Step Away from the Bathroom Vanity

Insecure
It seems like the Nacirema people are constantly self conscious of their bodies. Their ideal body is unattainable. Their culture teaches them that if they left their bodies in their natural state, it would lead to decay and other miseries. This is ironic, however, since their rituals meant to benefit them keep their bodies in a constant state of decay and sickness. They so desperately seek what they do not have that they are blinded by it.

Lonely
This characteristic was not directly implied in the article but I think that this must be something that many of the Nacirema people feel. Mothers are not bonded to their children through nursing, children are afraid of what their parents will do them in pursuit of bodily perfection, parents are blamed for their children's problems, and married couples are to worried about their own bodies to be truly intimate with each other. Who do these people find closeness with if they can not have any intimacy between mother and child, husband and wife, or friends that they fear could abandon them because of their teeth?
  
Private
Each person's body ritual is personal and private. It seems to me like each person has their own slightly different ritual attempt different goals with different methods. They only truly expose themselves to the medicine men and are extremely secretive even to their own family.

Desperate
These people are desperate to achieve what they have been taught to perceive as good and desirable. They will do anything, no matter how painful or destructive, and believe anything, no matter how counter-intuitive, if they are given any glimmer that it will make them clean, desirable, or safe.

Ignorant
I truly mean this word for what it means. They do not know any better so they destroy themselves because they do not understand how to achieve the bodily perfection they so desperately desire. If they only knew how the human body really works, and how dangerous and counter-productive their superstitious rituals were, they might change. But they are blinded by their desperation, and are misled by sadistic leaders, so that would be difficult.

I think I see where this article is going though. The Nacierma people are meant to be an example of what our body conscious culture could look like to someone who is not familiar with it. In anthropology, we need to be able to step back from what we know and observe people and their cultures with as blank of a slate as possible. This can help us see the flaws in the ideas that we can cling to as normal due to how our own culture has shaped us.

Part B
1. I feel like quite a bit of what I said is actually applicable to most Americans. However, the hypothetical example of the Nacirema is a bit hyperbolic compared to American culture- at least, the American culture that I'm familiar with. Also, there was a very large emphasis put on the "Nacirema" people's blind trust in sadistic superstitions, which were meant to represent our faith in hospitals, doctors, pharmacists, and nurses. This I also feel is slightly misleading because in the Nacirema essay, it was frequently implied that there was absolutely no support for going to a hospital, or subjecting yourself to medical procedures because in the end people just die in hospitals anyway. In actuality, we go to hospitals because we know that there are people there who have thoroughly studied and learned about the human body and how to best preserve it, due to scientific study. The bit about dentists randomly drilling holes into perfectly good teeth was amusing- I don't think I've ever met a single person that has had MORE dental decay thanks to frequent dental visits.

2. Perhaps my choice of the word "ignorant" is a bit ethnocentric. It could very well be that what I see as a lack of proof and factual evidence for a belief or idea that another culture holds to, they might actually have a greater understanding than I actually know. However, for the most part, I feel that my words were actually accurate observations. I'm pretty sure that if you asked one of the people described in that essay "Are you content with your appearance?" they would say no. Same goes with most all the other words other than ignorant. I think that essay itself was ethnocentric. It fixated an entire culture on one of its aspects and portrayed it in a negative, sadistic/masochistic, twisted way. THAT is ethnocentrism.

3. I think maybe "misguided" or "mislead" would be a better substitute for "ignorant" because the people are only following what they have been told is good and beneficial. Ignorant is too broad a word to accurately describe it.

4. I can see how crucial it is to avoid ethnocentric thoughts regarding other cultures because that can make it easy to fixate on a few aspects of a certain culture and use it to characterize them as a whole. That's what leads to things like stereotyping. Like I said, I think that were the Nacierma people real, the author of that essay could be described as ethnocentric. They chose on aspect, "the body ritual", of a culture and gave it a very clear spin (negative) and presented it that way. Ethnocentrism can make it too easy to glorify or despise based on only a few traits of a culture. I think that it is absolutely impossible for a cultural anthropologist to be completely free from ever carrying bits of ethnocentrism with them in their studies because we are all human and are all already molded by the culture we grew up in. However, I do think it is possible for them to fight it, and keep fairly well unbiased by reminding themselves of the temptation to insert their culture's thoughts on another.