Nacirema Tribe Summary

Authors and anthropologists often use different techniques to allow readers to experience something from a different perspective, and this was clearly the case in ARTICLE. Throughout the reading, it was explained how a unique group of people, the TRIBE, live their lives and practice rituals to improve their health. By comparing a bathroom to a shrine and medicine men to doctors, the author provided readers with an outside view on the practices of everyday Americans. In the reading, Minor explained that “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” (Minor 503). Each house in the community of Nacirema had at least one shrine, and these shrines were more decorated than the rest of the house. In these shrines, family members would carry out rituals to purify their bodies and heal their illnesses. Overall, I think that the most emphasized point in the reading was how the Nacirema people had developed an obsession with their health and bodies. In addition to the rituals that each person carried out, the men and women of the Nacirema took different medicines that were created by medicine men. These men required extensive compensation in the form of gifts for their medicines and …show more content…
However, this story actually allows Americans to view our daily lives from an outside perspective. We focus so much on beauty and youth, and we fear aging, which was described as an illness in the reading. We take medicines, go to doctors, and apply cosmetics to keep us healthy and young. We know that these will not prevent us from getting ill or aging, but we continue to use them anyways. While it may have seemed that the Nacirema people were living an unusual life, Malinowski explained it best when he stated