Body Ritual By Miner Sociological Perspective

Our culture defines us at a young age and it is engrained within us without choice. With the help of understanding this and evaluating how this affects our perceptions of other cultures, we can also understand how other cultures look at us as well. The writing Body Ritual by Miner puts into perspective of how we view our culture or how other cultures may view ours. There are different practices and rituals that can seem odd and our norms dictate and affect our understanding of them. We can examine different cultures such as the one in Madagascar to truly relate how much our norms affect how we think and perceive others that are different from us.
I was not necessarily surprised due to the hints that were given throughout the reading Body Ritual …show more content…
However it quickly becomes something that is taken for granted and due to this people can overlook their own personal culture and assume that it should be the norm for others. In fact each culture believes that about themselves because in fact we all have our own version of norms. When a different culture partakes in a ritual or practice it seems foreign and odd to us because it is not something that we learned at a young age to be engrained into us. Our ethnocentrism drives the sense of others being strange in comparison to us because we use our own culture as an evaluation of others cultures values, norms, and behaviors. Our norms are what we expect is the right way to do things therefore unless we practice cultural relativism we use those norms as a base when trying to understand other cultures. We immediately use our own experience and understanding and it is hard to step outside of that without some form of culture shock. Dancing with the dead was a great example that was given in chapter two on how different cultures have norms that may not be similar to ours. In America when someone passes away we typically honor their life with a funeral of some type and we either bury them or practice cremation and that is the norm in our culture. However in Madagascar they practice a ritual called Dancing with the dead, which is costly and they actually take the deceased from their resting site and dance with them as a way to thank them for what they believe they owe. As Americans our perception of this would be strange because we never bury our dead only years later to recover them. In our culture we do not necessarily look at the deceased and have a firm sense of understanding that we are where we are today due to them none the less have created a ritual like the one in