QUESTIONS: CULTURE READING ARTICLES

After reading both articles in this packet, answer the questions below. Your responses will be due on
4/22.

For “Body Ritual of the Nacirema”:

1. After reading the excerpt of the “Nacirema,” what was your initial reaction?
I thought it was a very ignorant article. Adding to my belief, I recognized that it was from 1956.
2. Explain which group of people do the Nacirema represent in reality, and explain using supporting
examples from the text why you think this?
Americans, because Nacirema spelled backward is American
3. What do you think is the main point of the article? Who might be their intended audience and why?
I think that the main point of the article is to give scholars (and other Americans) a view on how we
view and are educated about other cultures and societies.
4. Explain how the author’s use of word choices and satire might help support their main point.
The author uses the word “magic” and such a lot to describe the Nacirema. This enhases the idea of
the mystical ways of this group of North Americans.
For Culture and Meaning excerpt:

1. Explain the role of the cultural anthropologist. How does the analysis of the
classroom desk illustrates the role of the cultural anthropologist?

2. After reading the section “Question 1.1”, explain what is meant by “only humans dwell largely in
worlds that they themselves create by giving meaning to things. This creation is what
anthropologists mean by the term culture.” Provide an example of how meaning is given to
things, using culture as a lens (ie. A gesture, and object in the home, etc.).

3. Define ethnocentrism and relativism in your own words.

4. Explain the ethnocentric fallacy (what is wrong with ethnocentrism)? Provide an example from
the text.

5. Explain the relativistic fallacy (what is wrong with relativism)? Provide an example from the
text.

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BODY RITUAL AMONG THE NACIREMA

The ritual of the Nacirema was first brought to the attention of anthropologists twenty years ago,
but the culture of these people is still very poorly understood. They are a North American group living in
the territory between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tarahumara of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of
the Antilles. Little is known of their origin, although tradition states that they came from the east.
Nacirema culture is characterized by a highly developed market economy, which has evolved in a
rich natural habitat. While much of the people’s time is devoted to economic pursuits, a considerable
portion of their day is spent in ritual activity. The focus of this activity is the human body, the appearance,
and health of which appear as a major concern in the people’s belief. While such a concern is certainly not
unusual, its ceremonial aspects and associated philosophy are unique.
The main belief underlying this ritual activity appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its
natural tendency is to weakness and disease. Captive in such a body, man’s only hope to avert these
characteristics is through the use of ritual and ceremony. Every household has one or more shrines devoted
to this purpose. The more powerful individuals in the society have several shrines in their houses and, in
fact, the grandeur of a house is often referred to in terms of the number of such ritual centers it possesses.
The focal point of the shrine is a box or chest, which is built into the wall. In this chest are kept the
many charms and magical potions without which no native believes he or she could live. These preparations
are obtained from a variety of specialized practitioners. The most powerful of these are the medicine men,
whose help must be rewarded with large gifts. However, the medicine men do not provide the potions for
their clients but decide what the ingredients should be and then write them down in an ancient and secret
language. This writing is understood only by the medicine men and by the herbalists who, for another gift,
provide the required charm.
Beneath the charm box is a small font. Each day every member of the family enters the shrine room,
bows his or her head before the charm-box, mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds
with a brief rite of cleansing. The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of the community, where
the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make the liquid ritually pure.
The medicine men have an imposing temple, or latipsoh, in every community of any size. The more
elaborate ceremonies required to treat very sick patients can only be performed at this temple. These
ceremonies involve not only the miracle-worker but also a group of assistants who move quietly about the
temple chambers in distinctive costumes and headdresses. The latipsoh ceremonies are so harsh that a fair
proportion of the really sick natives who enter the temple never recover. Despite this fact, sick adults are
not only willing, but eager to undergo the long and drawn-out ritual purification, if they can afford to do so.
No matter how ill or how grave the emergency, the guardians of many temples will not admit a client if he
or she cannot offer a rich gift.
The Nacirema have an unrealistic horror of and fascination with the mouth, the condition of which
is believed to have a supernatural influence on all social relationships. Were it not for the rituals of the
mouth, they believe that their teeth would fall out, their gums bleed, their jaws shrink, and their friends
desert them. They also believe that there is a strong relationship between oral and moral characteristics.
For example, there is a ritual cleansing of the mouth for children, which is supposed to improve their moral
character.
The daily body ritual includes a mouth-rite. This rite involves a practice that strikes the unfamiliar
stranger as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs
into the mouth, along with certain magical pastes, and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series
of gestures.
In addition to the private mouth-rite, the people seek out a holy-mouth-man once or twice a year.

