Anthropology and Ethnocentrism

I've discovered that just about everything has something to do with everything else. So anthropology, which I'm taking a class in, can teach me something about my own spiritual condition. Here is a journal entry I wrote about something I learned about myself in reading my anthropology textbook:

I recently read a cultural anthropology article assigned for Missions Anthropology that made me laugh so hard I sobbed over it. It told the story of the bizarre body ritual practices among the Nacirema, how they have shrine rooms for certain bodily practices, daily ritual ablutions in a holy found, how witch doctors give them papers with magic writings which they exchange for holy substances they think will give health and which they keep in a charm box in the holy shrine, about pathological mouth-rituals without which they believe their mouths will decay, about the sadism demonstrated by holy-mouth-men who make holes in their teeth, about the masochistic urges which lead men to lacerate their faces and women to bake their heads in ovens, about temples sick people go to presided over by vestal maidens in ritual garb and thaumaturges who strip them naked and make them lie on hard beds for days and weeks, though only if they can make large gifts to the custodian of the temple, about the hatred of the people for their bodies and the lengths they go to to try to change them, about ritual fasts to make fat people thin and ritual feasts to make thin people fat, and the earnest desire to have an ideal form outside the range of human variation, and on occasion, when some women have achieved a stage of pleasing distortion, they let people look at them for a fee. The extent to which they are focused on the body is, apparently, bizarre among cultural standards.
So I was reading along complacently, quite prepared to be astonished and shocked by this peculiar people group, with that sort of superior distaste one can easily get when reading about a culture that seems primitive and superstitious, though I didn’t exactly get why the writer didn’t seem to approve of a few of these practices which seemed quite sensible. I mean, these Nacirema have devised a method of ridding themselves of demons and curses by sitting and talking with a witch-doctor about their pasts. Surely that sounds like what we do with psychiatrists and so on. They’re really quite clever.
Then as I got to the end and read about sexual practices being quite hidden and taboo and how they often try to prevent conception with certain magical practices and how many don’t nurse their infants, it suddenly all fell into place. Already beginning to laugh, I went back and looked at the title: “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema.” Nacirema. It’s American backward. Then I read the whole article over, convulsed in the most complete laughter I have experienced in a long time. Bathrooms, showers, doctors, prescriptions, dentists, perms, shaving, hospitals, nurses, supermodels, contraceptives. Of course I should have caught it at the beginning, when they talked about the great hero Notgnishaw who threw a piece of wampum across a river (crossing the Potomac) and cut down a cherry tree to reveal the Spirit of Truth. But I was so caught up in my cultural arrogance, studying the silly, superstitious ways of this culture that I completely missed it. And I think when I laughed so hard I cried that some of the tears were actually tears, for the clear realization of the absurdity and sadness of my culture that’s so obsessed with body image and doesn’t even realize it.
Ultimately, I think this is a very humbling article. It reveals the arrogance with which one can approach the study of other cultures. It also slyly pointed out the attitude with which many of these articles can be written, because the whole thing as very patronizing about the backward Nacirema. I know all about ethnocentrism and despise it when I see it, but I’ve never before seen it so thoroughly in myself. I think I’ve never before truly understood ethnocentrism and whatever its opposite is. You can theoretically accept the neutrality of culture or the good aspects of another culture or the bad aspects of your own without letting go of the insidious assumption that your own worldview is still best. It’s a very humbling thing to suddenly be given a view of your own culture in exactly the same way you view some other cultures. It’s an unusual and rare experience to be allowed to see it in so outside a way, like suddenly being able to step outside your body and look at it as you’ve never truly seen it before. It’s kind of a gift, really.