Will I Fit in After Time?

Recently in class we read two very interesting pieces of writing. We read “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” by Horace Miner and “What isa Woman” by Michelle Goldberg. Miner wrote about the Nacirema and their unique rituals. According to Miner, the Nacirema’s culture is still unclear, but I wonder if the Nacirema are actually a group of people. I wonder this because in class we realized that Nacirema is America spelled backwards. I wonder if the author is just using a play on words for us to realize that the American culture can sound very exotic and crazy to other cultures that are not familiar with our culture. We talked about this topic in class; what is normal to us, Americans, or what we practice at home, may not be normal to others. Their cultures cannot be called weird or crazy just because we are not familiar with them. 

An example of a belief the Nacirema has is that the human body is ugly and is naturally weak to diseases. They have rituals that make fat people skinny and skinny people fat. The Nacirema also has ritual to make a women’s breast larger if they are small and smaller if they are too large. I also saw an invisible narrative in the rituals of the Nacirema. The men are at higher status than women. The words Miner used when he was describing men was noticeably putting men higher than women. A significant section of the article that showed this was, “A man, whose own wife has never seen him in an excretory act, suddenly finds himself naked and assisted by a vestal maiden while he performs his natural functions into a sacred vessel,” the word “sacred” is used and he is assisted by his wife. While in a few sentences further down in the paragraph, women are described negatively, “Female clients, on the other hand, find their naked bodies are subjected to the scrutiny, manipulation and prodding of the medicine men,” the words used to describe a woman is “scrutiny” and “manipulation.”

A controversial topic that raised a lot of discussion was whether a person completely assimilated after living with a group of people for a certain amount of year. If an anthropologist lived with the Nacirema and followed all their rituals for ten years would they allowed to write about the culture? The same question came up when we discussed Goldberg’s article about whether transgender women can be identified as women. This article raised a lot of questions for me, I was wavered by both sides of the argument. I do believe that transgender women should be accepted as women, but I also do believe that they did not live through the troubles that women struggle through every day and struggled through in the past. Goldberg says that simply being born a male gives them privilege in society, even if they are a transgender. Also transgender men, or women who decide to become men, do not get the same rights as a man from birth. Although I do believe that transgender women will never experience the same struggles as women, I think they will be able to assimilate over time and should be accepted as women.

Although it was a bit difficult for me to decide where I stand on this issue, I think it is possible for one to assimilate over time. If an anthropologist lives with the Nacirema for over ten years, they will be able to speak the language, understand the rituals and cultures and most likely be accepted by the Nacirema people. Same goes with the transgender women, if they live long enough as a woman, they will slowly understand and live with the struggles of women.