Nacirema

1. Yesterday we were given an anthological report to read on a mysterious and self destructive culture. We read through the report and commented on all the customs of the culture and how strange we found them to be. As we read, images of what we assumed were natives of the country were displayed on a projector in front of us and it was accompanied by foreign, tribal sounding music. When we were finished reading the report and discussing what we thought of the culture we were told that the country was actually our own United States of America. When reading this report we were unable to identify the culture as our own because of the language used to describe the culture. For example in the report the culture is referred to as “self destructive” and “uncivilized” and because we would never consider our own culture to be like this it was impossible for us to assume anyone else would. We were also unable to recognize this because of the atmosphere we were in while reading the report which was set by the images we saw and the music we heard. These foreign things caused us to assume we had to be reading about a foreign country and so we did.
2. This reaction to the report we read suggests a lot about the Social Sciences like Psychology, Sociology and Anthropology. It suggests that a strength of these sciences is that they can be used to display the strange tendencies of any culture, even our own, and make us realize how destructive we are being as a society. However it also suggests that there are some faults with these sciences in the fact that most of the time the results of these sciences are designed to appeal to our society an d be accepted by us and therefore they may be biased against other cultures because that is what we as a society want to hear because we define our own culture by comparing it to the faults of other cultures to show how much better we are.