Body Ritual Among the Nacirema

The Nacirema

In 1956, the anthropologist Horace Miner published a short paper in the discipline's flagship journal, American Anthropologist, describing a North American group he called the Nacirema. The paper is barely five pages long, written in the flat, deadpan register of a professional ethnographic report, and it opens the way any serious mid-century ethnography opened: with a note on the group's territory (which Miner locates between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tarahumare of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles), a nod to their oral tradition of a culture hero, and the standard scholarly admission that little is known of the group's origins. Miner then turns, with total sincerity, to what he presents as the group's defining cultural obsession: the human body, and the elaborate ritual apparatus the Nacirema have built to manage it.

The Nacirema, Miner reported, are a people whose magical beliefs and practices center overwhelmingly on the body and its appearance. Their culture is built around a set of shrines that every household maintains — at least one, and often several — in a small chamber reserved for ritual activity, walls lined with charm-boxes built directly into the structure. Every family member has a personal charm-box, filled with magical potions obtained, at considerable expense, from specialized practitioners. These potions are never discarded even after their ritual power is spent, because the Nacirema believe the empty containers themselves continue to protect against the dangers the substances were originally acquired to treat — the charm-box accumulating, in Miner's telling, the overflow of years of magical materials whose original purposes have long since been forgotten, left in place as a kind of ritual insurance.

At the center of Nacirema ritual is a body of belief that would strike most outside observers as extraordinarily grim. The fundamental Nacirema conviction, Miner wrote, is that the human body is ugly, and that its natural tendency, left alone, is toward decay, weakness, and disease. The only hope of managing this condition is to enlist the rites of the shrine and the interventions of specialists, since the body cannot, in the Nacirema view, be trusted to sustain itself unaided. This belief expresses itself most vividly in the mouth-rite, a ceremony performed by nearly every Nacirema each morning and evening, in which a small bundle of hog hairs, treated with a magical powder, is inserted into the mouth and moved through a series of highly formalized gestures. Miner reports that Nacirema informants described the state of their teeth and gums, absent these rites, in near-apocalyptic terms — teeth would fall out, gums would bleed, jaws would shrink, friends would depart, lovers would be repelled. Beyond the daily household rite, the Nacirema submit to more elaborate interventions performed by a specialist class Miner calls the "holy-mouth-men," who use an array of frightening tools to bore into teeth, apparently in the conviction that affliction and moral fortitude are linked: the more pain a person endures in the chair, the more that suffering is understood as necessary, even virtuous.

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"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."

There is more. Miner describes a "listener," a specialist to whom the Nacirema confess their deepest anxieties, who through ritualized questioning is believed capable of exorcising the demons that have nested in the minds of the troubled. He describes a temple maintained by "medicine men," who dispense magical potions to supplicants — but only after the supplicant has offered a suitable gift and stated their troubles — keeping their formulas secret, written in an ancient script that only the practitioners and a caste of assistant magicians called "herbalists" are permitted to translate. There is a "latipso" ceremony, performed by a "vestal maiden" on the most seriously ill, and no supplicant may enter the latipso building without a gift for its guardians and a mark of ritual impurity that must be carried on the body throughout the stay. Miner even reports, with the same flat sincerity, that Nacirema births take place in secret, without friends or relatives present to assist — childbirth, rendered as strange and taboo-laden as any initiation rite by nothing more than descriptive distance and word choice.

By this point, several paragraphs into a document written and published as a piece of professional anthropology, you may still be picturing an unfamiliar tribe, its customs recorded by a fieldworker who traveled far to observe them. Read the name of the tribe backward. Nacirema is American, reversed. The shrine is the bathroom. The charm-box is the medicine cabinet. The mouth-rite is brushing your teeth. The holy-mouth-men are dentists. The listener is a psychotherapist. The medicine men are doctors, the herbalists are pharmacists, dispensing prescriptions written in Latin abbreviations few patients can read. The latipso — read it backward too — is a hospital, the gift for the guardians of the temple is your insurance co-pay, and the mark of ritual impurity is the hospital gown and wristband every patient is required to wear. The secretive birth, attended by specialists rather than family, is a mid-century American hospital delivery.

Miner's Real Target: Functionalism at Its Own Game

It is worth being precise about what kind of paper Miner actually wrote, because reading it only as an elaborate joke misses the argument underneath the joke, and the argument was aimed at a specific target: the school of anthropological theory dominant in Miner's own moment, called functionalism.