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These practitioners have an impressive set of tools, consisting of a variety of augers, awls, probes, and
prods. The use of these items in removing the evils of the mouth involves almost unbelievable ritual torture
of the client. The holy mouth-man opens the client’s mouth and, using the above-mentioned tools, enlarges
any holes that decay may have created in the teeth. Magical materials are put into these holes. If there are
no naturally occurring holes in the teeth, large sections of one or more teeth are gouged out so that the
supernatural substance can be applied. In the Nacirema’s view, the purpose of these religious functions is to
arrest decay and to draw friends.
Our review of the ritual life of the Nacirema has certainly shown them to be a magic-ridden people.
It is hard to understand how they have managed to exist so long under the burdens which they have
imposed upon themselves.

Revised from “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” by Horace Miner, American Anthropologist Magazine
58(3), 1956, pp. 503–7
_____________________________________________________________

CHAPTER ONE: CULTURE AND MEANING1

The World Behind Everyday Appearances

In cultural anthropology, as in every science, we strive to look beyond the world of everyday experiences to
discover the patterns and meanings that lie behind the world.
Take, for example, the typical classroom chair with an attached desk.
In our taken-for-granted, everyday world this piece of furniture is a utilitarian object: something to
sit on, or write on, or even put our feet on. But for the cultural anthropologist the classroom chair and desk
tell some interesting tales and pose some interesting questions. For example, why do we have chairs at all?
Many societies don’t; people sit or squat on the ground or the floor or sit on stools or benches. Historically,
the chair likely first appeared in Europe or the Near East but wasn’t even common in Europe until the
eighteenth century. And why does the classroom chair take the form it does? Why don’t we sit on stools?
One feature of the chair that anthropologists might explore as they tried to decipher the meaning of the
classroom chair and desk is the erect position into which it forces the body, compelling it, in effect, to “pay
attention.” We might take a clue from French philosopher Michel Foucault; he refers to the shaping of the
human body as a “political anatomy,” a way that people’s bodies are controlled by others to operate with the
necessary speed and efficiency. Political anatomy produces, Foucault says, “docile bodies.”
An anthropologist might suggest that the classroom chair and desk are part of the political anatomy
of educational settings, part of the system of relations that gives meaning to the classroom; that is, this
piece of furniture forms the body into a shape that prepares it (or forces it) to attend to a teacher and not to
others in the same room. Moreover, it is appropriate to its unique setting in the classroom, as are other
objects of furniture. Imagine, for example, replacing classroom chairs with bar stools, whose main purpose
is to promote bodily mobility and conversation with others.
Once alert to the idea that the classroom chair might serve as an instrument of control, we might
notice other ways in which classroom design serves as a mode of discipline. The distribution of people in
space, with each person in a particular “spot” in neat, ordered rows, serves to discipline people to “pay
attention” to the classroom center and not to others around them. We might also notice the distinctive
ordering of time and the use of clocks, bells, and whistles to control the movement and activities of people
in school settings. One can even take our analysis a step further and examine the discipline of the school
setting sequentially, from kindergarten through high school; contrast, for example, the wide-open space of
1
Robbins, Richard H. Cultural Anthropology: A Problem-Based Approach. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage
Learning, 2009. Pp. 2-12.
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the kindergarten classroom with the open, movable chairs and tables, and teacher’s desk off to the side,
with the enclosed, partitioned space of a second- or third-grade classroom with its neatly arranged desks
facing the centered desk of the teacher. This is the evolution of classroom discipline. Students, of course, do
not always obey the subtle commands that direct their bodies to do certain things at certain times. One
only has to examine the strange bodily contortions of students as they resist the form into which the
classroom chair tries to force them. We try, occasionally, also to resist the isolation imposed by the
arrangement of classroom furniture, or the timetables set by clocks, bells, and whistles.
The way that specific societies order behavior through the arrangement of space and time is but one
small area examined by cultural anthropology, but it can serve as an example of how, from an
anthropological perspective, we cannot take anything about even our own beliefs and behavior for granted,
let alone the behavior and beliefs of those whose backgrounds and histories differ from our own.
This book is about how cultural anthropology can help us see beyond our taken for-granted world.
We will examine how cultural anthropology helps us to understand others, and, in the process, to better
understand ourselves. We will also examine how knowledge of others and ourselves can be applied to
areas such as health care, communication, education, economic development, business, law, and
international relations.
Since any area of inquiry always begins with certain basic issues or questions, this book is organized
around seven general problems that arise from the human condition, problems such as how to understand
people with different beliefs and behaviors, reasons why ways of life change, how people justify violence,
whether there is any solution to problems of social inequality, and so on. These are problems that concern
everyone, not just cultural anthropologist.None of these problems has a definitive answer. The best we can
really do is reach a greater understanding of why the problem exists and what we can do about it. There
are some specific questions, however, that we can ask concerning these problems for which anthropologists
have sought answers. These are the questions on which we will focus. […]

