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

Body Ritual Among the Nacirema (1956) [pdf]

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45 pointsvkb15 comments

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.

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 :)

The Sacred Rac is another bit of great reading along these lines: http://www.abstractconcreteworks.com/essays/teaching/Composi...

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

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.

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.

> 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."

I think you have to be purposefully not paying attention to not see the variation in bathroom ritual across cultures for it surely exists and in significant ways.

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...

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."

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.)

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

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.

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

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

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