I guess this was Miners way of expressing how other cultures look and think of Americans. Miner uses many different phrases and symbols to represent basic everyday items or actions. Such as when he uses the word “shrine” to represent a private rooms in a house, in this case the bathroom. He implies that Naciremas wake up every morning and uses the shrine room as a secret area to expose their true self’s and uses these “potions”
Still even an inexperienced evaluator soon realizes the connection between the Nacirema and the United States. In fact, the word “Nacirema” is “American” spelled backwards. Miner further correlates the Nacirema to Americans by describing the location of this tribe to be in North America and refers to the feats of their hero whose name happens to be Washington spelled backwards (Miner 503). Miner describes the Nacirema people as a culture obsessed with rituals regarding to the vanity of the human body. In reality many of these rituals are considered to be normal hygiene practices by most civilized cultures.
Amin Zoud Anthropology 4311 – Medical Anthropology Dr. Margaret A. Graham January 30th, 2012 Critical Summary: Why Genes Don’t Count (for Racial Differences in Health) – MAR #5 In the article, “Why Genes Don’t Count (for Racial Differences in Health), the author Alan Goodman explains how using the term “race”, when clarifying biological similarities and differences, is inadequate. It depicts race as non-useful biological concept since there is no clear distinction between racial groups. “Race” was created culturally to explain biological variation in humans, but inevitably are just factors of racism and racialization. The article explains that since there is more variation in genetics within groups than between groups, that it is wrong to attribute health inequalities to genes. The profound message throughout this section is that race is not a scientifically effective biological category, and yet it remains as a socially constructed category.
Analysis of Riverside City Campus "The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease. Incarcerated in such a body, man's only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of the powerful influences of ritual and ceremony." This was said by Bromislaw Malinowski, a British anthropologist, in Horace Miner's essay," Body Ritual among the Nacirema." In the essay, Miner shows the reader how an outsider views American culture, through sociological concepts of ethnocentrism and values. James M. Henslin, defines "ethnocentrism" as "the use of one's own culture as a yardstick for judging the ways of other individuals or societies, generally
The Nacirema people are very different from the American culture. They do not live in a third world country but on the continent of North America. The Nacirema people do not see their natural flesh shells as a beautiful thing. Sadly, they see it as something that embraces impurities and is offensive. This covering that holds their soul in is feeble and clutches on to impurities that must be removed.
This essay will be discussing the way I felt Native Americans were being portrayed in the works of Ben Franklin and John Smith. As well as if the authors were treating them in a favorable or negative light. During the times of early exploration Europeans known as white settlers came to the new world and met the Native Americans for the first time. At first, some of the settlers not knowing what kind of people they were took them as dumb and primitive and not looking favorably on them. When the Indians entered the white people’s towns, they found it to be disrespectful.
The colonizing Society also has the pessimistic attitude of hostility and unfriendliness with the Indians and they advised Ms. Carr not to visit Kitwancool. “ White men told about the Kitwancool poles too, but when I told them I wanted to go there, they advised me “keep out” (138). No, I would certainly have said, ‘keep out’
America’s History is Wrong The author of the book introduction titled Indian/White Relations: A View from the Other Side of the “Frontier,” Alfonso Ortiz, makes the reader scrutinize and think about how historians have recorded and retold America’s early history. The history familiar to most Americans is biased because it is in accordance with white settlers’ viewpoint only. The Native Americans viewed the white settlement differently than we recorded. The Americas were no “frontier” for exploration. The land was the home of the natives; it was explored and well known.
This article was very interesting to read because counting, a simple and menial task for us is quite different for the indigenous people. This article brought awareness to how different our societies are. I was aware of the difference in technology and beliefs, but I never thought of the number system. I found it very interesting to see how counting can be different between cultures like our own and the indigenous people. I also found it interesting to learn how the lifestyles influence different beliefs like the number system.
I have compared their differences and finally I explore the reason of why we cannot define an ethnic group by their cultural elements. Argument of Theories: There is a problem when we seeing ethnic groups as cultural groups, because there will be a different in their practices even in a same group. According to the research that made by an anthropologist scholar, Dr Rie Nakamura, we can clearly see the differences among the Cham people in South Central Vietnam and in Mekong Delta of Southern Vietnam. The Cham people classified themselves as a similar ethnic group, but actually they are totally different to each other. For example, they have different of religions.