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Every culture is different. Even going from Georgia to Indiana, you will find different family structures, attitudes, phrases – one in particular is the soft drink, pop, soda, and Coke debate. We meet new people everyday from several different places, so it’s interesting to find out what their culture is like.
I’ve always said ‘pop,’ so it’s foreign to me when someone else uses any other phrase. That fact that in the Southeast and Northeast, many people use ‘Coke’ to describe any type of drink is crazy to me. Well, it was until a few days ago when I was reminded of Miner’s Body Rituals of the Nacirema. I hadn’t read that in almost four years, so of course it was forgotten about after all the classes and projects I’ve worked on in between.
For those of you that haven’t read it, the Nacirema are actually Americans. This short essay is an anthropological satire about the way Americans live. Miner discusses the Nacirema’s extreme fasination with the mouth and all the rituals involved.
“…inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures.”
That is one of my favorite parts of the essay. Think about how someone from another culture might view our ritual of brushing our teeth. Americans are obsessed with cleanliness and changing the human body to make it beautiful. We are convinced our bodies are ugly and deformed, so we do what we can to make it perfect.
It made me think a lot more about other cultures and different people. We need to stop with the ethnocentric attitude that our culture is superior others. Sure, ethnocentrism isn’t completely awful, it does help bring a culture together. But that’s in limited amounts. We need to be sure we’re accepting of every type of person, every type of culture.
I find other cultures absolutely fascinating. I enjoy learning about the ‘rituals’ and history that brought them there.
So, when you start feeling all, “Americans are so much better,” remember that we’re strange, we’re different and we brush our teeth with hog hair.