Functionalist anthropology, associated above all with Bronisław Malinowski (whom you will meet properly in Unit 3) and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, explained a culture's practices by asking what social or biological need each practice served — what "function" a ritual, an institution, or a taboo performed in holding the society together or meeting a basic human requirement. It was, in its moment, a genuine advance: it treated even the strangest-looking ritual as rational and purposeful once you understood the need it satisfied, rather than dismissing it as superstition or evolutionary backwardness, which had been the default assumption of the Victorian anthropology functionalism displaced. But functionalist ethnographies had also developed, by the 1950s, a recognizable house style — a particular vocabulary of "shrines," "rites," "practitioners," "taboo," and "magical" belief, deployed with total confidence about faraway societies, usually without much reflection on whether the ethnographer's own society could be described in the identical vocabulary and would sound just as strange.

Miner's genius was to take that exact functionalist toolkit — the vocabulary, the register, the assumption that the object of study is a bounded, exotic "tribe" whose practices need to be explained to an outside reader — and run it, without a single false statement, on 1950s America. Nothing in the paper is fabricated. Every practice Miner describes was real and ordinary among his readers. What he weaponized was the distance built into the professional ethnographic voice itself: the assumption, so automatic that his colleagues rarely noticed they were making it, that "us" and "them" require different descriptive registers — that a practice performed by "the Trobrianders" gets narrated as magic and ritual, while an identical structure of behavior performed by the anthropologist's own neighbors gets narrated as hygiene, medicine, or common sense. The paper is a controlled experiment showing that the difference between "ritual" and "routine" is not in the behavior. It is in who is doing the describing, and from what assumed distance.

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Concept Check

Miner's paper never states outright that the Nacirema are Americans. What technique does the paper use to produce its effect, and why does the essay count as a critique of the functionalist tradition specifically, rather than just anthropology in general?

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The technique is defamiliarization: describing a familiar practice using the vocabulary and descriptive distance ordinarily reserved for an exotic or distant culture — 'shrine' instead of 'bathroom,' 'holy-mouth-men' instead of 'dentists,' 'magical potions' instead of 'medicine.' It counts specifically as a critique of functionalism because Miner adopts the functionalist ethnographic house style — the vocabulary of rites, shrines, taboo, and specialist practitioners that Malinowski- and Radcliffe-Brown-influenced fieldworkers used to describe faraway societies — and applies it, without a single false statement, to the ethnographer's own society. The paper demonstrates that the register anthropologists used for 'them' versus 'us' was doing analytical work that had nothing to do with the actual structure of the behavior being described; identical practices sound like ritual magic or like routine hygiene depending entirely on the vocabulary and assumed distance of the observer, not on anything intrinsic to the practice itself.

Why the Trick Works: Defamiliarization as Method

Miner's paper is not really a joke, or at least it is not only a joke. It is a demonstration of the single move that anthropology as a discipline is built around: defamiliarization, the deliberate description of a familiar practice in terms ordinarily reserved for the exotic, so that its strangeness — which was there all along — becomes visible again. The concept has a lineage worth naming, because Miner did not invent the underlying move; he applied it with unusual comic precision. The Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky, writing decades earlier about literature rather than culture, coined the term ostranenie — usually translated "defamiliarization" or "estrangement" — to describe what good art does: it makes the stone stony again, in Shklovsky's phrase, by describing the habitual and automatic in language that forces you to actually perceive it, rather than simply recognize it and move on. Anthropology's version of the same operation, applied to entire cultural systems rather than single images, is what Miner's paper performs on toothbrushing, medicine, and obstetrics.

Nothing in Miner's description is false. Americans in the 1950s did perform a private, twice-daily ritual with a tooth-cleaning implement; they did keep unused medicine in a cabinet after its purpose had passed; they did submit to painful dental procedures and describe them as necessary; they did believe, in some inherited and rarely examined way, that the untreated body tends toward decline. What changes between Miner's version and the version you would give a friend is not the facts. It is the vocabulary, and the distance. Describe your own toothbrush as a "ritual object treated with magical powder" and the practice snaps into visibility as a cultural artifact — something learned, something that could have been otherwise, something a person raised in a different system would find as strange as you find the Nacirema. Describe it as "just brushing your teeth" and it disappears back into the background, filed away as simply how things are done, not as one particular way among many that a particular group of people happens to do them.

