Read “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” by Horace Miner. Respond to the following prompts in at least one 8-sentence paragraph.
Note: Miner’s article was written as a teaching tool to show the risks of misunderstanding/misrepresenting cultures. The Nacirema in the article are Americans (as in the U.S. – Nacirema is American spelled backwards). This assignment may be completed individually or in a group. When working in a group, each person must make sure their names are on the submitted assignment, and/or each member must sumbit their own copy of an assignment, with all group members’ names on it, to account for high SafeAssign rates.
- Explain both the emic and etic viewpoints.
- Which viewpoint was used to write the Nacirema article?
- How do you know?
- Which viewpoint was used to write the Nacirema article?
- Using an example from the article, explain how a one-sided analysis such as this one is not useful to the field of anthropology.
-
- Discuss at least two methods used in anthropology (from our class discussion and your reading on methodology in cultural anthropology) which could have been used to make this analysis less biased and indicate how they should be utilized to accomplish this goal.