To most of us, hospitals are a place to help you when you’re in need or want to get healthy. But for the Nacirema, it’s quite the opposite. According to the Nacirema ritual article, they call hospitals a latipso, which is hospital spelt backwards without the ‘H’. They discuss and caricature the repulsive viewings on what they think goes on in hospitals (latipso’s), or what they think they do. I will now tell you how in Miner’s perspective, the body is ugly and how the body is dirty.
In the Nacirema point of view this is how they see hospitals. In the Nacirema ritual article they call the people who dehumanize other people medicine men.
The medicine men manage their sick patients dressed in costumes and headdress. The Nacirema also say how it’s rarity that patients actually come out of the latipso alive. They say the latipso is “where you go to die”. The Nacirema also say that adults are eager to go under the control of the medicine men.
Unless you can afford to give a “rich gift to the custodian”, you can’t be admitted into the latipso. Even if you have paid them, you will still have more to pay after you’ve fully recovered. The Nacirema avoid exposing their bodies, but at the latipso you are stripped of all your clothing.
They evaluate your body and bathe you in the latipso shrine, not considering where they’re touching or how they are violating you.
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The Nacirema say people go into shock when they realize they had lost their clothing privileges. Even though the men’s wives have never seen them in an excretory act, doesn’t mean no one else can. The “vestal maiden” makes him perform his “natural functions” in front of her. The Nacirema say on the other hand that females have to be nude and the medicine men can freely probe them wherever they please. The Nacirema say the medicine men torture their patients, and perform “ablutions”.
The Nacirema consider medicine men as jabbing their clients with needles, and impairing, and making them worse than they were. The Nacirema people are more conservative and keep to themselves. Their body is their temple and is sacred to them.
To sum it all up, the Nacirema people exaggerate, and make up assumptions on almost everything they see, and make things seem worse than they actually are. In our point of view this is how we see hospitals. The reasons of why the Nacirema rituals may seem bizarre to us is that we simply call medicine men doctors.
The doctors in our culture dress in uniform according to their work position. In a hospital, there’s always a chance that you’re going to die, and sometimes it’s too late for them to save you because you were too sick to begin with, or they made a mistake. But doctors do everything in their power to not let that happen and do all they can to make you sturdy enough to go home safely.
In a hospital, you have to pay for the time and services of the hospital and workers, but just because you don’t have the money doesn’t mean the workers won’t take care of you, we will find a way to help you and find a way for you to pay for their services.
The reasons doctors examine you is to see what’s causing the problem and what’s wrong so they can fix it. The nurses bathe you in a bathroom where it is private from the public if you are incapable of doing so. You also have the right to keep your clothes on, unless you’re told to take them off for a medical reason, in exchange, you are told to change into a gown in a private room. Usually for men, when you are asked to change into a gown is for a physical, or nurses trying to examine you for a logical or medical reason.
But for women being examined, if you are pregnant, this gives the doctor or nurses a reason to check on the baby and how things are coming along. Almost everyone goes through this at some point of their lives, and you are not judged or discriminated upon. When you are very sick and unable to take care of yourself and can’t do things on your own, it is the nurse’s job to take care of you. The nurses use a thermometer to check their patient’s temperature and give them food to help them heal and recover.
On the other hand, when doctors need to cure you or prevent you from a disease or illness, they insert needles to cure that disease, or make you immune to it to help you stay healthy. The reason all the Nacirema assumptions seem bizarre to us is because hospitals aren’t that extreme, or don’t seem that way to us. People strip their clothes and lather their bodies with a greasy like substance. They then lay in a bright spaceship for a little bit while the spaceship cooks them until people are golden brown, or burnt. But that’s not the only thing they do that’s strange.
They pour on their bodies a sticky honey like paste, and cover themselves with a sheet. The sheet is then ripped off of the people, tearing off a layer of skin which makes blood spill out, and you look as red as a tomato. These examples can be related to the two tenets of how the body is ugly, and dirty. The body is ugly because people look like disgustingly brown and red bloody creatures, which are mentally deranged. The body is dirty because of the repulsive, grotesque substances that are put on their bodies to have them be cooked, and peeled.
In summarization, the Nacirema see their bodies as a temple and is very sacred to them, and have great care for their bodies. But for us, we disrespect our bodies, and disregard what we’re actually doing to them. What seems to be normal to us may seem bizarre and strange to others who have never seen these sorts of actions or aren’t used to seeing it. The way the class is related to this paper is that everyone goes to the hospital or has been to one for some reason. Also, we don’t take care of our bodies, and mutilate them just to look good and feel good about ourselves.
Rituals of the Nacirema. (2018, Oct 10). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/paper-on-rituals-of-the-nacirema/