Question 1.1: Why Do Human Beings Differ in Their Beliefs and Behaviors?
From an anthropological perspective, members of a society view the world in a similar way because they
share the same culture; people differ in how they view the world because their cultures differ. A good place
to start to understand the concept of culture is with the fact that members of all human societies experience
specific life events such as birth, death, and the quest for food, water, and shelter. All societies have what
are for them appropriate rules of courtship, ideas about child rearing, procedures for exchanging goods,
methods of food production, techniques for building shelters, and so on. But from society to society, the
meanings people give to such events differ.
Attitudes toward death provide one example. For some people, death marks the passage of a person
from one world to another. For others, death is an ending, the final event of a life span, which still others
consider death a part of a never-ending cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. The Kwakiutl of British Columbia,
for example, believe that when a person dies the soul leaves the body and enters the body of a salmon.
When a salmon is caught and eaten, a soul is released and is free to enter the body of another person.
Some societies fear the dead; others revere them. In traditional China, each household contained a
shrine to the family ancestors. Before any major family decision, the head of the household addressed the
shrine to ask the ancestors’ advice, thus making the dead part of the world of the living. In southern Italy,
however, funeral customs were designed to discourage the dead from returning. Relatives placed useful
objects such as matches and small change near the body to placate the soul of the deceased and ensure that
it did not return to disturb the living.
Members of some societies accept death as a natural and inevitable occurrence, while others always
attribute death to the malevolent act of some person, often through sorcery. In these societies every death
elicits suspicion and a demand for vengeance. Members of other societies require great demonstrations of

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grief and mourning for the deceased. Some, such as the Dani of New Guinea, require a close female relative
of a recently deceased person to sacrifice a part of a finger. In southern Europe, widows were required to
shave their heads, while in traditional India, widows were cremated at their husbands’ funerals. In the
United States, survivors of the deceased are expected to restrain their grief almost as if it were a contagious
disease. To Americans, the sight of southern Italian women pulling their hair and being restrained from
flinging themselves into an open grave is as bewildering as their own restraint of grief would be to
traditional southern Italians.
Or take the area of food. No society accepts all items in their edible universe as “good to eat.” Only a
relatively few items are so designated. Insects such as grubs, beetles, and ants are acceptable fare in some
societies, while people in others regard eating insects with horror. Americans generally do not define
insects as food (although federal regulations do allow a certain percentage of insect matter to be included in
processed food). Most Americans like and are encouraged to drink milk, although some people in China
consider milk undrinkable, while the Chinese practice of raising dogs for meat is repulsive to most
Americans. American children who have raised pet guinea pigs would have a hard time accepting the
Peruvian practice of raising guinea pigs for food. Many American tastes in food originate in biblical
definitions of what is considered edible and inedible. Thus, of edible land animals, the book of Leviticus
says that they must chew their cud and have split hoofs, consequently eliminating not only pigs, but camel
and rock badger as well. Of animals of the water, edible things must have scales and fins, removing from a
biblical diet such things as clams, lobster, and sea urchins. And of animals of the air, only things that have
wings and fly are legitimate dining fare, eliminating penguin, ostrich, and cassowary. Thus, human beings
create and define for themselves what they may eat and what they may not eat independent of what is or is
not truly edible.
Of all the some two million species of living organisms that inhabit the earth, only humans dwell
largely in worlds that they themselves create by giving meanings to things. This creation is what
anthropologists mean by the term culture. Human beings are cultural animals; they ascribe meanings of
their own creation to objects, persons, behaviors, emotions, and events and proceed to act as though those
meanings are real. All facets of their lives—death, birth, courtship, mating, food acquisition and
consumption—are suffused with meaning.
Clifford Geertz suggests that human beings are compelled to impose meaning on their experiences
because without these meanings to help them comprehend experience and impose order on the universe,
the world would seem a jumble, “a chaos of pointless acts and exploding emotions.” Geertz says that human
beings are “incomplete or unfinished animals who complete themselves through culture—not culture in
general, but specific forms of it: Baliniese, Italian, Hongot, Chinese, Kwakiutl, American, and so on.” When
people share the meanings they give to experiences, they share and participate in the same culture.
Differences in culture arise in part from the fact that different groups of human beings, for various
reasons, create, share, and participate in different realities, assigning different meanings to death, birth,
marriage, and food. Objects, persons, behaviors, emotions, and events in a human world have the meanings
ascribed to them by those who share, use, or experience them. The clothes people wear, the way they wear
them, the food they eat (or refuse to eat), even their gender, are defined through the meanings these people
give them.
One of the problems that cultural anthropologists address is understanding why different groups of
human beings have different cultures. Why does one group assign one set of meanings to what they
experience, while another group assigns it another set of distinct meanings? […]

