Remember the Naciremas?

Those of you who had Mrs. Smith for Honors English/World History in 7th grade would remember this very unusual, yet veracious article. If you have not seen this article before or have forgotten about it, click this link and read the article before you continue reading my post.

http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~thompsoc/Body.html

Many of us have argued the existence of a similar type of society as in Brave New World in our our world right now. In Brave New World, Huxley mentioned the existence of helicopters, soma, contraceptives, and bottle babies, which, do in fact, like Kevin Cabusora has mentioned in his recent post, exist in our society today. I agree with Kevin that the society Huxley has presented in his book is not far from our grasp. Some may disagree in that our society is moving towards the Huxleyan world, but we are still far from it. I am not surprised of the dissidence that the book has created amongst us since Aldous Huxley meant to do this in his book: to provoke different opinions about the book and analyze how we apply these opinions towards our own society.

Back to the article, what did you think of it? Were you astounded by the unusual and horrifying culture of the Naciremas? The torture and the oddities that these people practiced?

Spell N-A-C-I-R-E-M-A backwards...what do you think now? I know you could not be more aghast.

When I read the article about the Naciremas for the first time, I was horrified at how their society ran. After the realization that Nacirema actually stood for American, the shrines were bathrooms, and the holy mouth men were simply dentists, my conception of the article completely changed. My point is that Aldous Huxley and Horace Miner (author of the "The Body Rituals Among the Naciremas") have intentionally used a unique style of writing as not to confuse the readers per se but to elicit critical analyses and mixed interpretations of the written work. The author's style of writing, whether it be the use of anagrams (as in the article of the Naciremas) and horrifying imagery or sophisticated language and ambiguity (as in Brave New World), influences our opinions of the written work.