This disappearing act is what anthropologists mean when they talk about culture. Culture is the learned, shared system of meanings, practices, values, and assumptions that a group of people uses to organize their lives together — and one of culture's most consistent effects on the people inside it is to make its own contents invisible. You do not experience your habits of greeting, eating, dating, mourning, or brushing your teeth as a culture's habits. You experience them as simply correct, or simply normal, or simply how the world works, the same way a fish does not experience water as wet. Ruth Benedict, one of the founders of American cultural anthropology and a teacher of Margaret Mead, put the point precisely in 1934: no one, she wrote, ever looks at the world with pristine eyes.

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"No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking."

Benedict's claim is not that people are stupid or unobservant. It is that perception itself is filtered, from early childhood on, through categories a person did not choose and mostly does not notice: what counts as clean, what counts as rude, what counts as a reasonable amount of eye contact, what counts as a normal age to move out of your parents' house, what counts as edible. Benedict's own major work, Patterns of Culture (1934), took this filtering claim further than most of her contemporaries were willing to go, arguing that each culture selects, from the vast range of possible human behaviors and values, a coherent configuration — she borrowed the term "pattern" from the psychology of her day — that gives the culture something like a consistent personality, favoring certain traits (restraint, or exuberance; cooperation, or individual achievement) and suppressing others. Later anthropologists pushed back hard on how far Benedict took this idea, arguing that treating a whole culture as a single "personality type" flattened real internal diversity, conflict, and change within any society — a criticism worth holding onto, because it previews a pattern this course will keep meeting: an anthropologist makes a genuinely useful observation, states it more sweepingly than the evidence supports, and later scholarship narrows the claim back down without discarding the original insight. You will see the identical pattern, at much higher stakes, in Unit 3's treatment of Margaret Mead.

Franz Boas, Benedict's teacher and the figure most responsible for establishing American anthropology as a science rather than a branch of Victorian race theory, spent much of his career attacking a rival explanation for human difference that was dominant in his day: the idea that differences between peoples reflected differences in biological or racial capacity, with European and American societies sitting at the top of a presumed hierarchy of civilizational development. This was not a fringe position in nineteenth-century anthropology; it was closer to the field's founding assumption, embedded in evolutionary schemes (savagery, barbarism, civilization) that ranked entire peoples on a single ladder of progress with the anthropologist's own society conveniently at the summit. Boas's alternative, developed across decades of fieldwork with Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest and rigorous physical-anthropological measurement designed explicitly to test and undercut racial-hierarchy claims, was historical particularism: the argument that each culture has to be understood as the product of its own specific history, environment, and borrowings from neighboring peoples, not slotted into a universal evolutionary ladder that claimed to explain all human variation with a single ranked scale. Boas's famous 1911 study measuring the head shapes of immigrants and their American-born children found that cranial measurements long treated as fixed racial markers shifted measurably within a single generation in a new environment — evidence, deployed directly against the racial-determinist anthropology of his era, that supposedly innate racial traits were considerably more plastic, and considerably more shaped by environment and history, than the field's establishment wanted to believe. The word for how culture gets into a person in the first place is enculturation: the lifelong process, beginning in infancy, by which a person absorbs the categories, values, and unstated rules of the group around them, so thoroughly that by adulthood those categories no longer feel like rules at all.

The Reader's Own Shrine

Here is where the mirror trick has to become explicit, because it is easy to read the last several paragraphs, nod along, and quietly exempt your own life from the analysis — as if defamiliarization were something that happened to other Americans, in 1956, with their quaint charm-boxes, and not to you, this morning. It is not. Run the technique on your own day rather than Miner's.

Consider the deodorant ritual that most readers of this unit performed within the last twenty-four hours: each morning, a person applies a chemical compound to the underarms, formulated to prevent the body from producing its natural scent, a scent that in most other times and places in human history has not been treated as something requiring daily chemical suppression. Consider prom: once a year, in a practice with no obvious practical function, adolescents in most American high schools spend significant money on formal clothing not otherwise worn, travel in groups to a rented hall decorated for the occasion, and engage in a series of highly scripted behaviors — a designated dance floor, a crowned "king" and "queen" selected by a vote of their peers, a photograph ritual performed both before departure (for the benefit of parents) and during the event itself — that, described in Miner's vocabulary, would read as a coming-of-age rite involving costume, hierarchy, and public display remarkably similar to rites anthropologists have documented in societies around the world. Consider the handshake: two strangers, on first meeting, grip each other's right hand and move it up and down several times, a gesture whose origin (a demonstration that neither party is holding a weapon) has been almost entirely forgotten by the people who perform it dozens of times a week, correctly, without ever being taught its meaning in so many words. Consider Venmo: a payment app on which the sender is permitted, and often expected, to attach a public emoji or short phrase to even the most mundane transaction — a public record of exchange between friends that functions less like a receipt than like a small, recurring social announcement of who owes whom, and for what, visible to a network of mutual contacts. Consider graduation, an event this course will return to with a full analytical vocabulary in Unit 7: a specialist-designed robe, unworn at any other point in a graduate's life, derived from medieval academic dress whose original function almost no participant could explain; a procession, in strict order, before an assembled audience of kin; a scripted sequence of movement across a stage, hand extended to receive a rolled document from an authority figure, followed immediately by public, ritualized display (the tossed cap) understood by every participant to signal the completion of a transition, without anyone needing to be told what the tossed cap means.

