In the world, there are lots of
tribes and each of them has its own tradition. While many traditions have some
characteristics in common, still lots of them are different. In the case of
some traditions, people called them weird and barbarous. The author of this
passage shows similar attitude to Nacirema tribe while he describes Nacirema's
body rituals. I can't sure that those body rituals are normal, still the
author's attitude has problem. In fact, we need to know what is
"normal" or not.
To say more about this, we can call
this "cultural relativity". In the passage, you can see that the
author says Nacirema’s culture as barbarous or says how they have managed to
exist with such burden. In addition, in the last paragraph, he/she refers “our
high places of safety in the developed-civilization”. These shows that the
author can’t afford Nacimera body rituals as their tradition but just an
uncivilized behavior. There is no such standard that only high-civilized
culture has the meaning as tradition. I think the author should have shown more
acceptable attitude towards other cultures.
However, all things that I wrote above are not the important thing. With a close observation, you can find that “Nacimera” is symmetric with “American”. Because of this, we should think more about the author’s message which he/she wants to give us. While Nacimera people are less civilized, America is the most powerful country in the world with high-civilized society. While Nacimera people believe magic, on the other hand Americans depend on science.
I can’t sure that I totally understand the author’s purpose to write this, but these are my opinions. Because America is powerful and has high-tech, the author’s attitude towards Nacimera people might be the attitude of American themselves.
