Introduction and Horace Miner

Hi! Let me introduce myself. My name is Taylor Ream and I am from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Anyone who has watched Breaking Amish or heard of this area knows that it is mostly cornfields and farms and is famous for being the home of the Amish. I graduated from Ephrata High School last June and my favorite subject in high school was always science. I especially loved biology and human physiology and it is for this reason that I started looking into professions in the medical field. When I first came to Temple in the fall, I was a Biology major because I knew I liked that subject and I could use my degree to go on to medical school. Two weeks into the first semester I realized how much I dislike math, in particular calculus, which happens to be a huge part of a Biology program and that is when I decided on being a Kinesiology major. I now love what I am studying and plan to go on to physical therapy school to get my doctor of physical therapy degree after graduation. From this mosaics course, I hope to gain a greater appreciation for a wider range of subject material. The only kinds of books I normally read are happily-ever-after romance novels, so reading the books assigned in this class will be drastically out of my comfort range and will hopefully broaden my horizons.

The first reading assignment we were given, The Body Rituals of the Nacirema by Horace Miner, already was a step in the right direction towards achieving my goals for the course. Although I was less than excited to read the essay based off the title and publication date, I found it to be very interesting and thought provoking. I am almost embarrassed to admit that I read the entire essay through, commenting to myself the whole way about how barbaric and weird these people are, without understanding the underlying secret. It was only after looking up Nacirema on Google hoping to find some pictures of the strange tribe that I learned that Nacirema is American backwards. I felt relatively stupid for not picking up on this myself, but after I read this I was able to easily pick out the parallels between our society and the "Nacirema". This piece is incredibly well-written, criticizing the beauty-centered habits of Americans by explaining them in more extreme term and out of context. It is incredible how image conscious we are and skeptical of our bodies. I never really thought about how much discomfort we put ourselves through in the name of beauty and health. The paragraph where Horace talks about the Nacirema putting a bundle of hairs in their mouths particularly disgusted me until I realized he was referring to the simple act of teeth brushing. My perspective completely changed from being disgusted with the thought of doing this, to being disgusted at the thought of NOT doing this! Horace Miner's essay on the Nacirema made me realize that perhaps I can enjoy reading something other than brainless love stories....