Defamiliarization
The deliberate description of a familiar practice in terms ordinarily reserved for the exotic, so that its learned, cultural character — present all along — becomes visible again. Horace Miner's 1956 'Body Ritual Among the Nacirema' is anthropology's clearest demonstration; the technique descends from the Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie, applied by Miner to an entire cultural system rather than a single literary image.