ok so Miner is being ironic in this article. He describes the Nacirema rituals as involving magic, and describes the people as masochistic, while the "magic" healers are sadistic. Because of our ethnocentricity in our own culture, it is hard for anthropologists to have a fully objective viewpoint of other cultures, and the witchcraft described in this article is an extreme parody of this.
The witch doctor "listener" sounds exactly the same as psychologists in America, except Miner includes little things like mothers cursing their children from birth, and that being the reason that their issues stem from childhood. OF COURSE peoples issues are going to stem from their childhood; that is when the mind is most malleable!
You could say that Americans are even more guilty of this belief in magic. The "listeners" in our country usually find the best solution for "exorcising" our demons is in pill form (ritalin, prozac, etc etc). If that is not magical, I dont know what is.
I thought the holy mouth men thing was funny, because they really dont sound that much different from dentists, but the way that Miner "objectively" describes them totally tries to present them in a different light, making his description all the more subjective. He talks about the "exorcism of evil" from their mouths and even talks about the "crazed" look in the "mouth mens" eyes, suggesting their rapacious appetite for blood and causing pain. crraazy.
One more obvious parallel to our society is the described general dissatisfaction with breast shape (and the procedures to change these percieved flaws) and the women "afflicted with almost inhuman hypermammary development" who make a living by permitting the natives to stare at them for a fee. Umm can you say STRIP CLUB? Plastic surgery, anyone? He is saying that the Nacirema do this because of their hatred toward the body, but we do the same damn thing in America because we are horny perverts.
The way this culture is described is so ridiculous that it has to be laden with biting commentarty on how Americans place themselves above these "magic-ridden" cultures, because no credible anthropoligist would ever be this ethnocentric.
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depends on what you mean by "credible"...that dude that Miner quotes at the end of the essay (Malinowski) is one of the biggest names in anthropology. He wants to make sure that other anthro peeps won't just mistake his article as referring to radical extremists in the field, but to most of those operating in the field at the time.
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