Selena Cortez
Professor Lauren Arenson
Anthropology 1500
3 March 2017
The Subsistence Patterns of the Nacirema
In the case study “The Body Rituals of the Nacirema”, Horace Miner is using coded language to describe the daily health routines of the average American. He describes George Washington as a mythical hero of the Nacirema people who chopped down a cherry tree and cross the Potomac River. The “body rituals” that he portrays as “uncivilized” and “barbaric” are quite common if someone does see the underlying context of the case study. Some of the health care routines that are depicted are going to the hospital, the dentist, and seeing a therapist. Through lenses of ethnocentrism, however, many people may believe that this is yet another isolated native tribe that has not become “civilized” yet. In the case study, Horace describes that these acts of hygiene as “a passive distaste for their own body and life”. The rituals are in order to prevent aging and to achieve the “perfect body”. The women in the tribe change their breast size, take birth control, and change their appearance by “putting their heads in …show more content…
Through enculturation, their children are taught to accept these ideas as their own, learn the rituals that go along with them, and to keep this on a cycle of learning. If kept unchecked, the idea of body image will be heavily engraved in the American culture and possibility becomes more harmful than tribe members may know. Through contact with other tribes, however, their ideas can possibly change and form to make a healthier idea of body image that would stop the constant contact with the witch doctors. When Chagnon came into with the Yanomani’s tribe, he saw an impending cholera outbreak coming. Chagnon and someone else gave the 1,000 Yanomani tribe members vaccinations for the outbreak. This outside contact was important to the Yanomani’s
Professor Lauren Arenson
Anthropology 1500
3 March 2017
The Subsistence Patterns of the Nacirema
In the case study “The Body Rituals of the Nacirema”, Horace Miner is using coded language to describe the daily health routines of the average American. He describes George Washington as a mythical hero of the Nacirema people who chopped down a cherry tree and cross the Potomac River. The “body rituals” that he portrays as “uncivilized” and “barbaric” are quite common if someone does see the underlying context of the case study. Some of the health care routines that are depicted are going to the hospital, the dentist, and seeing a therapist. Through lenses of ethnocentrism, however, many people may believe that this is yet another isolated native tribe that has not become “civilized” yet. In the case study, Horace describes that these acts of hygiene as “a passive distaste for their own body and life”. The rituals are in order to prevent aging and to achieve the “perfect body”. The women in the tribe change their breast size, take birth control, and change their appearance by “putting their heads in …show more content…
Through enculturation, their children are taught to accept these ideas as their own, learn the rituals that go along with them, and to keep this on a cycle of learning. If kept unchecked, the idea of body image will be heavily engraved in the American culture and possibility becomes more harmful than tribe members may know. Through contact with other tribes, however, their ideas can possibly change and form to make a healthier idea of body image that would stop the constant contact with the witch doctors. When Chagnon came into with the Yanomani’s tribe, he saw an impending cholera outbreak coming. Chagnon and someone else gave the 1,000 Yanomani tribe members vaccinations for the outbreak. This outside contact was important to the Yanomani’s