body ritual of the nacirema

Provided by Matthew Abate.

1. Give us a quick summary of the main points of this article.
2. When you first read this article what were your initial thoughts about this group of people? 
3. Would you want to be a member of this culture? 
4. What rituals performed by the Nacirema seem most outlandish to you? 
5. What country do the Nacirema live in according to the reading? Where did they seem to originate? 
6. What is the shrine that Miner refers to? 
7. What does the box or chest in the shrine represent? 
8. Describe at least four of the variety of the rites and rituals described by Miner. 
9. According to Miner, what functional beliefs underlie Nacirema body rituals? (What are the purposes for them?) 
10. Miner treats Nacirema behavior in caring for the body as “ritual.” Is it? What makes something “ritual” as opposed to “habit” or “custom”? What trappings of Miner’s “medicine men” or “Holy mouth-men” make them appear as ritual specialists? 
11. Some would say that Mine’s analysis exoticizes the Nacirema and makes them seem mysterious and irrational. What in his writing dose this? Does presenting customs as “religion” rather that as “science” or “medicine” inevitably make them seem irrational to people in our own culture? Are our own customs with respect to care of the body irrational? In what ways is scientific medicine different from other (“religious”) belief systems? How much of what human beings do in everyday life is “rational” or “irrational”? Do you think that there are cultural differences in such rationality? 
12. Who are the Nacirema? When did you discover the joke? What point do you think Miner is trying to make in this article? 
13. Contemporary anthropologists are very concerned about what is often called “the problem of representation.” The question, in part, is: who gets to “represent” a group of people, by writing about them, interpreting their behavior, and in other Name: ____________________ ways speaking “for” (or about) them? How does somebody get that right? Does the social position of the speaker play a role in the process? What kind of social position do American anthropologists have? 
14. What is “ethnocentrism”? What is “cultural relativism”?First, what is Miner's purpose? Who is the intended audience, and what assumptions does Miner make about the reader's knowledge or beliefs? What does Miner's piece tell us about the difficulty of describing another culture?