Horace Miner in Applying Anthropology (2012: )

 Eat & Drink  Sleep  Language & Communication  Procreate  Clothing  Tools  Expel  Food: You eat that?  Sleep: See “Slumber’s Unexplored Landscape”  Language: That just sounds like blah, blah, blah  Procreate: How can you marry her?  Put some real clothes on  Tools: That’s a silly way to do that  Expel: I can’t go there… ©2013, Jason Antrosio,

 Mouth obsession and teeth (201)  Gouging, sadism ( )  Face scraping (202)  Bake heads in ovens (202)  Latipso, keep going (202)  Shame, especially around reproductive functions (202)  Body issues and rituals  “between the Canadian Cree … and Mexico” (200)  Nacirema  American  Dentists  Shaving  Baking heads—from 1956  Latipso  Ospital  “going from village to village and permitting the natives to stare at them for a fee” (202) ©2013, Jason Antrosio,

 Recent medical studies confirm importance of placebo—or “nocebo”—effect  Ideal body form “is virtually outside the range of human variation” (202)  Barbies  and idealized male builds  What if Miner had seen tanning beds? Even stranger than baking heads…  Miner’s main point: counter common ethnocentrism with anthropology’s cultural relativism ©2013, Jason Antrosio,

 All people are part of history and change over time  All people have variation within group  People are interconnected  So when we read about others  Do not assume they are frozen in time  Careful of over-generalizing assumptions

Renato Rosaldo, Culture & Truth (1989:52):  “In retrospect, one wonders why Miner’s article was taken simply as a good-natured joke rather than as a scathing critique of ethnographic discourse. Who could continue to feel comfortable describing other people in terms that sound ludicrous when applied to ourselves?” ©2013, Jason Antrosio,

 Miner’s cute story of we-are- weird-to-them overlooks history and power  Miner’s language  “effaces the colonial encounter through which we have developed notions of ‘witch doctors’ and ‘exotic rituals.’ Miner’s whimsical frame also denies stratification and power dynamics on the American end”  Michaela di Leonardo, Exotics at Home (1998:61) ©2013, Jason Antrosio,