Your Culture, My Culture

 Before writing, I confess that unfortunately I already have read about Nacirema before on the internet and known about it, thus I was not so shocked or surprised. Reading my in-class, I just clarified the truth of Nacirema there. For that reason, I will focus on how it could affect the way you view or interact with people from different cultural backgrounds, even though Mr. Menard told us to primarily focus on the moment of realization when you knew what the piece actually was.

Reading the article named Body Ritual among the Nacirema, I’m sure that most of the students thought about how the customs of this tribe called Nacirema are weird, and so did I when I first met it. However, there was no tribe such as Nacirema, but it was just a form of wordplay by spelling ‘American’ backward. This means, in a different point of view from us, anything we think that is very natural can be seen weird. In other words, some other cultures we think that is weird can be natural and reasonable enough in the position of the members belong to that culture. This is the main idea of cultural relativism. In cultural relativism, culture is not something that can be understood by someone outside of that culture. It never is understood because culture is formed by so many kinds of environments of the society. Therefore a person who was born and lived in different environments is impossible to understand that culture.

This interesting and weird document about Nacirema suggest us a great example of why cultural relativism is needed. Experiencing this ‘gestalt shift’ which is a word used when the object is same but the cognition of people is changed, anyone might be surprised pretty a lot. I emphasize again that no culture is natural to anyone and we cannot understand the other cultures. Hence, the only thing we can do is to respect. To respect other cultures can be said that it is the key point of cultural relativism. By the article, I hope that everybody is motivated enough to respect other cultures.