None of these American practices is being mocked here, any more than Miner was mocking 1950s Americans, or anthropologists mock the societies they study. The point of the exercise is not that deodorant, prom, handshakes, and Venmo are silly (though a defamiliarized description can certainly make them sound silly, which is itself worth noticing — why does the vocabulary of exoticism make things sound silly, and what does that reveal about the assumptions baked into that vocabulary in the first place?). The point is that these practices are exactly as learned, exactly as culturally specific, and exactly as invisible-from-the-inside as the mouth-rite of the Nacirema. A person raised in a different culture — one without underarm-odor taboos, without age-graded formal dances, without a public ledger of small debts among friends — would need these practices explained, the same way Miner's American readers needed the mouth-rite explained back to them before recognizing it as their own.

Ethnocentrism and Its Alternative

The habit of judging another culture's practices by the standards of your own, and finding them lacking, deficient, or simply wrong because they are different from what you are used to, has a name: ethnocentrism. The term itself was popularized by the sociologist William Graham Sumner in 1906, who defined it as the view of things in which one's own group is the center of everything and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it — a definition close enough to how anthropologists still use the word a century later that it is worth quoting for its precision, even though Sumner himself does not appear in this course's approved quote well and so is described here in prose rather than quoted directly. Ethnocentrism is not the same thing as pride in one's own culture, and it is not limited to obviously hostile judgments. It shows up quietly, in phrasing: describing an unfamiliar marriage custom as "backward," an unfamiliar cuisine as "gross," an unfamiliar religious practice as "superstition" while one's own religious practice is simply "faith," an unfamiliar family structure as a "breakdown" of the family rather than a different, functioning structure for organizing kinship. Every one of those word choices smuggles in a standard — the observer's own culture — and applies it as if it were neutral, universal, simply what any reasonable person would think, rather than one particular vantage point among many.

Anthropology's methodological answer to ethnocentrism is cultural relativism: the discipline of temporarily setting aside your own culture's standards in order to understand a practice on the terms of the people who live it, asking what it means to them, what problem it solves for them, what place it occupies in their larger system of belief and social life, before asking whether you personally approve of it. This is worth being extremely precise about, because the phrase "cultural relativism" gets confused, constantly and consequentially, with a very different claim, and the confusion is common enough that it is worth naming directly here, at the start of the course, rather than assuming it will sort itself out later. Methodological relativism is a tool for understanding: bracket your judgment long enough to see clearly, because judging too early is one of the most reliable ways to see badly. Moral relativism is a much stronger and more contested philosophical claim: that no practice can be judged right or wrong at all, that morality itself is nothing more than whatever a given culture happens to believe, and that an outsider therefore has no standing to criticize anything a culture does. These are not the same claim, and an anthropologist can hold the first without holding the second — can seek to understand a practice fully, from the inside, in order to describe it accurately, and still, afterward, as a human being and not merely as a researcher, judge some practices to be wrong. Understanding how something works and deciding what to do about it are two different projects, performed in sequence, not one project that collapses into the other. It is worth noting that methodological relativism as a formal principle is itself a Boasian inheritance: Boas insisted that a fieldworker had to suspend evolutionary ranking and racial hierarchy long enough to describe a culture on its own terms, precisely because the racial-determinist anthropology he was fighting had skipped straight to judgment (this people is "primitive," this people is "advanced") without doing the patient descriptive work first. Cultural relativism, in other words, was born as a corrective to a specific historical abuse of anthropological authority, not as an abstract philosophical stance adopted for its own sake. This course will return to the distinction with much sharper cases later — cases where the discipline's methodological caution has been criticized precisely because bracketing judgment for too long, or too completely, has real costs for real people. Weighing those hard cases directly is the work of the Ethics course; this course's job is to make sure you have the analytical tool — cultural relativism as method — sharp and correctly labeled before anyone hands you a case where it is hard to use.

