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Nacirema ("American" spelled backwards) is a term used in anthropology and sociology in relation to aspects of the behavior and society of citizens of the United States. The neologism attempts to create a deliberate sense of self-distancing in order that American anthropologists might look at their own culture more objectively, thus comparing emic and etic views of it.
In the paper, Miner describes the Nacirema, a little-known tribe living in North America. The way in which he writes about the curious practices that this group performs distances readers from the fact that the North American group described actually corresponds to modern-day Americans of the mid-1950s.
Miner presents the Nacirema as a group living in the territory between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui people and Tarahumara of Mexico, and the Island Caribs and Arawak peoples of the Antilles. The paper describes the typical Western ideal for oral cleanliness, as well as providing an outside view on hospital care and on psychiatry. The Nacirema are described as having a highly developed market economy that has evolved within a rich natural habitat.
Miner's article became a popular work, reprinted in many introductory textbooks and used as an example of process analysis in the literature text The Bedford Reader. The article received the most reprint permission requests of any article in American Anthropologist.
Some of the popular aspects of Nacirema culture include: medicine man (doctors, psychiatrists, and pharmacists), a charm-box (medicine cabinet), the mouth-rite ritual (tooth brushing), and a cultural hero known as Notgnihsaw (Washington spelled backwards). These ritual purification practices are prescribed as how humans should comport themselves in the presence of sacred things. These sacred aspects are the rituals that the Nacirema partake in throughout their lives.
This article is reprinted and appears as the final chapter in an anthology, Nacirema: Readings on American Culture. The volume contains an array of scholarly investigations into American social anthropology as well as one more article in the Nacirema series, by Willard Walker of Wesleyan University: "The Retention of Folk Linguistic Concepts and the Teacher Caste in Contemporary Nacireman Culture" which laments the corrosive and subjugating ritual of attending School. On phonology, the anthropologist notes:
This refers to the traditional enumeration of the 5 vowel letters in the English alphabet (A, E, I, O, and U), which is in contrast to the much larger number (varying between accents) of distinct Vowel in the language (see English phonology#Vowels).
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