in the United States is continuously increasing. It keeps increasing because many students believe that the educational system is set up for success. Urban and Palmer (2016) found that, “multiple studies report that international students encounter a variety of challenges caused by cultural, linguistic, social, and educational differences” (Crockett and Hays, 2011; Olivas & Li, 2006). International students face many obstacles, which makes them believe that the U.S. doesn’t support them sometimes. For instance, international students have a hard time because of the language barrier, debt, and discrimination. In order, for them to get a higher education they must experience a lot of challenges, which leads to feeling like an outsider. In the article Body Ritual among the Nacirema, Miner (1965) uses unique language to tell a story about the Nacirema people and their traditions and practices. After reading the article I realized that Nacirema are Americas. The point of the article is try and help the readers understand that even though people are different they’re are all somehow the same. Different cultures ways of life are very similar to our ways of life. The, “intensity of the problems related to cultural adjustment of international students depend on a variety of factors, such as students' English language ability, the perception of social acceptance, the length of time in the host country, students' race and ethnicity, and their experiences with discrimination” (Constantine, Okazaki, & Utsey, 2004; Yeh & Inose, 2003). There are many challenges that international students face till this very day. When they experience those challenges doesn’t make fitting in any easier for them. People from all over seek education in American. International student would rather deal with other international students because it’s a lot harder to make friends with non-international students. In this section, I’m going to expand on the reason why boys perform worse than girls in school. Also, I will shed light on a specific study that was done by Jonsson. The article written by Jonsson he talks about males failing in school, but they’re not succeeding in school because they strongly believe school is more feminine. For males to become more successful in education they must be willing to remove that fixed mindset that school is only for females. Jonsson also sheds light on the gender differences between males and females. Within the article the author writes about boys scoring lower than girls in Sweden. But for people to understand the “why” behind it we have to take an emic perspective. Jonsson stated that, “According to the idea of an anti-school culture, to make a serious effort to do well at school is simply not consistent with performing “cool” or other normative forms of masculinities” (Jonsson, 2014). Because school is recognized as a girly place, the boys don’t feel like they belong in the actual education system. Of the many reasons, boys are failing at school because they’re not able to behave as “rowdy boys”. In addition, boys perform bad in school because its not “cool” to get good grades. However, girls on the other hand put in the actual effort and be “cool” simply because of the nature of our schools today. Within Jonsson’s article he incorporates data, “taken from two ethnographic studies in two Secondary schools; both of them are situated in multi- ethic suburbs of the Swedish capital Stock-holm” (Jonosson, 2014). This experiment was conducted by an individual who followed students around during school and took notes. According to the study, the boys intentionally didn’t follow the rules. It was supposed to make them cool, and the girls wanted absolutely no parts in the foolishness. A few of the male student’s interviews were disturbing. Certain comments made by the boys were alarming. The boys didn’t care to answer any of the teacher’s question, some of their responses were “cool guy” response.