Musings on the Culture of the Nacirema

I have long been interested in and carried out ethnographic fieldwork and historical investigations amongst the Kunac, the Eissua, the Iwik and, if much more limitedly, on other tribes beyond these three tribes. Despite my interest in all of these social and cultural groups most of my ethnographic, historical, and ethnological work has been done amongst that most exotic of tribes, the Nacirema. 

 

The Nacirema, as others who have studied the body rituals of this exotic tribe with its holy sticks and its magical substances which are rubbed and dabbed on their physical bodies and which they believe gives them cultural, including gender culture, magical power, and those who have assayed the ethnocentrisms of the Nacirema, with their grounding in a messianic, self-satisfied, and self-righteous sense of self and tribe, to note just a few, are fascinating. 

 

These body rituals and this messianic sense of chosenness and mission of the Nacirema are, of course, not peculiar to the Nacirema if we look etically and comparatively at human cultures and societies. They are also characteristic of the Kunac, the Eissua, and the Iwik and of human groups in general. What makes the sense of messianic chosenness among the Nacirema different from the similar messianisms of the Kunac, the Eissua, the Iwik, and most other human identity groups, however, is the linking, in Nacirema culture and society, of this messianism to large demographic size and to, as a consequence, immense economic, including technological, political, including military, and cultural power and imperial practise, whether of the economic, political, cultural, or geographic variety.

 

Recently I have been studying the cultures of the Nacirema's two dominant political totemic groups, the Tarcomed and the Nacilbuper. While the members of each of these totemic subtribes proclaim their difference from each other and assert emically that they are radically and irrevocably different from each other, they really aren't that different when one looks beyond a rhetoric whose function is group identity construction, group identity replication, and group boundedness. 

 

Both subtribes, for example, and despite somewhat changing demographics and ideology across time and space, share a common sense of messianic chosenness and mission, if with slight differences in meaning attached to the symbols, rituals, and language of both social and cultural groups. Both, for example, have long supported the imperial mission of the larger tribal group of which they are a part. Additionally, both share common and similar practises of social and cultural amnesia, in both their oral and literate forms, which paint not only their own subtribe as innocent, good or righteous, and on a holy mission from the divine, however they conceptualise the divine other, but also their tribe in general as innocent, good, and on a divine mission both on the home front and abroad. Finally, both, while claiming to be working for the common good, largely work for the good of the oligarchs who dominate the political, economic, and cultural life and social domains of Nacerimadom.

 

This rhetoric of emic cultural difference and the reality of etic cultural similarity, of course, is not peculiar to the Nacirema as I noted earlier. One also finds it, as I noted earlier, among the Kunac, the Eissua, and the Iwik. One, in fact, finds it among humans in general be they hunter-gatherers, small scale agriculturalists, large scale agriculturalists, industrialists, or postmodernists. It is, of course, this cultural similarity of humans groups despite the rhetoric of cultural difference that ethnologists explore and ferret out. And they do it despite the fact that most of the masses don't care about the scientific and comparative work they are engaged in because they, the socialised, demagogued, and propagandised masses, are inscribed in and magically enthralled by their culturally manufactured emic "realities". Sometimes, the seduced masses even demonise social scientists for doing their important scientific work because they perceive it as politically and ideologically incorrect profanation of the sacred myths they hold to be holy and true. And the human world turns.