“NACIREMA” AND “AH-HA MOMENT” Peter Wogan Introduction Do you remember how you felt when you first realized who the Nacirema really are? What follows is a set of strategies that will give each of your students a chance to have that same “ah-ha moment.” These strategies are based on Horace Miner’s famous 1956 essay, “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema.” The basic idea is to create “ah-ha moments” by turning Miner’s essay into a guessing game. The instructor reads Miner’s essay out loud in class and the students have to guess what culture Miner’s essays refers to; then the students write and read their own Nacirema paragraphs about some aspect of American culture and everyone tries to guess what these paragraphs refer to. Not only do these exercises create suspense and laughter, but they impart lessons about insider and outsider perspectives and the value of studying American culture. Figuring out which culture Miner’s essay refers to might not sound like a tough guessing game to fellow anthropologists, who are so thoroughly familiar with Miner’s essay, but, in my experience, students do, in fact, find this to be a tough guessing game. During the eight years in which I’ve done this exercise, no student has figured out that Nacirema = America before hearing the 4th paragraph of the essay, and many still don’t get it well into the 2nd page. In fact, a colleague told me that she gave this essay to her dentist, and even he, the Holy Mouth Man himself, didn’t realize after reading it that the essay was about America! Surely there are still students out there who will find this essay mystifying, which is the perfect set-up for the eventual ah-ha moment. Instructors themselves also stand to be surprised and enlightened by the students’ own Nacirema pieces. Appropriate classes for this exercise include any course, at any level, that includes study of American culture, such as at the beginning of the culture segment of a four-field introductory course or an introductory cultural anthropology course. Class size is of some importance when it is time for students to read their own Nacirema pieces out loud in class. Class time required for the entire exercise is about 90 minutes. Just the reading of “Nacirema” (either Miner’s or the students’) can be done in about 20 minutes. Reading “Nacirema” (15 minutes) In order to work as a guessing game, you have to make sure that the students don’t know beforehand that Miner’s essay is about American culture. The joke doesn’t work without this set-up, so you have to do the following:
Make sure the syllabus for this day does not mention “American culture.”
When making photocopies of Miner’s essay (one for each student), white out any material that clarifies that America is the focus of the essay.
I recommend using one of the essay versions available on the internet, especially the one cited in the References below. Cut or white out everything up until the 5th paragraph, which begins “The fundamental belief….” This way you will have eliminated the give-aways in earlier paragraphs (mention of North American location, 2nd paragraph, and “highly developed market economy,” 3rd paragraph). If you start with the 5th paragraph on the web version cited below (i.e., starting with “The fundamental belief…”), you won’t need to do any more tinkering or whiting out. (If you do use the original Miner essay, be sure to also white out the sentence that says “According to Nacirema mythology, their nation was originated by a culture hero, Notgnihsaw….”)
You should be able to reduce the whole essay to one double-sided copy.
When you’re in class and ready to begin, say something like the following: “We’re going to read a short piece now about a very interesting culture, and I just want to see if you can figure out which culture it is. Some of you might have even read this essay for another class; if so, please, do not say the name of the culture, so everyone else will have a chance to keep thinking about it. Others might have heard about this culture on TV or in the news, but don’t worry: if you don’t know the culture, that’s fine. So as we read this, please raise your hand when you think you know which culture is being analyzed.”
Now give all students in the room a copy of the Nacirema essay. Then read the essay out loud, paragraph by paragraph.
When the first hands go up, ask if those students are pretty sure they know the culture. When the students start smiling, you can always tell they have figured it out. Still, if you want to give them some confirmation and further pique other students’ curiosity, ask them to jot down their guesses in their notebooks, then walk over and silently inspect their written answers, saying to the whole class, “OK, good, some of you have heard of this culture, but let’s keep reading, to give others a chance to guess.”
Keep reading. When about a third or half the class has raised their hands and the giggles are rising, ask those in the know to shout out the name of the culture. Once they say “America,” the rest of the class will experience a sense of vertigo, and you will almost hear the synapses going off as the meaning of what they’ve just been reading suddenly clicks into place (Nacirema = America spelled backwards, far away = right here, etc.).
Discussion of “Nacirema” (20 minutes)
Here are some things to discuss at this point:
What does the “holy mouth man” represent? The “hog bristles”?
