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Horace Miner
Most cultures exhibit a particular configuration or style. A single value or
pattern or perceiving the world often leaves its stamp on several
institutions in the society. Examples are "machismo" in Spanish-influenced
cultures, "face" in Japanese culture, and "pollution by females" in some
highland New Guinea cultures. Here Horace Miner demonstrates that "attitudes
about the body" have a pervasive influence on many institutions in Nacireman
society.
The anthropologist has become so familiar with the diversity of ways in
which different people behave in similar situations that he is not apt to be
surprised by even the most exotic customs. In fact, if all of the logically
possible combinations of behavior have not been found somewhere in the
world, he is apt to suspect that they must be present in some yet
undescribed tribe. The point has, in fact, been expressed with respect to
clan organization by Murdock.[1] In this light, the magical beliefs and
practices of the Nacirema present such unusual aspects that it seems
desirable to describe them as an example of the extremes to which human
behavior can go.
Professor Linton [2] first brought the ritual of the Nacirema to the
attention of anthropologists twenty years ago, but the culture of this
people is still very poorly understood. They are a North American group
living in the territory between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tarahumare
of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles. Little is known of
their origin, although tradition states that they came from the east. . . .
Nacirema culture is characterized by a highly developed market economy which
has evolved in a rich natural habitat. While much of the people's time is
devoted to economic pursuits, a large part of the fruits of these labors and
a considerable portion of the day are spent in ritual activity. The focus of
this activity is the human body, the appearance and health of which loom as
a dominant concern in the ethos of the people. While such a concern is
certainly not unusual, its ceremonial aspects and associated philosophy are
unique.
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.
Incarcerated in such a body, man's only hope is to avert these
characteristics through the use of ritual and ceremony. Every household has
one or more shrines devoted to this purpose. The more powerful individuals
in the society have several shrines in their houses and, in fact, the
opulence of a house is often referred to in terms of the number of such
ritual centers it possesses. Most houses are of wattle and daub
construction, but the shrine rooms of the more wealthy are walled with
stone. Poorer families imitate the rich by applying pottery plaques to their
shrine walls.
While each family has at least one such shrine, the rituals associated with
it are not family ceremonies but are private and secret. The rites are
normally only discussed with children, and then only during the period when
they are being initiated into these mysteries. I was able, however, to
establish sufficient rapport with the natives to examine these shrines and
to have the rituals described to me.
The focal point of the shrine is a box or chest which is built in to the
wall. In this chest are kept the many charms and magical potions without
which no native believes he could live. These preparations are secured from
a variety of specialized practitioners. The most powerful of these are the
medicine men, whose assistance must be rewarded with substantial gifts.
However, the medicine men do not provide the curative potions for their
clients, but decide what the ingredients should be and then write them down
in an ancient and secret language. This writing is understood only by the
medicine men and by the herbalists who, for another gift, provide the
required charm.
The charm is not disposed of after it has served its purpose, but is placed
in the charmbox of the household shrine. As these magical materials are
specific for certain ills, and the real or imagined maladies of the people
are many, the charm-box is usually full to overflowing. The magical packets
are so numerous that people forget what their purposes were and fear to use
them again. While the natives are very vague on this point, we can only
assume that the idea in retaining all the old magical materials is that
their presence in the charm-box, before which the body rituals are
conducted, will in some way protect the worshipper.
Beneath the charm-box is a small font. Each day every member of the family,
in succession, enters the shrine room, bows his head before the charm-box,
mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief
rite of ablution.[3] The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of
the community, where the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make the
liquid ritually pure.
In the hierarchy of magical practitioners, and below the medicine men in
prestige, are specialists whose designation is best translated as
"holy-mouth-men." The Nacirema have an almost pathological horror of and
fascination with the mouth, the condition of which is believed to have a
supernatural influence on all social relationships. Were it not for the
rituals of the mouth, they believe that their teeth would fall out, their
gums bleed, their jaws shrink, their friends desert them, and their lovers
reject them. They also believe that a strong relationship exists between
oral and moral characteristics. For example, there is a ritual ablution of
the mouth for children which is supposed to improve their moral fiber.
The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite. Despite
the fact that these people are so punctilious [4] about care of the
mouth, this rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger
as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a
small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical
powders, and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of
gestures.[5]
In addition to the private mouth-rite, the people seek out a holy-mouth-man
once or twice a year. These practitioners have an impressive set of
paraphernalia, consisting of a variety of augers, awls, probes, and prods.
The use of these items in the exorcism of the evils of the mouth involves
almost unbelievable ritual torture of the client. The holy-mouth-man opens
the client's mouth and, using the above mentioned tools, enlarges any holes
which decay may have created in the teeth. Magical materials are put into
these holes. If there are no naturally occurring holes in the teeth, large
sections of one or more teeth are gouged out so that the supernatural
substance can be applied. In the client's view, the purpose of these
ministrations [6] is to arrest decay and to draw friends. The extremely
sacred and traditional character of the rite is evident in the fact that the
natives return to the holy-mouth-men year after year, despite the fact that
their teeth continue to decay.
It is to be hoped that, when a thorough study of the Nacirema is made, there
will be careful inquiry in to the personality structure of these people. One
has but to watch the gleam in the eye of a holy-mouth-man, as he jabs an awl
into an exposed nerve, to suspect that a certain amount of sadism is
involved. If this can be established, a very interesting pattern emerges,
for most of the population shows definite masochistic tendencies. It was to
these that Professor Linton referred in discussing a distinctive part of the
daily body ritual which is performed only by men. This part of the rite
includes scraping and lacerating the surface of the face with a sharp
instrument. Special women's rites are performed only four times during each
lunar month, but what they lack in frequency is made up in barbarity. As
part of this ceremony, women bake their heads in small ovens for about an
hour. The theoretically interesting point is that what seems to be a
preponderantly masochistic people have developed sadistic specialists.
