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Brandon Morrison
212194924
ANTH D
Sophya Yumakulov
Tutorial 2, Tuesday at 17:30
In Body Rituals among the Nacirema Horace Miner gives us an iconic example of the
dangers of representation, and how anthropologist use an ethnography. In this paper we see
how with some small changes in language can make something that seems so familiar and
mundane seems mysterious and exotic. Language and how we use it can be a powerful tool
and as responsible anthropologists we must make sure to tread with caution when use sound
judgement when writing about a group of people. This is doubly important when writing
about a marginalized community as it may be the only information the general public or
policy makers have on said group. I believe that Horace Miner gave the field of anthropology
a warning and a call to introspection about the practices that are taken for granted in the field;
especially at the time he wrote it.
Now in this fictitious ethnography about at the time was contemporary American life
gives us many clues into what Horace miner was attempting to get across with his paper. First
and foremost was his use of language. He uses language in a way that attempts to cast the
people detailed in his paper as the mysterious foreigners as opposed to your everyday
neighbours. “Every household has one or more shrines devoted to this purpose” (Miner 1956,
503) Something as simple as the use of the word shrine. It’s a simple enough word, one that
everyone is familiar with, but not one that is used in common parlance to talk about mundane
everyday activities. It’s a word that is evocative of very specific thematic traits. When I hear
the word shrine I don’t think of a typical American household, I think of Indiana Jones
exploring the jungle of some far-flung destination. At the time Miner was writing this paper
America was only a few decades removed from the height of Egyptomania and upon hearing
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the word shrine no one would have thought about their own households, rather they would
have thought of mummies and ancient tombs. “I was able, however, to establish sufficient
rapport with the natives to examine these shrines and to have the rituals described to me”
(Miner 1956, 503-504) Again here Miner uses the word native in a way that while technically
correct in its usage is clearly part of a larger narrative he’s attempting to weave. While the
word native does in fact simply mean a person(s) or species that is associated with a place via
birth it has come to take on a different meaning in everyday speech. That is to refer to the
native peoples of North America whose ancestral claims predate European colonization. I
believe of course that this is all fully intentional. Miner knows how these words will be
perceived and uses them with surgical precision to conjure these thoughts in the reader’s
mind. “Few supplicants in the temple are well enough to do anything but lie on their hard
beds. The daily ceremonies, like the rites of the holy-mouth-men, involve discomfort and
torture.” (Miner 1956, 506) Here we see Miner lace a sentence with one word after another
that is used to provoke a specific image. Supplicants, temple, ceremonies, rites and holtmouth-men are all used to great effect in this excerpt to trick the readers mind into thinking
this is a sinister and nefarious activity being performed in some remote corner of the globe. I
believe one of the ways Miner achieves this so effectively is the repletion of said words. He
uses them constantly throughout the paper, never letting up on his point. The barrage of such
words enraptures the reader and gives them no chance to think there might be an alternative
meaning to his words.
As we have learned in lectures anthropology as a troubled past. Specifically, when it
comes to groups of people in colonized lands by European imperial powers. This piece is
meant to show the dangers of repeating history, even though it was written in 1956 is has
retained its relevance by being about an evergreen issue. How we perceive others who are
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foreign to our sensibilities. Whether it’s people outside of our ethnicity, our social class, our
language. The way we treat outsiders to our groups is of great concern and has been since
long before Miner wrote his article.
The issue I take with Miner’s work here is that to someone who didn’t have context of
what he was trying to write about it could be viewed as a genuine piece and taken at face
value. Now the odds of this are perhaps slim but I believe that there are those out there who
could stumble across the text and simply look at it as an account of a tribe somewhere
without reading into the deeper meaning. This would be a potentially harmful scenario as it
would reinforce dangerous ideas in someone’s mind about native tribes. At the end of the
article, I believe a summation by Miner himself would have been useful in spelling out why
he wrote it the way he did and to turn the looking glass back towards the reader for some selfreflection. As it is currently written we must seek out that and do the work ourselves and
some people may miss that opportunity which I find troubling.
As anthropologists we must not fall into the trap of writing ethnographies about
groups of people as if they are characters in a book. These are real people who have their own
set of lived experiences and while they may be vastly different from our own that doesn’t
make them mystical or magical or ominous. Every group of people has developed a way of
life that works for them and while as we have learned in class, we cannot simply turn a blind
eye to things that may seem normal to them but are harmful to others. We also cannot judge
everyone by the same standards that we in the western world take for granted.