My first encounter to “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” gave me an awful feeling, because Nacimera tribe sounded so odd to me. Possibly it was the oddest people I ever heard of. They were known to live in daily ritual practices, which sounded so barbaric, and so uncivilized to me. This ritual had tendencies to give pain to the devotee, for merely nothing. In fact, this masochistic tribe would not have any unharmed men after practicing all their rituals. Also, the fact that having baby is treated as taboo and secret made me think “How can this tribe still live up to date?”
So at first, I doubt the existence of this exotic tribe. However, after knowing that the writer of this text was a famous anthropologist, I made myself into the trap. After that, I had full confidence in the information written in the text, and thus tried hard to understand a new tribe presented in “Body Ritual among the Nacirema”. Because I was taught from schools that I should embrace various cultures and religions throughout the world, I even took further step of try understanding Nacirema culture. It was kind of successful, and I was able to give off reasons why Nacirema people do each actions.
The only problem was that the article contained a twist that would change whole viewpoint of reader, as well as the meaning it contains. But before talking about that, I want to introduce you another interesting tribe, called Naerok.
[Naerok is a tribe that lives in the far edge of Eurasian continent, in an unnamed peninsula for more than several thousand years. However, this tribe isn’t well known to the public due to their tendency to exclude foreign culture. Still, their culture is well examined by some specialists who have deep interest in them.
According to the people, Naerok tribe has a highly competitive society. From their age of 6 or 7, most children from “Mangang”, the biggest village among all others, go through special trainings to become the best soldier. They basically live inside a barrack called “Nowgah”, and is only allowed to go back home for sleeping. Some children tend to go to better Nowgah, and some tends to be not. Well, this is really important to go to better Nowgah, because it connects directly to the better future.
When every Naerokians become twenty, they need to participate in a competition to become a real soldier of Naerok tribe. The “G-Nuenus” competition is held only once every year, and determines the rank of each soldier who is participating, comparison to each other. If the person gets lower rank, they would have to live a pity life or reapply for next year’s competition. If a person gets highest rank by defeating most people, he is allowed to get a title called “Rotcod”, and is admired by whole society.
Generally, their culture is strange in comparison to our culture. Naerokians strongly believe that well rotten food is best for human body. Every time a foreigner comes to the village, they forcefully put a rotten cabbage called “Chimik” in their mouth to welcome him. Anyway, it is certain that at least one rotten food is consumed by single Naerokian every day. Also, Naerok has special admiration toward appearance of each individual, so being fat, as well as being ugly, is considered as a sin. So, almost all the women from the Naerokian tribe carve bone out from their face in order to create a special Naerokian face. This is why we can determine whether a women is Naerok or not, so easily.]
What do you realize about this short expository essay that introduces Naerokian tribe to you? The Naerok tribe sounds so barbaric and unhygienic that you might not want to encounter them in any circumstances. However, to tell the truth, we can encounter them really easily in Korea. Well, it is unavoidable to do so. This is because; Naerok is “Korean” spelled backward: Yes. This barbaric and unhygienic tribe is Koreans.
This writing was written in order to make people feel their culture in an unfamiliar ways. No Korean would suspect Naerok to be depicting their own doings. For example, well rotten food “Chimik”, which is loved by Naerok, is simply arranged version of “Kimchi”. Also, the article is intended to criticize Korea’s harsh education system by making analogy between education and military training. If you are quick enough to realize Nowgah is actually Hagwon, and the yearly Competition G-Nuenus is actually Su-Neung, you now realized that this essay is only a little fraud. This is the same trick that the article “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” has. It basically transforms American culture into something else, while keeping the essential characteristics hidden inside it.
After I heard “Nacimera is American spelled backward”, whole translation of this article changed. First feeling I got was a great “shock”. “How couldn’t I realize it was fake?” I thought. In reality, it wasn’t intending to explain a brand-new tribe called “Nacirema”, but was intending to explain “American” in a different viewpoint. For example, the “holy mouth men” was actually dentist, and the action that I thought as barbaric was just exaggerated dental treatment. Also, Latipso, which I believed to be a torture chamber, was actually “Hospital”. Lastly, the part that explained about bizarre pregnancy of Nacirema tribe was just actually portraying contraception methods that people take nowadays.
At this moment, I came up with a question: “Why did author write all this?” I know it’s an absurd question, but I think this is the most important thing to be determined with this text. The author demonstrated clever wit in arranging this writing, and completely tricked people into believing something wrong rather than getting the real meaning behind it. But why?
In my opinion, author intended to make people see their culture in different perspective, as well as making them criticize their own culture. I think what I felt while reading Nacirema is same as what people from other cultures think when they encounter new culture. Also, by criticizing this “barbaric and unhygienic” culture, people would know what their own civilization’s problem is. For example, Even though we “Naerok tribe” believe Kimchi to be the healthiest and most delicious food among all, what foreigners would see is a rotten cabbage that smells like hell. Well,
this is same for other cultures: all cultures have something that seems strange
to others. So, isn’t this article basically giving us the message that all
culture can seem unnatural to the others, thus none is actually superior to
others.
