Eat A Cake

After reading Horace Miner's piece Body Ritual Among the Nacirema, I was enlightened by an idea I never really gave much thought to. He writes about the barbaric practices of the primitive Native Americans. He discusses how the people follow these rituals of the Nacirema without much reason. Their "unique" mouth-rites are just "daily body ritual[s]" performed by everyone. Miner also points out their obsession over their shrines. This is parallel to the various day-to-day "rituals" we Americans practice today. In fact, Nacirema is just American spelled backwards. From there, it can be concluded that Miner's purpose was to mock the hygiene, medical, and daily life practices in our American culture today. 

Humans spend hours a week in their shrines, or bathrooms, to clean up in their "holy water," brush their teeth with "certain magical powders" on a "small bundle of hog hairs." The significance of teeth hygiene is crazy in our society. We have rows after rows of different types of toothpaste(fluoride toothpaste, anti-calculus toothpaste, whitening toothpaste, anti-plaque toothpaste, etc.) sold in our stores. We go to our dentists routinely for mere check-ups. Also we blindly accept our medicine and prescriptions from our "medicine men." There's so much medicine that we just use because it's prescribed. This exemplifies how we humans are oblivious to our surroundings and just follow through because those acts are commonly practiced. 

Even though we appear to be much more civilized than the Nacirema, the practices we follow have the same foundation. People should stop being so stressed about looking good and maybe pay a little more attention to the "why's" or other enjoyable highlights in life, like eating desserts :)) (I tried)