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2013년 5월 7일 화요일

Body Rituals among the Nacirema

The first thing I had in my head when Mr. Menard handed the class this essay: ‘Why?’ We all know he does not like TOEFL style writing and his classes are usually very unique. But why is he making us to write a review on a simple, TOEFL-like informative writing? The problem is, I stopped there. I ended up negotiating with my thought, thinking ‘maybe he is feeling a little tiresome today’ - which was a terrible mistake. I realized ‘the truth’ the next day.

<Body Rituals among the Nacirema> is an essay about unique rites practiced by the Nacirema people. The author illustrates their religious thoughts and rituals in informal sentences, and seems to be delivering the rites of an unknown, underdeveloped tribe. However, the Nacirema is actually ‘American’, written backwards – meaning that the writer was talking about Americans and their lives.

While it looks like an informative one, this essay is actually an experiment. In this piece of writing, the writer is conducting experiment on readers about how much we are vulnerable to stereotypes. He does this through fooling the readers by two different points as following.

The author uses clever language to convey the facts of American living style without implying that he is actually talking about America. He induces us to think of uncivilized tribes around the world by words such as ‘rituals’, ‘ceremonies’, ‘practitioners’, and ‘medicine men’. He connects the Nacirema with those. For instance, he says the Nacirema people ‘insert a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth along with certain magical powders and move the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures’, which is implying Americans brushing their teeth. By this skillful strategy, the writer succeeds in separating fixed thoughts, or stereotypes, that most of us have - American lives are civilized and fancy – from this essay. This enables the readers to freely think about how Americans live from objective point of view and judge its right or wrong. However, most of the readers end up thinking that the rituals of the Nacirema is very strange, weird and sometimes even inhumane. When they get to know that the Nacirema is in fact ‘Americans’, we feel shocked from the fact that while we were introduced of a familiar way of living, we are thinking in totally different way as we did towards Americans before reading this.

We often tend to believe in smart people. We believe that smart people make less mistakes and stay accurate, letting them to be more reliable – which is true in many cases. In the essay, the author uses many high-level, unfamiliar vocabularies that ‘sound’ smart to deceive the readers to think that the writer is also smart. Also, the writer gives specific facts such as ‘Professor Linton first brought the ritual of the Nacirema to the attention of anthropologists twenty years ago’, ‘they are a north American group living in the territory between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and …’, etc. These so-called ‘evidences’ are actually not true. These factors increase the reliability of readers towards the essay, thus readers feel there is almost no chance of being fooled by this essay. The writer uses this mentality to effectively fool them. This point also breaks people’s fixed idea that ‘smrt’ essays (with academic, professional terms) are highly reliable.
 

To conclude, I would like to relate the presence of stereotypes with the process of understanding cultures. As we have discussed above, there were generally two big fixed ideas in understanding cultures: we often see it based on stereotypes of their names (as we thought American culture as a fancy, developed one), and we are easily deceived by facts that look smart (or ‘smrt’). The writer is sending an important message to the readers: people should be alert and awake. By showing how the understanding of a culture can differ from each other depending on the existence of stereotype, the author is telling us that we should always be aware not to include or form fixed ideas or even prejudices in understanding foreign cultures. Also, we need to have an objective point of view to understand them fully and accurately.
 










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