The paradox of Horace Miner’s article, “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” (first written in 1956), still strikes my heart, to this day, with the profoundness of the anthropologist’s favorite concept: cultural relativism.
In the words of Anthropologist Fans Boaz, cultural relativity is the principal that “civilization is not something absolute, but … is relative, and … our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes.” In short, it is the idea that we cannot understand another’s culture if we do not first recognize that our own way of thinking affects our abilities of perception. We must, according to this concept, learn the underlying beliefs and activities of a people in terms of their own individual culture, before we can truly study them without the cloudiness of judgement or bias.
Miner’s powerfully connotative language and scholarly overtones hide the riddle between the lines, so if you, like myself, didn’t understand the satirical irony after the first read through, you are not alone- that only further demonstrates the pungency of cultural relativity, which I’ll try to illuminate afterwords… Continue reading
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