Social-Science Fiction: The Genesis and Legacy of Horace Miner's “Body Ritual among the Nacirema”

Abstract

In this article, I present the first comprehensive examination and analysis of what remains, nearly sixty years after its initial publication, not only one of the most frequently read articles in the history of American Anthropologist but also one of the more widely circulated English-language pieces of 20th-century social science. Combining archival research at Horace Miner's home institution, interviews with family members and former colleagues, and examination of over 50 partial or full anthological reproductions of the piece spanning five decades, I examine the genesis and reception of the work with an eye to unpacking the reasons for its extraordinary longevity. My conclusions are, first, that the work has been read in a surprisingly atomized rather than holistic manner, resulting in a misunderstanding of Miner's likely intentions. Second, the work has accumulated diametrically opposed readings as either illustrative of or, since the late 1960s, radically skeptical of basic ethnographic method. Third, this and other paradoxes inherent in the composition and reception of the work, combined with its comic traits, qualify it as a latter-day example of the carnivalesque.