Like the "box or chest which is built into the wall" ("Body Ritual among the Nacirema, p. 2) in Nacirema homes, Americans spend a great deal of time taking prescription drugs and over the counter remedies into and out of their medicine cabinets. For Americans, these medicine cabinets often have mirrors, a help in scrutinizing their ever-imperfect bodies. The faces and teeth of Americans are washed and brushed in the font (sink) below the medicine cabinet, just as the Nacirema "mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief rite of ablution" ("Body Rituals of the Nacirema"). The "holy mouth men"("Body Rituals of the Nacirema," p. 2) are very similar, in this author's opinion, to American dentists. Just as the Nacirema believe all love, esteem, and social relationships will desert them if they do not attend carefully to various tedious and often painful mouth rituals, Americans are very similar. So horrified are Americans of their own "holy mouth men" (dentists), however, that some Americans (unlike the more fastidious Nacirema, no doubt!) actually...
3), American medicine men (i.e., doctors) have similarly imposing temples, hospitals, to which the very sick are taken, or, sometimes, where the merely temporarily sick or severely injured are taken in case of emergencies, in order to (Hopefully, at least) get well again. It is truly amazing, when reflecting on all of these numerous similarities, to realize that virtually no dissimilarities at all exist, between the Nacirema and Americans themselves. Maybe, in the opinion of this author, both cultures are simply turned around, and should be set straight in order to more fully enjoy live and all it has to offer.Cultural Observation of Dress Why do all humans engage in the act of dressing the body? Consider how dress relates to both the physical and the social needs of the wearer. Everyone dresses according to social factors and to make themselves more physically appealing to other. This helps them to be seen as hip and enhance their appearance. These variables ensure that the social and individual needs of the person are met.
Newborn babies are given "a mile hallucinogenic drug, tsentsema" (84), in the form of an uncooked leaf from the tsentsema plant. The idea is to help the baby "see" an arutam soul, when the baby is under the influence of the tsentsema plant. The belief is that boys need them but girls don't, and boys are not born with an arutam, so they must obtain them along their growth pattern.
Culture and Sociology of the Nacerima Body Rituals Among the Nacirema," by Horace Miner is an article that offers a social look at the American lifestyle. The author steps outside of the American culture and describes how somebody unfamiliar to the culture might describe it. This manages to open the reader's eyes to the fact that the American culture can be seen as just as strange as unfamiliar foreign cultures. The
start from the premise that, in some form or other and at some moment or other, people require order and leadership in their lives and, particularly, in their societies. The answer here does not propose to discuss why that is, although, as a general assumption, it may be related to an overall rejection of chaos and what this brings about, especially from what history has taught us about periods
Instead of verbally communicating with a live human being, people would rather press some buttons and receive the answer digitally. Question 5 The body ritual of the Nacirema demonstrates the unusual practices of certain cultures. Within this group of people, they are obsessed with keeping their bodies clean and pure of disease. As a result of this infatuation, most of their entire lives revolve around their cleaning rituals. This group of
cheap genomic sequencing has widespread and unforeseen cultural, political, and societal implications that have only just begun to reverberate through the human population at large. Genomic sequencing not only reveals some of the causes and connections behind certain diseases or disorders, but also puts the lie to certain forms of bigotry which assumed that dramatic phenotypic differences represented a similarly dramatic genetic or biological difference (put another way, genome
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