Oftentimes when learning about different cultures people tend to have a large Social imagination. People like to judge certain cultures about their beliefs and sometimes those people jump too much to a conclusion causing the culture to have a bad name for itself. In class this past week we talked about the Nacirema culture. Many of us thought this culture was strange and kind of revolting. However when we looked into this culture more we began to see that Nacirema was American spelled backward which opened up many different doors of confusion. Many of the different statements in the article sounded completely different almost like we were learning about tribes that were in the land before The United States existed. For instance, it talked about different potions that were set in shrines for the people to heal themselves with. However, the potions in the article symbolized medicine and the shrines were the bathrooms and cabinets we keep the medicine in. This shows that although the class thought the culture was strange it turned out we were judging our own culture at the same time. If the class did not use their social imagination many would have been left wondering about the “Nacirema” culture and never would have realized that the article was talking about Americans.
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Knowing what one is writing about, most people would agree, is one of the most important things about writing. Horace Miner has no idea what he is talking about. This may seem like a bold accusation, but evidence in his book, Body Rituals Among the Nacirema, points towards this man being a holier-than-thou fool. Body Ritual Among the Nacirema is an attempt to satirize the intricate “body rituals” that Americans have in their daily lives, with a strange focus on mocking oral hygiene. He calls science and medicine “magic” and ridicules the people for believing in it. The way this man mocks medicine is embarrassing, to say the least. Satire is supposed to ridicule expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, and oral hygiene and medicine is not exactly stupid practice, let alone vice.
Some people may say that magic is just science that we do not understand yet. This statement trivializes exactly how much study and factual evidence goes into science and medicine, and the way that Miner mocks the Nacirema’s use of “magic” in their rituals is laughable. He laughs at the fact that the Nacirema believe that “their teeth would fall out, their gums bleed” (Miner). Of course, the Nacirema think that; it is true. He insinuates that they are stupid for believing that their dentists, he refers to them as holy-mouth-men, help keep their teeth healthy and prevent tooth decay.
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Informative Essay about Body Ritual among the Nacirema.
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