Journey Six: Nacirema, the moment of realization

Nacirema, the way we view society

Name: Hosung Kim A

Class: 10v1

ID Number: 131048

             Before I wrote the in-class response to the Body Ritual Among the Nacirema, I was half asleep. In a dizzy state of mind, I started reading about the Nacirema. It was hard to comprehend the cultures portrayed in the essay as it was way beyond my imagination of a proper culture. I knew that a global leader needed cultural relativism, a skill to understand other cultures even though they’re different or peculiar. But the cultures were too abstruse. “The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease.” I didn’t even know at first what this sentence meant! But after reading through some paragraphs my mind suddenly became transparent. Maybe I needed to write about how cultures of the Nacirema differ from the perspectives or ideals that the developed world has, like lookism. I was thrilled to have located the educational lesson in this essay. Even though we are developed technologically we still had things to learn from the undeveloped people such as the Nacirema. I spent a whole hour trying to explain how our developed culture had things to learn from the undeveloped part of the world criticizing our egocentrism. I was proud of my essay. And it didn’t take me a long time to know that all my ideas were bull shit.

The truth is always hard to realize. Who knew that the “North American group living in the territory between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tarahumare of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles” was actually America. Nacirema was American spelled backwards! All I did in my in-class essay was to forcefully relate the facts portrayed in the essay and explain how we should learn from the various cultures of the Nacirema. And it turns out that the medicine men, holy-mouth-men, and the listener were all careers explained in an anthropological view. (I first thought they were psychos trying to earn an authoritative stance in the tribe by using  various ritual activities that made no sense at all) It was foolish of me to have interpreted the meaning of Nacirema in a biased perspective, thinking that our culture is much more superior in comparison to theirs. It shows that we, living in a society with advance technology are always looking down upon other cultures without thinking thoroughly about it. Who am I to have judged their cultures, who gave me the authority to define them inferior. These questions began to rise up in my mind, questioning the basic parts of my life.

             I read lots of books relating to the subject of behavioral economics which is also my major. Behavioral economics is basically figuring out how humans choose or view things in an irrational way. To sum up we have heuristics.

We make choices that are very simple without thinking them through. Until now, I always wondered how humans have made the wrong choices; I thought that we always had a proper perspective in viewing things. But now it’s apparent that we humans are not always rational. We tend to have an ego that our biased views are always the best views. Even though I studied the subject and believed that humans are not rational, the fact that I was still tricked is the evidence that I still possess a short perspective in viewing the true nature of an object. That’s what occurred in reading the Nacirema. The bias in seeing the Nacirema as an inferior culture gave me a lesson to think before I judge.

             But, then a question rose in my mind again. ‘How did the author trick me in such a way?’ While reading the whole essay not even a single doubt had raised in my mind that Nacirema was actually implying the cultures of America. Perhaps it’s because I was half-asleep, we may never know but I remember being awed by the usage of vocabulary and the abstruse structure of the sentences. These features had made the essay much more academic and had increased its credibility. And while I was focusing hard to understand the sentences, the author was laughing behind my back. Furthermore, the effective use of rhetoric contributed in shading the true meaning of the essay.

The Shrine

“The more powerful individuals in the society have several shrines in their houses and, in fact, the opulence of a house is often referred to in terms of the number of such ritual centers it possesses.” The true meaning of this sentence is merely explaining the fact about bathrooms. How rich families have various shrines, which are bathrooms and how the opulence of a house can be told by counting the number of bathrooms located in a house. The interpretation of this particular sentence is so simple. But by reorganizing the sentences and using professional words such as opulence, the author has achieved the goal of illusion. He made the readers feel small by using words that we usually don’t use such as opulence, hyper mammary and ablution leading our thinking process to other means rather than the true meaning of this essay. This is how the readers were mainly deceived by the author.

             But if we think about it further, the author may have used a different set of ideas while writing this essay. The fact is more shocking if we broaden our views in the interpretation of this essay. The nacirema isn't just limited to America. We also experience these daily routines as washing our faces or going to the hospital. How did the author successfully deceive all people by using different set of words with the same cultures?

The descriptive tone that the author has imprinted on his essay had tricked the readers to think this was an explanatory writing when it was actually a different view to the American culture. It shows that people do not think when reading or perhaps living. Thinking is a process where you first realize, relate, and progress. We all have read the essay which suffices the realizing part of our process. Next, we related the content of the essay with various experiences throughout our lives. Finally, the last step is where our thoughts may all go wrong. When we progress our thoughts the strange idea of an ego comes in play. We always try to reproduce information based on our own interpretation. I’m not suggesting that this is wrong but this usually limits the potential to spread out our thoughts into different perspectives. This is what happened exactly with the essay here.

             So to sum up Nacirema isn’t just an essay to put other people on tilt, trying to upset them like internet trolls. It shows us how we view culture on a superior, somewhat biased point of view. Even though the meanings and the descriptions were clear in the essay the majority has failed to realize the true meaning of this essay. Mainly because of the author’s usage of hard words, abstruse structured sentences, and the heuristics that we all have. The essay had made me realize the true meaning of thinking. In viewing cultures we must not judge them good or bad, as we are all wearing specific lenses of our own individual cultures. But we should rather try to see through the true meaning of the writers themselves. Thinking 'what were they trying to say?'