Body Ritual Among The Nacirema Rhetorical Analysis

Horace Minor applied satire in his article “Body Ritual among the Nacirema.” to the culture of the American people. Several ways in which “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” relate to the core concepts of sociology are through the use of sociological imagination, ethnocentrism and cultural relativism. The American culture is described by Minor in a very unique and humorous way. The author uses satire to examine the rituals that are every day in American culture. The reader thinks at the beginning of the article that they are reading about some uncivilized tribe of people but soon realized that the “rituals” that are being performed are just everyday events that take place in every American household.

In this article, Miner takes the role of an outsider and judges the Nacirema just as we judge other cultures. Miner does an exceptional job of wording things in such a way that we don’t even recognize our own culture. Miner wants us to realize that when someone, such as an anthropologist describes another culture, we can interpret that into being abnormal but in actuality, it is, by all means, very normal.

Horace Miner’s essay, “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema”, focused on rituals among the people of the “Nacirema” tribe (or the American people). The first main idea of the essay is that all people of this group spend most of their time and earnings on “ritual activity” which targets improving the human body. Leading to the second main idea of the essay which asserts that a fundamental belief among these people is that the human body is “ugly”. The final and overall main idea of the reading is obsession over self-image has caused these people more stress than necessary.

We have always learned about the history and it always has to do with men. The role they had and what they contribute to the society. However, this is not only a man’s world but also a woman’s. Women’s contributions are equally important for the development of the society. Similarly, in the book assigned Oglala Women Myth, Ritual and Reality by Marla N. Powers, demonstrates the life of women from a Lakota tribe and what their gender role contributes to the tribe and to their families and religions. Furthermore, Power tries to educate her reader about the gender and diversity of world 's religion through her book.

If you do not know that Miner’s essay is a satire, the entire thing sounds ridiculous, but once understood, the seemingly foolish descriptions of “body rituals” performed by these people called the Nacerima are found to be activities the reader likely partakes in regularly. True to the style

While the Nacimera tribe has not evolved drastically in terms of their obsession with the human body, their idea of entertainment has shifted. Their shrines have evolved from ones dedicated to body rituals to ones dedicated to witnessing the misfortune of others. The Nacimera now profit from exploiting the mistakes of other members of their tribe. As the number of young women that have children of their own rose, the leaders of the Nacimera tribe realized that it could be an opportunity to showcase the wrongdoings of others in an attempt to discourage other members of the tribe from doing the same.

A woman’s role in society has been continuously put to question throughout history, a dispute still present to this day. During the rise of Islamic faith and Middle Ages, strong representations of pro-femininity, wit and power were arising in literary works in effort to create a new image of womanliness, before faintly present in historical works. Through bias interpretation, women formally known as unskilled and lacking purposeful attributes to society besides baring children and servicing to their husbands were glorified for their true abilities in legendary works such as, The Arabian Nights, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, and The Book of the City of Ladies. The primary argument of woman’s inferiority towards men in society can be linked to religion,

Gillian Clark’s book on, Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Lifestyles is a patchwork constructed from the legal and medical texts of the era. Clark makes it abundantly clear; that this book is like a kaleidoscope of the somewhat colorful and comical limited written knowledge of women of the period. In most cases the history was recorded by the biased slant of the male-dominated society. Clark points out in her introduction,

At first glance, you might think that authors living and writing on topics existing over 150 years apart would be so different with no chance of offering any common message. Each author lived in distinct time periods with different writing styles. Each shared different religious backgrounds and wrote for their own reasons. One had to hunt for every scrap of food, while the other was able to purchase it at the local store. The motivations, habits, and daily obstacles would be entirely foreign to the other had they ever had the opportunity to meet. Despite the separation in time, Mary Rowlandson and Herman Melville shared similar experiences in witnessing two cultures attempt to mix and live together in the same space. While the New World offered an abundance of social and financial potential it simultaneously fostered negative traits of human nature. Giving an account of the horrendous acts committed by both sides, history provides a third party telling of confrontations between American Indians with white settlers. Without a doubt, slavery caused untold controversy, but history does so again with cold facts, names, and dates. Through their writing, Rowlandson and Melville provide invaluable

Notions of beauty changed many times in the history. In blessed times of the Renaissance, an ideal of beauty was considered women in the body. Artists with pleasure immortalize those amusing paunchy women to the envy of starving representatives of the beautiful sex of our days. Today, women look at these paintings and jealously sigh, "What kind of wonderful times were." The standard of beauty and femininity 90-60-90 proportion transforms women's life into a hell. By itself, the struggle for the perfect body as a whole is good, but some girls and women start to go to extremes and bring themselves to dangerous conditions.

All countries and cultures have their own ideology or standards of what makes a person beautiful. In a National Geographic video entitled, “Teeth Chiseling” an Indonesian tribe believes that a woman will be able to obtain more beauty if her teeth are chiseled into sharp points. Although this body modification may appear to be extreme, it is important to understand the philosophy that has allowed this tradition to manifest and endure over the years. The Indonesian tribe believes that if a soul is not pleased with the body, it inhabits, the spirit will leave causing the person to die (NG). As a result, in order to prevent the spirit from leaving, people of the tribe will usually endure several body modifications. Although, teeth chiseling appears

In an essay written by Horace Miner, "Body Rituals among the Nacrima" Miner observes a culture through an outsider 's perspective. Miner, an anthropologist, studies the behavior and cultural development of the Nacrima. His distant perspective can be seen when he describes the rituals in which the people take part in as a "…. rite [involving] a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting." The culture he speaks of is that of the Americans and Miner strategically uses word play to disguise this, fooling the reader into believing that the essay depicts an older, less advanced culture. He uses this distance to his advantage to force the reader to perceive the world we live in differently; One that is ritualistic and practices magic in order to sustain survival. For example, Miner states, the "witch doctor has the power to exorcise the devils that lodge in the heads of people who have been bewitched" when

Disciplinary body practices is defined as the everyday body maitenance whether it be shaving, dieting, makeup, etc based on societal ideals of whats considered "beautiful". Even though both men and women can fall into this practice it's more common in the lives of women. Women tend to be critized harshly and treated differently based on thier appearance. The book discusses four body ideals: changeable notion in beauty, beauty that illustrate power in society, beauty standards and consumerism of capital growth and beauty enforced in complex ways. For instance, the "changeable notion of beauty" shows that beauty can be determined in various forms depending on the society. In our society beauty is considered to be tall, skinny, large breasted,

According to Miner (1956), one of the practices upheld in the Nacirema culture is the use of influential ceremonies and powerful rituals as the remedy for averting human weaknesses, diseases, and ugliness incarnated in the human body. This differs from the practice in my city of residence, where we uphold a culture in which the cure for ailments and weaknesses is proper nutrition and that for ugliness is aesthetics and cosmetic therapy.

At its core, cosmetic surgery, medical technology, physical and biochemical status of ethical issues are prevalent in modern society. Change of appearance in human development appears in one artistic expressional event after another, such as: Austronesian tattoo, tattooed, Western grant wash and circumcision, long-necked tribe neck plus a circle of copper rings, the wrapping of Chinese Ming and Qing Dynasty feet for small size, the obsessional fitness of modern society with fasting and its obsession with a set standard of female physical beauty ....... Its main purpose is nothing more than to improve the soul level, to define race, and cater to the beauty zeitgeist of the times.  An external change such as surgery or tattooing often produces an unnatural experience and a period of physical and mental suffering, or continuous self-restraint before they can reach the