Question 1.2: How Do People Judge the Beliefs and Behaviors of Others?
Richard Scalgion is fond of telling the story of his friend, a member of the Abelam tribe of Papua New
Guinea, who was looking through an issue of Sports Illustrated magazine. The friend, dressed in full

5
ceremonial regalia with a feather through his nose, was laughing uncontrollably at a woman shown in a
liquor advertisement. When he managed to stop laughing long enough to explain what he thought was so
funny, he said, “This white woman has made holes in her ears and stuck things in them.” When Scaglion
pointed out that his friend had an ornament in his nose, the reply was, “That’s different. That’s for beauty
and has ceremonial significance. But I didn’t know that white people mutilated themselves.”
Scaglion’s friend confronted a problem that many do when they confront behavior or beliefs that
seem to differ from their own, and his response was not unusual. He was both shocked and mystified at the
strange behavior. And this poses a dilemma: since there are so many versions of what the world is like, how
do we go about trying to understand each of them without making positive or negative judgments? Which
version is correct? Are there any we can reject or condemn? Can we say, as so many have, that one culture
is superior to another?
In the catalog of human behaviors and beliefs, it is not difficult to find practices or ideas that may
seem bizarre or shocking even to some trained anthropologists. Cultural anthropologists have described
the beliefs of the Hongots of the Philippines, who must kill an enemy to obtain a head they can throw away
in order to diminish the grief and rage they feel at the death of a kinsman or kinswoman. They have studied
the historical records of the Aztecs of México who, when contacted by Cortés in 1519, believed that the
universe underwent periodic destruction, and the only way to ward off disaster was to pluck the hearts
from live sacrificial victims to offer to the gods. They have reported on the circumcision practices of the
people in the Nile Valley of the Sudan where, in order to ensure a young girl’s chastity and virginity, her
genitalia are mutilated to close the vaginal opening so completely that additional surgery is often required
to allow intercourse and childbirth later in life. The question is, how should we react to practices and
beliefs such as these? Should we condemn them or accept them?

The Ethnocentric Fallacy and the Relativist Fallacy

If we do condemn or reject the beliefs or behaviors of others, we may be committing the ethnocentric
fallacy, the idea that our beliefs and behaviors are right and true, while those of other peoples are wrong
and misguided. Cultural anthropologists have long fought against ethnocentrism. They try to show that
what often appears on the surface to be an odd belief or a bizarre bit of behavior is functional and logical in
the context of a particular culture. They find the ethnocentric fallacy intellectually intolerable; if everyone
everywhere thinks that they are right and others must be wrong,
they can only reach an intellectual and social dead end. Furthermore, if we assume that we have all the
right answers, our study of other cultures becomes simply the study of other people’s mistakes.
Because of the intellectual implications of ethnocentrism, cultural anthropologists emphatically
reject this position. But the alternative to ethnocentrism, relativism, is equally problematical. Relativism,
simply stated, holds that no behavior or belief can be judged to be odd or wrong simply because it is
different from our own. Instead, we must try to understand a culture in its own terms and to understand
behaviors or beliefs for the purpose, function, or meaning they have to people in the societies in which we
find them. In other words, relativism holds that a specific belief or behavior can only be understood in
relation to the culture, or system of meanings, in which it is embedded.
For example, according to Renato Rosaldo, the ceremonies and rituals accompanying a successful
headhunting expedition psychologically help the Hongot manage their grief over the death of a kinsperson.
Rose Oldfield-Hayes explains that even to the women of the northern Sudan, the genital mutilation of young
girls makes perfect sense. Since family honor is determined in part by the sexual modesty of female family
members, the operation, by preventing intercourse, protects the honor of the family, protects girls from
sexual assault, and protects the honor and reputation of the girl herself. Moreover, says Oldfield-Hayes, the
practice serves as a means of population control.

