<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.
Unconvinced?
Remember this picture!
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