Exaggeration - What Does It Mean To Us?

  It’s fun to read pieces like “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema”. Really, it is. Even if one may not recognize that the Nacirema are actually “the American”. I remember reading this piece as a sophomore and finding it somewhat bizarre. I asked myself, “Who are the Nacirema? Is this a fictional piece?” But then, as soon as I attended the next Zoom–yes, this was in the Zoom era– and heard Mrs. Parks tell her second-hour class that this piece was meant to mock the daily lives and interests of Americans, I felt it all come together miraculously. The descriptions of our tendencies to trust doctors and surgeons with our lives and go to therapy so someone can listen to our problems were so bizarre that I didn’t even entertain the thought that maybe, just maybe, the Nacirema were just like us. 

Now that I look at this piece once more a year later, I see all the wonderful irony, satire, and exaggeration that Miner employed in a new lens. It’s not just bizarre–it’s planned out incredibly well. Past all the exaggeration, the reader can tell what Miner is trying to tell us: how menial our daily tasks may seem on the big scale to others and how anthropologists were indirectly isolating indigenous tribes of Africa from the rest of the cultures of the world. By using terms such as “ritual” and “the ‘listener’” to refer to daily tasks and therapists, Miner’s doing the same thing that he saw in the anthropological articles he read as a scholar and an anthropologist. 

Through this, I realized that exaggeration is not simply meant to entertain or keep readers reading. It’s meant to act somewhat as a sugarcoating for an issue that could possibly be very serious and hard to swallow–just so that the information doesn’t go down the hatch too roughly.

  An exaggeration of how I felt last semester.