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[UPDATE: This has become my most frequently read blog post of all. I’m guessing that’s because a large number of undergraduate students come here wondering what Body Ritual among the Nacirema means. If that’s you, welcome! I would just ask two things of you: first, please do read Body Ritual and try to figure it out for yourself first before reading this post, and second, once you have read the post below, don’t spoil it for everyone else.]
One of the most important anthropological studies to be conducted in the past century is Horace Miner’s (very short) 1956 classic Body Ritual among the Nacirema. If you haven’t read it, you owe it to yourself to follow the link now and examine Miner’s penetrating insights into one of the most unusual cultural groups yet to be studied by ethnographers. Please do read the essay before you read the rest of this blog post, as the post won’t be very helpful without it.
(Scroll down to read the rest of the post.)
Strange and incomprehensible rituals, aren’t they? At least, that’s how they seem at first. But if you haven’t figured it out yet: what does “Nacirema” spell backwards?
The obsessive and sadomasochistic bodily rituals that Miner describes with such scope are our own, not only among the Americans but among most Western cultures, and increasingly in the rest of the world as well: bathrooms, toothbrushes, nurses, dentists. But described in the language of the outsider, these things all come to look strange. (They also come to look like “religion,” another reason I don’t care much for the concept.)
There are many messages that one can take away from Miner’s exercise. In my view, one of the most important is that other cultures are not as different from ours as we often think they are.
I think that my post on performance theory was too strongly phrased; it sounds as if I’m saying we should always understand other cultures’ myths in terms of their content and not their effects, and understand rituals in terms of their meaning rather than effect. But I don’t believe this. I’ve been thinking about the point since writing my recent Christmas posts. In both of these posts (and the comments below) I was effectively arguing that certain rituals and myths are best viewed through something like a performative lens: the rituals are best understood as preserving family tradition, the myths as stories that delight children despite their being false statements. It’s just that these particular rituals and myths, of course, are ours: the rituals of Christmas and the myth of Santa Claus.
So indeed, the fundamental point of ritual and myth can very often be in what they do, not merely in what they mean. But that’s as true of our own cultures as it is of others’. Sometimes they make claims regardless of their truth, because of those claims’ effects; and sometimes they perform traditional actions regardless of their meaning or cognitive content. But so do we. Like us, they make statements about the physical world and its causal processes; the fact that those statements seem bizarre to us does not mean that people were only saying them for their effects.
(Sorry for the long gap in the post. I just didn’t want to give the game away, for those encountering Miner for the first time.)
Thanks for this ingenious take, which I had not come across before, despite having an enthusiasm for this sort of thing. I am sure I will use this article myself.
I am also suspicious of the uses of idea of “religion;” it works well enough for some things, but too often it’s a kind of leveler. I think it’s especially unhelpful in cross-religious dialogue. As a Christian, I don’t want to know what Buddhism can show me about “being religious;” I want to know about suffering, mindfulness, discipleship. Religion is (for these purposes) too ‘thin’ a concept.
But it strikes me that the Miner article sort of cuts both ways: you can read it as saying “we really are all more or less similar from a few steps back,” or (on the other hand) as saying, “you’ve got to step up close in order to see what things mean.” My sense is, to every distance, there is a season.
Thanks, skholiast, and welcome to the blog! I hope you’ll stick around.
I agree that there are a number of different lessons one can take from the article; that’s part of its genius. At the time of writing, the point may likely have been to undercut smug ideas of Western superiority (as suggested in the last sentences). That’s less of an issue these days, at least among the kind of people who read anthropology articles, and yet I think the article remains as powerful as ever.
I agree with you 100% about “religion” as well. One of the problems the term poses is that it makes us think that “secular” and “religious” questions (or answers) are different in kind. But suffering and mindfulness were problems for
the avowedly atheistic Epicureans as well as the effectively atheistic Theravāda Buddhists; practices to change our cognitive approaches in ways that reduce suffering are as important for psychoanalysts as for Buddhists. There are so many questions out there more important and interesting than this perplexing term “religion.”
> Thanks, skholiast, and welcome to the blog! I hope you’ll stick around.
I will certainly be back, and I’ve added Love of All Wisdom to my blogroll. I’m going to keep digging through your archives, but I am already feeling invigorated from what I have encountered here. I am impressed with both the catholicity and the depth of the posts.
As to the difference or lack thereof betw. “religious” and “secular”… I don’t wish to pull the comment thread very far astray, but one might note that it’s perfectly possible to be both of these simultaneously, depending on how one spins the words… For instance, some would claim that most contemporary American religion is secular through and through, if one means by this that the religious is a sort of ‘option’ *within* the secular. Similarly, I can imagine Kierkegaard saying that his Copenhagen was both sec. and rel., (though not perhaps in his specialized sense of “religious” as a Stage on Life’s Way). Of course there is a current Christian trope that tries to argue that Christianity is “not religious”; and I have some sympathy with this take on things, but again, I always want to ask “compared to what…?” And I am deeply suspicious of contemporary “explanations” (=reductions) of religion-in-general (e.g. Pascal Boyer, Daniel Dennett), though I have certainly learned somethings from them.
Perfectly plausible to me, since the meanings of the two terms are so broad.
Thanks for the kind words about the blog, and I’m eager to hear your comments on previous posts! I’ve tried to index tags and categories heavily, to help people find posts of interest. Do let me know whether it’s useful to you or there are ways to improve it.