The Nacirema community has its distinct believes just as any other cultural group. They believe that human body is very essential for the continuity of a person. However, they believe that human body is susceptible to various evil spirits which cause diseases. For a person to be sick in the Nacirema community, his or her body must have been attacked by some devilish spirits.
Treatment in the Nacirema community is by exorcism which entails very crude and painful procedures but they do not see any problem. To them, pain is unavoidable while one is still living. In this regard, Nacirema people spend every day of their lives undertaking various rituals to get rid of the evil spirits.
They view a human body as being incapable of protecting itself from diseases and should be assisted by medicine men and herbalists. This is quite different from the society where I come from because we believe that at any given situation the body tries to fight foreign substances. Moreover, we believe that diseases do not necessarily mean that evil spirits have attacked the body.
Due to their believe that evil spirits attack the body hence making one sick, the Nacirema people believe in magic. Every person has to perform several rituals each day to protect themselves. It is important to note that to the Nacirema people, magic is part of life.
Magic is used to protect the body from evil spirits and at the same time to heal it from diseases when one is sick. People in this community have based their day to day lives on magic and elimination of it can lead to a complete breakdown in the social order. Medicine men, herbalists and other people who have magical abilities are highly respected because they are thought as being superior.
Nonetheless, the charms that the Nacirema use to heal and protect the body do not always work. To begin with, their teeth usually decay yet they conduct oral rituals every morning. On the same note, people still fall sick after all the protection charms that they use. Above all, when people fall sick and go to the temple to sick medication, very few of them survive.
It is ironical that the Nacirema people have not learnt that their rituals are not that effective as they think. Where I come from, we also have body rituals. We believe that the immune system of the body sometimes fails to properly protect the body from foreign substances. Moreover, we believe that divine intervention is necessary for one to live a complete life. In this regard, people usually go to church to seek the help of God in strengthening their souls.
This is more or less similar to the beliefs of the Nacirema people. On the same note, similar to the Nacirema rituals, we do have rituals to cleanse the mouth. We brush our teeth daily. Nonetheless, according to us there is no connection between the mouth and morality of a person. However, we differ with them because we do not believe that evil spirits need to be exorcised from the body.
The rituals that the Nacirema people undertake are weird. With all the civilization and given the continent from which they come from, it is not expected that they could still believe in magic. These rituals would shock people from other parts of the world to death. However, the Nacirema people do not view their rituals as beingodd.
Day in day out, they religiously follow what they think as being basic part of life. They wake up in the morning and do the morning rituals without fail. There has never been anyone who has stood up to complain about the absurdity of the rituals. To confirm that these people do not see anything funny in their rituals, they initiate their children into these rituals.
While the number of patients who survive from the temples is very low, people are still willing and work very hard to go into the temple when they fall sick. To a certain extent though, one might say that the Nacirema people know that their rituals are unusual. This is due to the fact that they conduct them with a high degree of secrecy that even the children do not get to know about them until initiation.
The Nacirema are people from America. It is quite crucial to know that the Nacirema are inhabitants of North America. Ironically, despite their neighbors being modernized they are not. They have for years clung to their rituals. They are surrounded by the Canadian Cree and Tarahumare of Mexico. This is an area which is surrounded by developed economies and people are relatively rich.
Their other neighbors include the Carib, the Arawak and the Yaqui. It has been argued that they migrated into this region from the East though this is subject to argument. Naturally, they are hardworking people and spend most of their time executing various economic activities.