Ethnography is the name for both the method and the written product of this kind of close, patient, judgment-suspending study of a culture — traditionally produced by living among a group of people for an extended period and recording, as fully as possible, how they actually live, in their own terms. You will meet ethnography properly, and the fieldwork that produces it, in Unit 3. For now, notice only this: Miner's paper is itself formatted as a piece of ethnography, complete with the genre's typical moves — a description of ritual specialists, a discussion of shrines and sacred objects, an account of taboos and their consequences — deployed with total sincerity on a subject the reader assumed, until the final reveal, was safely foreign.

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Concept Check

A student says: 'Cultural relativism means anthropologists think all practices are equally good and nobody can say any culture is wrong about anything.' What is wrong with this statement, and how would you correct it using the distinction this unit draws between two different senses of 'relativism'?

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The statement collapses methodological relativism into moral relativism, which are distinct claims. Methodological relativism is a research discipline: temporarily setting aside your own culture's standards to understand a practice on its own terms, from the perspective of the people who live it, before evaluating it. This is a tool for accurate description, not a moral position, and it emerged historically as Boas's corrective to racial-hierarchy anthropology, which had skipped straight to ranking cultures without first describing them fairly. Moral relativism is the separate, much stronger claim that no practice can be judged right or wrong because morality is simply whatever a culture believes. An anthropologist can practice the first — bracketing judgment to understand a practice fully and fairly — without accepting the second; understanding how a practice functions and works from the inside is a different task from deciding, afterward, whether it is defensible. The corrected statement: cultural relativism (methodological) is about understanding accurately; it does not by itself settle any question about right and wrong.

The Ethnosphere, Previewed

There is a reason this course opens with a party trick about toothbrushes rather than with a map of the world's language families or a survey of subsistence strategies. The trick is the discipline's real content, not a warm-up before the real content starts. Every unit that follows will run some version of it: it will describe a distant or unfamiliar practice with genuine seriousness, and it will turn the same instruments on something close to home in the same breath, because the alternative — presenting other cultures purely as curiosities on display, described from a position of comfortable distance, never implicating the reader's own life — is exactly the error this discipline was built to correct. That older approach has a name, and it is not a compliment: exoticism, the habit of treating cultural difference as spectacle for an outside audience rather than as a way of living that makes as much sense from the inside as your own life makes to you.

The anthropologist and writer Wade Davis, whose work will return at the end of this course, framed the stakes of taking other cultures seriously — not as failed attempts at modernity, but as complete and viable answers to being human — in terms this course adopts as its own starting premise.

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"The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit."

Notice what this claim requires, symmetrically, in both directions. It requires taking a stranger's mouth-rite seriously as a complete cultural system rather than a quaint superstition — and it requires taking your own mouth-rite seriously as a cultural system too, rather than treating it as simply "hygiene," a neutral, non-cultural fact about how bodies are correctly maintained. Every later unit in this course will hand you a genuinely distant lifeway — Trobriand exchange, Azande witchcraft, Guugu Yimithirr direction-giving, bridewealth negotiations you have never had to navigate — and every one of those units will, in the same breath, hand the same instrument back to you, pointed at your own kinship chart, your own gift-giving, your own rites of passage. The Nacirema were never really the point. You were.

Key Debates: Engaging the Scholarship

Was Miner's paper satire, science, or both? One reading treats "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" as a piece of pure comic writing dressed up in academic clothing, valuable mostly as a teaching device — a way to get students to feel the strangeness of their own culture before they can articulate why it should feel strange. A second reading, closer to how professional anthropologists have generally treated the paper since its publication in a serious peer-reviewed journal rather than a satirical outlet, argues that Miner was making a genuine methodological argument about the discipline's own descriptive habits, and that the piece functions as a rigorous critique of functionalist anthropology's unreflective vocabulary — not a joke wearing a lab coat, but an experiment whose punchline happens to be funny. The two readings are not fully exclusive: the paper's power depends on both functioning at once, since a purely comic piece would not have been accepted by American Anthropologist, and a purely dry methodological argument would not have achieved the same instant, durable recognition the paper has enjoyed for seven decades of undergraduate teaching.

