Reading As A Way To Reach The Degrees Of Intellectual Maturity
How did the reading affect you as a reader?
When we would like to give our opinion about an issue, we should start thinking from inside the box which means we should live that issue in order to give a judgment. The judgment will be different when we will see the point from the right side. As a reader, the text “ Body Rituals Among the Nacirema” affects me in a different way, and it desires me to find out what might I will see from inside the box.
Sometimes it will be important to give a judgment about something that belongs to ourselves from outside the box in order to find what might the others think from that side. However, what can a reading that belongs to the year of 1956 do to a person who lives in 2018?. Also, in general what can reading give us ?
Reading is the basic way to educate the one and give him the knowledge about what is going on, and it moves the individual from the quagmire of ignorance and darkness to light and science and then it helps him to reach the degrees of intellectual maturity and establishing his personality with all its different dimensions , so that will result a wisdom in dealing with positions and responsibilities. However, the characteristics of commitment, awareness and balance are the qualities of the good reader whose readings are vary. The development of reading plays a major role in the development of the individual's cognitive orientation and changes his attitude toward life. It is the path to the personal culture which is defined as all that one learns for a long time to gain a set of useful information and facts in various sciences and literature. Also, it encompasses the individual's heritage represented in creeds, rituals, values and traditions.
The formation of this culture is not limited to the principle of collecting science, but rather constitutes reading is the most important factor of the emergence of personal culture (Sharma). Miner uses a very special writing way to help us to see different things about our culture. This text is trying to let us to think from the outside way that we always think we are normal people but other cultures are very strange.
Basically, we are also strange to the other cultures as they are to us. I think Miner wants us to learn how to respect the other cultures, their daily events their lifestyle, and their ceremonies even though they are really strange until they will become normal to us. However, Miner wrote his text in a way that gives an impression about the things to be different and to give more power to the normal things in our life. For instance, "The Mouth Priest" is the dentist who obsessed by the Americans who are one of the most obsessed people with mouth and “orthodontics”. Then, I released that the magic box is the first aid box that is available in almost all the current houses that full of medicines and creams. Also, at the end of the article, after we come to the conclusion and marvel at the behavior and practices of this community of people and judge them with some irony of practices that we consider unreasonable and crazy, we discover that these people described by Miner are only the Americans and called Nacirema only to reverse the characters of the word “American”.
Finally, while I was reading the text, Miner sent me to live with the Nacirema people, and he made me to see what were the Nacirema people do in their life specially, to their mouths, making of medicine, and how they treat each other. That unnormal picture was printed in my mind, and it made me feel how the others have a really different life that might be difficult for us but normal for them. All that was happening inside my mind Imaginatively !To sum up, “ Body Rituals Among the Nacirema” gives a special effects to the reader to reopen his/her mind to the normal things in order to replace the word “Normal” with “ different normal but with “power” and gives more attention to others’ life.
