Nacirema People Summary

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I found the reading about the Nacirema people to be very interesting, initially, I was unsure about the author's intentions. It seemed they were introducing the Nacirema people and slowly delving into the different rituals practiced by their culture. On the second page, I began to grasp the lack of fluidity between the explanations of different rituals.

While I have some familiarity with tribal societies conducting rituals and ceremonies, I have never encountered such practices within North America. One interesting aspect discussed in the reading was the taboo surrounding intercourse among the people, along with the unwillingness to accept conception or parturition. However, I did find this to be similar to the initiation rituals of the Awa …show more content…
What I found interesting were the rituals involving a “listener” which reminded me of the role of “confessors” in the Catholic Church, where individuals share their concerns and receive guidance.

Something new to me was the Nacirema cultural belief that the human body is inherently ugly and susceptible to disease due to natural tendencies. I found this statement to correlate to the section which described how women go through rituals to increase or decrease the size of their breasts. As well as those who have hypermammary development, they will go to different villages and allow the natives to stare at their breasts for a fee.

Nevertheless, even with all the interesting cultural beliefs of the Nacirema people, I found the paper to lack fluidity and coherence. If the paper had been separated with subheadings focusing on each type of ritual mentioned, I think it would have allowed for a better cohesive understanding of each ritual. The beginning started a bit weird and I thought this would have been more opinionative based. Most of the paper felt as if the author was writing as much as they could to not forget everything they had been told or seen by the Nacirema
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