Does defamiliarization risk trivializing the cultures it borrows its vocabulary from? A more pointed critique, raised periodically since the paper's publication, is that the Nacirema trick depends on the reader already holding a set of assumptions about what "shrine," "magic," and "ritual specialist" vocabulary connotes — assumptions that are themselves a residue of the exoticizing, sometimes condescending anthropological writing about non-Western societies that the paper is nominally critiquing. If the joke only lands because the reader already associates "ritual" and "magical belief" with backwardness, the argument goes, then the paper's humor is parasitic on exactly the ethnocentric assumptions it wants to dismantle, rather than fully escaping them. Defenders respond that this is precisely Miner's point rather than a flaw in it: the paper works because it exposes those latent assumptions in the reader, forcing them into view rather than leaving them comfortably unexamined — you cannot be shown that your assumptions are doing quiet work unless the demonstration first activates them.

Is cultural relativism, as a method, separable from the specific historical fight (Boas against racial-hierarchy anthropology) that produced it? Some contemporary scholars argue that treating methodological relativism as a timeless, neutral research principle obscures its origins as a targeted response to a specific and dangerous set of nineteenth-century claims, and that remembering this history matters practically — it explains why the discipline treats premature judgment as a methodological error rather than merely a matter of politeness. Others argue that whatever its origins, cultural relativism as method now stands on independent epistemic grounds (you simply get better, more accurate descriptions of a practice if you understand its internal logic before evaluating it) and does not need its Boasian backstory to justify its continued use. This course sides with the first view for pedagogical purposes — knowing why the tool was built helps you use it correctly — without taking a position on whether the tool would still be justified in the tool's total absence of that history.

Assessment Suggestions

• Nacirema translation exercise: Students select an everyday practice from their own life not already used as an example in the unit and write a 300-400 word defamiliarized ethnographic description of it in Miner's register — no insider vocabulary permitted, only what an outside observer could see and infer. Peer-review in pairs: can your partner correctly identify the real-world practice from your description alone?
• Functionalism vs. defamiliarization essay: Students research one additional functionalist-era ethnographic claim (assigned or self-selected, with teacher approval) and explain, in a short essay, what social or biological "function" a functionalist anthropologist would have assigned to the practice — then explain what a defamiliarized description of the same practice, in Miner's style, would add that the functional explanation leaves out.
• Ethnocentrism audit: Students collect five examples of ethnocentric phrasing from media they consume in a single week (news coverage, social media, advertising, casual conversation) and rewrite each phrase in cultural-relativist language that describes the practice from the perspective of the people who practice it, without using the word "primitive," "backward," "weird," or their synonyms.
• Methodological vs. moral relativism debate: In structured pairs, students argue opposite sides of the proposition "Understanding a practice fully requires suspending moral judgment of it, not just methodological judgment" — one side defending the distinction this unit draws, the other side pressing on cases where the distinction seems hard to maintain in practice. Debrief as a full class on where, if anywhere, the line actually gets difficult to hold.

Vocabulary

• Culture: The learned, shared system of meanings, practices, values, and assumptions a group uses to organize its life together, largely invisible to the people living inside it.
• Ethnography: Both the method and the written product of close, extended, judgment-suspending study of a culture, traditionally based on direct fieldwork.
• Defamiliarization: Describing a familiar practice in terms ordinarily reserved for the exotic, so its learned, cultural character becomes visible again.
• Cultural Relativism: The methodological discipline of understanding a practice on its own terms, from the perspective of the people who live it, before evaluating it — distinct from moral relativism.
• Ethnocentrism: Judging another culture's practices by the standards of one's own culture, treating one's own group as the neutral center against which others are measured.
• Enculturation: The lifelong process by which a person absorbs the categories, values, and unstated rules of the culture around them, beginning in infancy.

Recommended Resources

Primary Source

• Horace Miner, "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema," American Anthropologist 58, no. 3 (1956) — the full original paper, available through most library databases and widely reprinted in anthropology readers; five pages, worth reading start to finish rather than only in excerpt.

Books

• Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (1934) — the configurationist argument that each culture selects a coherent pattern from the range of possible human behavior; read alongside later critiques of how far the "pattern" metaphor can be pushed.
• Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) — the foundational statement of the culture-not-race argument that underwrites methodological cultural relativism as this course teaches it.
• Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World (2009) — the Massey Lectures in book form; the source of this unit's closing quotation and the course's guiding wager about the value of cultural diversity.

Lectures

• Wade Davis's public lectures and TED talks on the "ethnosphere," widely available online, extend the closing argument of this unit into the stakes the course will return to in Unit 10.