6
 However, relativism poses a moral predicament. We may concede that it is permissible to rip hearts
out of living human beings, provided one believes this is necessary in order to save the world, or that it is
permissible to subject young girls to painful mutilation to protect family reputations or control population
growth. But this quickly leads us into the relativistic fallacy, the idea that it is impossible to make moral
judgments about the beliefs and behaviors of others. This, of course, seems morally intolerable because it
implies that there is no belief or behavior that can be condemned as wrong. So we are left with two
untenable positions: the ethnocentric alternative, which is intellectually unsatisfactory, and the relativist
alternative, which is morally unsatisfactory. How do we solve this problem?

Virginity Testing in Turkey

To illustrate further the dilemma of relativism, and the difficulty of appreciating the cultures of others
without making moral judgments, a couple of years ago an American based human rights group issued a
report condemning the practice of virginity testing in Turkey. Traditionally, young women in Turkey, as in
some other cultures, are expected not to have had sexual relations prior to marriage, although the same rule
does not apply to men. The bride’s virginity is revealed by displaying, the morning after the wedding, the
sheet from the couple’s wedding bed with the tell-tale hymeneal bloodstain. The human-rights report
condemns the traditional testing as well as the reported practice of forcing tests on hospital patients,
students, and applicants for government jobs. Here’s the question: is the human rights group being
ethnocentric in judging Turkish customs by American cultural norms, or is it correctly identifying abuses of
women that must be corrected? And does it help if we further understand the so-called logic behind the
belief?
Anthropologist Carol Delaney, in her book on Turkish village society entitled The Seed and the Soil,
describes how virginity testing is related to the way Turkish villagers conceptualize and explain the
reproductive process. They see producing children as analogous to the planting and growing of crops; the
man provides the “seed” with his semen, and the woman serves as the “soil” in which the seed germinates
and grows. As a metaphor for reproduction, the idea of the seed and the soil provides villagers with a way
of thinking about and understanding reproduction. This metaphor of seed and soil has at least one very
important implication: since seeds do not have a limited life span (as we know semen to have), villagers
believe that once planted, the seed (semen) may grow at any time. Consequently, if a woman has had sexual
relations with a man other than her husband at any time prior to her marriage, the paternity of the child
will be in doubt. Since descent in traditional Turkish villages is closely tied to many things, including
property rights, uncertainty about the identity of the true father can have major implications. Thus, in the
context of Turkish beliefs about procreation, virginity testing may be said to make sense.
Resolving our dilemma is not quite that easy, however; for one thing, one might say that the beliefs
about procreation themselves may simply be a way for Turkish males to assert and legitimize their
authority over women. Furthermore, before we condemn the beliefs, we need to recognize that they
emerge from the same tradition as do our own. That is, our language draws from the same agricultural
metaphors to explain reproduction as Turkish villagers. We talk about women being “fertile” or “barren”
and semen “fertilizing eggs.” “Sowing one’s oats” as an expression of (male) sexual activity is still heard in
parts of America. Furthermore, these views are reinforced by religious proscription, legitimized in the
Koran and the Old Testament. Thus, before we either condemn or accept the Turkish villagers’ treatment of
women, we need to examine what their beliefs tell us about our own. Ours may be equally problematical.
There is obviously no easy answer to the question of when or if it is proper to judge the beliefs and
practices of others to be right or wrong. Anthropologists certainly have been in the forefront of exposing
the dangers of ethnocentrism and have been closely identified with the idea of relativism and the
promotion of tolerance. Perhaps the best we can do is follow the lead of Clifford Geertz when he says that
“the aim of anthropology is the enlargement of the universe of human discourse.” Encountering other

7
cultures enhances our understanding by presenting us with puzzles, particularly puzzles about ourselves,
that might not otherwise occur to us. That is, confronting what at first seems strange, bizarre, absurd, or
just different in other peoples should lead us to examine what it is about ourselves that makes others seem
so different. Ideally, our attempts to understand what at first seemed puzzling in some culture, and our
arrival at some solution to that puzzle, should result in questioning what it was about us that made the
behavior or belief seem puzzling in the first place. In addition, we need to understand that if each culture
orders the world in a certain way for its members, it also blocks off or masks other ways of viewing things.
We need to appreciate that there are perspectives different from our own and that our ethnocentric biases
may blind us to those alternatives. In other words, while culture provides us with certain meanings to give
to objects, persons, behaviors, emotions, and events, it also shields us from alternative meanings. What our
culture hides from us may be more important than what it reveals.