A View to my Exotic Origins

I just finished a required reading in SOC 120, the article "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" by Horace Miner. The Nacirema people were a little-known tribe in the Antiles archipelago by the Caribbean Sea to the south and the Gulf of Mexico to the Northwest. I am glad the author did not call the Nacirema tribe Indians but instead  North American tribe. Nacirema is actually American read backwards.

I felt like I was reading an American anthropologist' perspective on a culture that could have been mine. I found the fascination of an outsider to a foreign culture more interesting that the bizarre practice of the Nacirema women he was describing where they bake their heads in small ovens for about an hour.

"What are your general thoughts on the article?" Ursula asks.
"The article seems to be about Americans. Nacirema backwards is American." Jessica Doyle points out.
I reply to Jessica Doyle's comment.
I seem to be getting your point, Jessica. The article is the simply the dyslexic way of looking at how Americans deal with their bodies.  In the article, I feel like I am simply reading an American anthropologist' perspective on a foreign culture. I find the fascination of an outsider such that of the author more interesting than the practices of Nacirema (read backwards as American) people. While the practices described seem primitive and exotic to the author, to me, these practices have their own modern counterparts. The holy mouth men are now called dentists and hygienists; the latipso is the medical examination room; and  the listener would be the modern day clinical  psychologists. Long before the invention of dental floss, there were hog hairs.

I stopped reading the article when the author pointed out "the gleam in the eye of a holy mouth man as he jabs around into the exposed nerve". Finding the Nacirema tribal practices having sadistic and masochistic tendencies seem to me an easy and unfair judgment made by an outsider to a foreign culture. In the US people would have tattoos, piercings and would go under the knife for anything: self-expression, to enhance their image or just to belong or be cool. Limiting intercourse to the phase of the moon is also nothing new to devout Catholics who would not go for artificial birth control because of the dictates of the holy men in the Catholic church. Catholics practice the natural family planning method, nothing lunar but close.

The article even if it could have just been a joke reminds me a book I recently read.  It is a book by a Japanese author, Koji Suzuki.  Paradise!

The author has no relations to the makers of Vitaras and Forenzas. In the only book of his that I have read so far, he weaved his story from the prehistoric distant lands where modern day Asians in America come from. I am quite familiar about legends when there were land bridges between islands  across the Pacific. I have read about Native  Americans coming all the way from Asia by the Bering Strait along the northern part of the  Pacific coast in a series of migrations. Suzuki is definitely referring to people from Mongolia, now a landlocked country in east and central Asia bordering Russia to the north and China to the south. Scholars dispute how long these people from Mongolia have been in North America . Some say 25, 000 years based on evidence while others counted less years and made it 12, 500 basing on their own evidences.

I take interest on migration patterns of Asians to North America