The medicine men have an imposing temple, or latipso, in every community of
any size. The more elaborate ceremonies required to treat very sick patients
can only be performed at this temple. These ceremonies involve not only the
thaumaturge [7] but a permanent group of vestal maidens who move sedately
about the temple chambers in distinctive costume and headdress.
The latipso ceremonies are so harsh that it is phenomenal that a fair
proportion of the really sick natives who enter the temple ever recover.
Small children whose indoctrination is still incomplete have been known to
resist attempts to take them to the temple because "that is where you go to
die." Despite this fact, sick adults are not only willing but eager to
undergo the protracted ritual purification, if they can afford to do so. No
matter how ill the supplicant or how grave the emergency, the guardians of
many temples will not admit a client if he cannot give a rich gift to the
custodian. Even after one has gained and survived the ceremonies, the
guardians will not permit the neophyte to leave until he makes still another
gift.
The supplicant entering the temple is first stripped of all his or her
clothes. In everyday life the Nacirema avoids exposure of his body and its
natural functions. Bathing and excretory acts are performed only in the
secrecy of the household shrine, where they are ritualized as part of the
body-rites. Psychological shock results from the fact that body secrecy is
suddenly lost upon entry into the latipso. 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.
This sort of ceremonial treatment is necessitated by the fact that the
excreta are used by a diviner to ascertain the course and nature of the
client's sickness. Female clients, on the other hand, find their naked
bodies are subjected to the scrutiny, manipulation and prodding of the
medicine men.
Few supplicants in the temple are well enough to do anything but lie on
their hard beds. The daily ceremonies, like the rites of the holy-mouth-men,
involve discomfort and torture. With ritual precision, the vestals awaken
their miserable charges each dawn and roll them about on their beds of pain
while performing ablutions, in the formal movements of which the maidens are
highly trained. At other times they insert magic wands in the supplicant's
mouth or force him to eat substances which are supposed to be healing. From
time to time the medicine men come to their clients and jab magically
treated needles into their flesh. The fact that these temple ceremonies may
not cure, and may even kill the neophyte, in no way decreases the people's
faith in the medicine men.
There remains one other kind of practitioner, known as a "listener." This
witchdoctor has the power to exorcise the devils that lodge in the heads of
people who have been bewitched. The Nacirema believe that parents bewitch
their own children. Mothers are particularly suspected of putting a curse on
children while teaching them the secret body rituals. The counter-magic of
the witchdoctor is unusual in its lack of ritual. The patient simply tells
the "listener" all his troubles and fears, beginning with the earliest
difficulties he can remember. The memory displayed by the Nacirema in these
exorcism sessions is truly remarkable. It is not uncommon for the patient to
bemoan the rejection he felt upon being weaned as a babe, and a few
individuals even see their troubles going back to the traumatic effects of
their own birth.
In conclusion, mention must be made of certain practices which have their
base in native esthetics but which depend upon the pervasive aversion to the
natural body and its functions. There are ritual fasts to make fat people
thin and ceremonial feasts to make thin people fat. Still other rites are
used to make women's breasts larger if they are small, and smaller if they
are large. General dissatisfaction with breast shape is symbolized in the
fact that the ideal form is virtually outside the range of human variation.
A few women afflicted with almost inhuman hyper-mammary development are so
idolized that they make a handsome living by simply going from village to
village and permitting the natives to stare at them for a fee.
Reference has already been made to the fact that excretory functions are
ritualized, routinized, and relegated to secrecy. Natural reproductive
functions are similarly distorted. Intercourse is taboo as a topic and
scheduled as an act. Efforts are made to avoid pregnancy by the use of
magical materials or by limiting intercourse to certain phases of the moon.
Conception is actually very infrequent. When pregnant, women dress so as to
hide their condition. Parturition takes place in secret, without friends or
relatives to assist, and the majority of women do not nurse their infants.
Our review of the ritual life of the Nacirema has certainly shown them to be
a magic-ridden people. It is hard to understand how they have managed to
exist so long under the burdens which they have imposed upon themselves. But
even such exotic customs as these take on real meaning when they are viewed
with the insight provided by Malinowski [8] when he wrote:
Looking from far and above, from our high places of safety in the developed
civilization, it is easy to see all the crudity and irrelevance of magic.
But without its power and guidance early man could not have mastered his
practical difficulties as he has done, nor could man have advanced to the
higher stages of civilization.
1 George Peter Murdock (1897- ), world reknown ethnographer.
2 Ralph Linton (1893-1953), best known for studies of enculturation
(maintaining that all culture is learned rather than inherited; the process
by which a society's culture is transmitted from one generation to the
next), claiming culture is humanity's "social heredity."
3 A washing or cleansing of the body or a part of the body. From the Latin
abluere, to wash away.
4 Marked by precise observance of the finer points of etiquette and formal
conduct.
5 It is worthy of note that since Prof. Miner's original research was
conducted, the Nacirema have almost universally abandoned the natural
bristles of their private mouth-rite in favor of oil-based polymerized
synthetics. Additionally, the powders associated with this ritual have
generally been semi-liquefied.
6 Tending to religious or other important functions.
7 A miracle-worker.
8 Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), famous cultural anthropologist best
known for his argument that people everywhere share common biological and
psychological needs and that the function of all cultural institutions is to
fulfill such needs; the nature of the institution is determined by its
function.