Is this one of those jokes that has a deeper meaning? For example, what about when Miner says “They also believe that a strong relationship exists between oral and moral characteristics”? You can discuss why boyfriends and girlfriends will generally not share toothbrushes, yet they will kiss and thereby exchange germs; explore how this behavior, which is irrational and contradictory from the point of view of germ theory, can be explained by American cultural notions: tooth brushing as a ritual that delineates personal space, the mouth as moral self, etc.
Give them another famous riddle: “What’s the last thing a fish discovers?” (Answer: water.) Compare water to culture, as something ubiquitous, something you don’t usually have to think about. Present such thinking as an anthropological challenge. Stress the second half of the promise of anthropology: “To make the strange familiar and the familiar strange.”
If there’s time, finish reading “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema,” or have them do that before the next class.
Students Create Their Own Nacirema Piece (15 minutes) Now it’s time to have the students to write up their own Nacirema-style descriptions of some aspect -- any aspect -- of American culture. This can take time, especially since the students often get absorbed in this creative challenge, so there are two options: a) Have the students write their mini-Naciremas for the next class, or b) Let them write their miniNaciremas on the spot, during the next 10 to 15 minutes in class. Either way, the writing directions are the same, and they can be found in Appendix A: Nacirema Writing. If you have them write about American rituals, be sure to stipulate that they be unusual, hidden rituals like showering, not standards like birthdays and Halloween so that classmates will have a harder time guessing their referent. Students Read Their Own Nacirema Piece (40 minutes) (This part can be the most fun of all.) Have students read their Nacirema paragraph out loud, one at a time, and stress that they shouldn’t reveal what their piece is describing. After the paragraph has been read, have the rest of the students guess what the writer was describing. It’s often hard to guess the writer’s focus due to the paragraph’s abstract language, brevity, and unpredictable choice of topic. But no matter how many students guess the writer’s focus, you can’t go wrong. Even if only a few students guess the
writer’s intended meaning, the rest of the students will be positioned for a sudden “ah-ha moment” when they hear the answer. And sometimes the “wrong” guesses are just as interesting and plausible as what the writer intended. In any case, there should be lots of laughs and surprises. (If you want to hear more thoughts about humor, surprise, anthropology, and teaching, see Wogan (2006)). After each revealed answer, praise some element of the student’s writing: an insight, an apt comparison, a good image or turn of phrase (e.g. “Zebra Man” for basketball referee, an authority figure who is, for some reason, made to look ridiculous). Students will also often throw in follow-up comments, and discussion of some particularly complicated insights may ensue. If you do not have enough time to have the entire class read Nacirema paragraphs, consider one of these options: a) only review one or two Naciremas as a whole class, then have students do the guessing game in small groups (about 5 to 15 minutes, 2 to 4 students per group); b) assign the Nacirema writing as homework, collect the homework in the next class, and only read out a few samples in that class period or the next one; c) have only volunteers read out their paragraphs, based on the amount of time you have. Wrapping Up At the end, sum up and segue to your upcoming classes. Explain that they have all just learned, through direct experience (the best way to get at this), a few important anthropological lessons:
American culture can be interesting, worthy of analysis; insider and outsider perspectives are both valuable, and their boundaries can get blurry; the best analyses contain flashes of insight like Nacirema, but they also require deeper, more systematic research. You need both insight and research, so the rest of this unit will now go into more depth on X (fieldwork, some aspect of American culture, etc.), while also honoring flashes of insight. Warn them about students and researchers who assume that if they just check out 30 books from the library or spend months living in another culture, they are, ipso facto, good scholars and their work is done. The truth is that some Nacirema paragraphs contain more insight than a 50-page senior thesis, if not a whole book.
References Cited Miner, H. 1956 “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema.” American Anthropologist 58: 503507. Available at http://spot.pcc.edu/~rwolf/miner.html Wogan, P. 2006 “Audience Reception and Ethnographic Film: Laughing at First Contact,” Visual Anthropology Review 22: 14-33.
APPENDIX A: NACIREMA WRITING DIRECTIONS 1) Write about any aspect of American culture (e.g. any ritual, sport, belief, or practice). 2) Make the piece only 1 paragraph in length. (If it were longer, we wouldn’t have time to read it out in class.) Type it up with standard font and margins. 3) Write in the language style of “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” (scientific jargon, big words describing an ostensibly exotic culture). 4) Make it hard for the rest of the class to guess what you’re describing. 5) Include some insight into this aspect of American culture, a novel way of looking at this cultural phenomenon. (If you’re writing during class, you may not have enough time to fully meet this challenge; just start with #1 through 4, and see if you can do # 5 as well.)
