Body Ritual Among the Nacirema (1956) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Body Ritual Among the Nacirema (1956) [pdf]

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62 pointskelseyfrog20 comments

They should have started out more vaguely— I started reading it from the second page, and without Notgnihsaw I didn't have a clue.

> A few women afflicted with almost inhuman hypermammary development are so idolized that they make a handsome living simply going from village to village and permitting the natives to stare at them for a fee.

Me: "Haha! These people are so dumb!"

See also Motel of the Mysteries -- a YA-level book, lavishly illustrated -- about a far-future society uncovering an early-80s motel and interpreting it as a burial complex, dedicated to the tiling-god Mica and dating from the height of the now-vanished Empire of Usa.

As I recall, they believed that the ancients had dedicated the altars to Mica because the countertops were all said to be "For Mica". :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formica_(plastic)

> The charm is not disposed of after it has served its purpose, but is placed in the charm-box of the household shrine. As these magical materials are specific for certain ills, and the real or imagined maladies of the people are many, the charm-box is usually full to overflowing. The magical packets are so numerous that people forget what their purposes were and fear to use them again.

Oof, I feel that one.

> No matter how grave the emergency, the guardians of such temples will not admit a client if he cannot give a rich gift to the custodian

My first reaction on reading this was, "no, it's illegal for a hospital to deny emergency care". But then I noticed this was written in 1956, whereas the EMTALA was only passed in 1986. Good to know we've improved at least a little bit.

"Noitan nacirema eht fo saedi eht!" I have this line memorized because a friend and I would constantly reference it to each other after encounting the story in a shared american history class. Of course we didn't limit it to the story and mostly used it to swear at each other backwards.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BabaKiueria about the inversion of cultural anthropology for Australia/Aborigines

For anyone who is missing the context, as I was, "Nacirema" is "American" spelled backwards.

As I was reading this I was like "that's not that different from what I do", and then a paragraph of two later the light bulb went on.

I first read about the idea a week ago and already forgot about it, even though I found it brilliant. sigh.

Onto "In Praise of Memorization (pearlleff.com)" now

Hey this is just like Babakiueria - maybe they got the idea from this paper!

https://youtu.be/NqcFg4z6EYY

I read (an excerpt of) this in middle school, but my recollection was that the teacher didn't do a great job of communicating what the point was. It felt more like a "ha, gotcha, it was America all along!" moment. I remember being annoyed by some of the outdated elements (hog-bristle toothbrushes) which made it seem "unfair". As an adult, of course, the underlying factual inaccuracies just strengthen the point.

Sorry to hear that. For a different perspective, my grade nine world civilizations teacher delivered this perfectly to us as an in class reading exercise where we first critiqued the society of the Nacirema before the big reveal. I'll never forget how surprised I was to realize that my own country was something that could be criticized.

Another point my teacher made when she presented this article was the power of words like "ritual" and "ceremony" to dismiss a foreign society's customs as "religious rites", detaching them from any functional purpose or cultural context. (In modern terminology, one might refer to this as a form of "othering".)

That's pretty much what my teacher was going for, but it came across more as "imagine how strange people from other countries might think we are" as opposed to "imagine how often you've uncritically received this kind of description of another culture".

To be fair, "the point" is not clear. It seems to be some critique of some aspect of past anthropology, but what that is exactly is opaque.

It's a mostly accurate physical description of the (contemporary) American lifestyle described in a lurid way that distorts motivations using language typically applied to "uncivilized peoples". Realizing that and reacting "wait, we do that stuff, but that's not why we do it" is a good lesson on how to read similar texts that were written in earnest.

Wow. It has been a while since my 8th-grade history teacher sprung that on us.

[edit: Presumably minus the hypermammary bit someone else quotes.]

one of the great studies, great teaching aid which illustrates the modern purpose of anthropology

Oh man, the behaviors in my culture are ritualized, much like the behavior in other cultures. I would never have realized that, save for this clever piece of satire.

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