As a human being,
endowed with the ability to interpret and predict others’ behaviors, we are
often obligated with the responsibility of using such capacity to add to the
great archive of knowledge contributing to the understanding of the human race.
A few, eager specimen of people with nothing but compassion towards the human
race dedicates in taking this burden and brings humanity to a higher level. One
example of this specimen is Mr. Menard, a teacher in KMLA who assiduously pursued
the duty for the rest of our society and his own academic pursuit. He conducted
an experiment about the level of cultural awareness in Korean students, taking
the sixty-seven students in the International Field as a sample group. The
experiment reveals the narrowness in which students view different cultures,
especially those concerning the tribal culture. This essay will focus on a
particular participant in the experiment, a fifteen-year old girl named Oh
Yae-Lim, to illustrate the process and the conclusion of the experiment.
A 10th
grader in KMLA, Oh Yae-Lim participated in the experiment without having been
informed beforehand about it. Upon entering the class, she was told that she’d
have to write an essay about a certain piece of writing, called Body Ritual Among the Nacirema. The given passage was about a tribal group in North America called ‘Nacirema’
and its peculiar custom. It was already famous for ‘Nacirema’ as a signifier of
‘American’, a satire of cultural prejudice and Americans’ lookism, but was
unknown to her. She was required to write a page-long reflection and submit it.
On the following week she was told that the passage was actually a sheer work
of fiction, ‘Nacirema’ standing for ‘American’ and its masochistic practices
for its obsession to beauty and health.
Reading Oh’s
essay, incomprehension of the tribe Nacirema is recognizable. On surface she makes an effort
to objectify the situation. She makes a criticism on the writers’ arrogance
towards other cultures, pointing out that his use of diction is rather an
effort not to look at the tribe’s culture seriously and recognize the functions
that the eccentric custom may serve to the society. She assumes that the
passage is of imperial origin, due to the fact that it was written in 1956, a
period where imperialism flourished. However, she denies that Narcirema is even
faintly similar to the modern culture, or within the reasonable range of
capitalist society. Throughout the essay, she keeps the two subjects parallel.
This behavior manifests her inner uneasiness about the Nacirema culture,
contradicting her stance supporting cultural relativism.
Her subconscious action of dividing tribal custom and common social
phenomenon can be seen as deriving from the concept of tribes as a ‘primitive
group’, where a separate law of moral should be applied. She is unable of
realizing the very likeness of Nacirema and her own capitalist society, though
hints are scattered throughout the passage implying the similarity. A very
developed market economy, painful treatment of patients, obsession to beauty through
means of surgery are all neglected, not being mentioned at all throughout the
writing. Similar tendency is observed in other students’ writings, with only a
minority of students realizing sarcasm and satire which the essay conveyed through
anagram of Nacirema.
A computation of the students’ essays reveals the poor level of
cultural awareness these students hold; while they are injected of the
injustice and narrow-sightedness of imperialism by education, they are unable
to take out the prejudice consisting the imperialism themselves, most
importantly unable of switching perspectives: that what they consider rational
may seem crude and vulgar in other perspective. This conclusion indicates the necessity
of future improvement in widening the scopes of perception, especially as
communication between countries is increasing at an unbelievable speed. In
order to successfully incorporate the next generation into a global society,
prejudice and fear towards unknown culture should be rid of.
