MSU Body Ritual Among the Nacirema

MSU Body Ritual Among the Nacirema

part 1

https://msu.edu/~jdowell/miner.html

Compose posting on the main points rendered in Horace Miner’s article “Body Ritual among the Nacirema.”

3 paragraphs ill tip you hehe

PART 2

Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish born British social anthropologist who conducted his fieldwork among the Trobriand islanders in the beginning of last century is widely credited as the anthropologist who introduced ethnography as a scientific enterprise. Malinowski maintained that in order to understand the native point of view, the ethnographer has to immerse totally in the culture he/she intends to study. Total immersion, he maintained further, requires participant-observation, the technique of learning a people’s culture through social participation and personal observation. Simply put, participant-observation requires eating food of the people being studied, learning how to speak and behave acceptably, and personally experiencing their habits and customs.

However, some of the photographs of Malinowski’s actual fieldwork reveal a rather different scenario (see the photographs of Malinowski’s fieldwork in the PowerPoint presentation on ‘Doing Cultural Anthropology’) in which the imposing figure of Malinowski clad in his European clothes and shoes can be seen interacting with natives.

Was he preaching something that he himself has never practiced? Or, is ethnography a defective method to begin with?