The Nacirema and the New Englanders

 

Reading “Consider the Lobster” was an entertaining–yet somewhat bizarre–way to highlight the hypocrisy within American culture regarding the consumption of seafood like lobsters. However, unlike “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema”, David Foster Wallace employs an educational, yet blunt tone reminiscent of someone explaining a bizarre concept to an outsider, not a fellow outsider doing the explaining themselves. This is most evident in lines such as when Wallace describes more traditional recipes for cooking lobster. He writes that “a detail so obvious that most recipes don’t even bother to mention it is that each lobster is supposed to be alive when you put it in the kettle” (670), which is a foreign concept to many of us, especially as Midwestern Americans who most likely don’t cook lobster ourselves frequently. However, his passive-aggressive and somewhat ironic tone here lets us know of an obvious reality that is so detached from our own. It’s almost as if we are the anthropologists learning about the Nacirema while reading this essay–and from one of the Nacirema themselves, no less! 

Because we read “Consider the Lobster” in such close succession with “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema,” I feel that both essays’ styles and purposes were enhanced together because of the similarities and differences they both seem to bring out of one another. It’s almost the same situation, just told by different points of view on different aspects of the American–or Nacirema, depending on which essay you’d like to see through the eyes of– culture and customs.