Nacirema

Reminds me of “Motel of the Mysteries” by David Macaulay [1], who also wrote “The Way Things Work.” It tells the story of a future archeologist who unearths a motel and goes about completely misidentifying the purposes of various motel artifacts, such as claiming the toilet seat cover was a ceremonial headdress. Cracked me up as a kid, and the art is beautiful! Great gift for anyone who has young kids.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;David_Macaulay" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;David_Macaulay</a>

In 1996 some crazy folks produced a very dark, yet extremely funny, satirical mockumentary about Austria&#x27;s culture in the style of western documentaries about Africa, from the perspective of a rather serious all-african documentation movie crew:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt0109689&#x2F;?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt0109689&#x2F;?ref_=fn_al_tt_1</a><p>As a european, i found that one hillarious! They reversed all the cliché things, and express a lot of wonder about bizarrely presented austrian culture.

In the same vein: The Sacred Rac <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;laulima.hawaii.edu&#x2F;access&#x2F;content&#x2F;user&#x2F;millerg&#x2F;ANTH_200&#x2F;A200Unit1&#x2F;Sacredrac.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;laulima.hawaii.edu&#x2F;access&#x2F;content&#x2F;user&#x2F;millerg&#x2F;ANTH_...</a>

Reminds me of BabaKiueria: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt0166032&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt0166032&#x2F;</a><p>(Ignore the current user-submitted &#x27;storyline&#x27; entry which doesn&#x27;t represent the film fairly.)

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikisource.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirema" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikisource.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirem...</a><p>&gt; There remains one other kind of practitioner, known as a &quot;listener.&quot; This witchdoctor has the power to exorcise the devils that lodge in the heads of people who have been bewitched. The Nacirema believe that parents bewitch their own children. Mothers are particularly suspected of putting a curse on children while teaching them the secret body rituals. The counter-magic of the witchdoctor is unusual in its lack of ritual. The patient simply tells the &quot;listener&quot; all his troubles and fears, beginning with the earliest difficulties he can remember. The memory displayed by the Nacirema in these exorcism sessions is truly remarkable. It is not uncommon for the patient to bemoan the rejection he felt upon being weaned as a babe, and a few individuals even see their troubles going back to the traumatic effects of their own birth.<p>It&#x27;s interesting how poorly this has aged.

The article sets out to explain the use of the term to allow more objective introspection but then only gives satirical examples. That&#x27;s a bit disappointing.<p>You&#x27;d think reframing your own country&#x27;s&#x2F;culture&#x27;s actions, behavior, politics or religion in intentionally alienated language (i.e. renaming key figures and concepts) would have some more practical examples.<p>The idea reminds me of the solution to fair sharing of a cake: have the person selected to cut it up go last when taking slices so they&#x27;re incentivized to make all slices the same size. By being unable to benefit from any bias in the result (and in effect, potentially only being harmed by it) the person is forced to distance their immediate desire to have more cake from the act of dividing up the cake. Masking the country or cultural identity likewise (ideally) allows analyzing aspects of it without introducing in-group bias.<p>Of course I&#x27;m not sure simply spelling everything backwards is sufficient, but the article doesn&#x27;t elaborate beyond this rather obvious use in satire.

&gt; <i>The neologism attempts to create a deliberate sense of self-distancing in order that American anthropologists might look at their own culture more objectively.</i><p>I feel as though there should be a way to apply this depersonalization technique when attempting to de-escalate political and cultural discussions which have seized up due to tribalism.

Reminds me of Twitter user @gathara who adopted a Western style of talking about African politics during the US election. Stuff like - <i>&quot;observers from the African Union urged calm amid worries existing ethnic tensions could break into violence in the oil-rich North American nation. Speaking from the coastal capital of Washington DC, incumbent President Trump said today...&quot;</i>

I&#x27;ve often wondered how Americans see the world. I have a lot of family and friends from there, and something about meeting them is striking.<p>The rest of the world gets an enormous amount of information from America. I&#x27;ve never lived in the US, but I know all the states. I couldn&#x27;t write out all the counties in the UK. I know more US supreme court justices than combined from all other countries. I know the presidents going back 100 years, which I can&#x27;t say I know even for the countries I&#x27;ve lived in for decades. I know some names of people who play the local sports there, the ones that aren&#x27;t played in Europe. I even know brand names of businesses that don&#x27;t have a European presence. This is all stuff outside of celebrity culture, where of course you get a huge number of US singers and actors.<p>What happens when you go to Europe and everybody knows a bunch of stuff about your home country? Does it surprise you? Do you ever run into people expecting you to know how the economy of Sweden was doing in the 90s? Or what the Departements of France are?

is it coincidence that &quot;Nacirema&quot; is &quot;American&quot; spelled backwards?