Don’t fear the reaper

‘We are desperate not to think of ourselves as animals, subject to the usual creaturely cycles of birth and death’

Nearly 60 years ago, in an anthropology journal, the US academic Horace Miner reported on the exotic customs of the Nacirema, a people noted for their rituals designed to deny the inevitability of death. Each Nacirema home, he explained, had a shrine with a small chest on the wall, full of “charms and magical potions” for prolonging life; tribe members made twice-yearly visits to “holy-mouth-men” with the power to rejuvenate their teeth. The Nacirema showed “pervasive aversion to the natural body and its functions”, including procedures “to make women’s breasts larger if they are small, and smaller if they are large.”

You might wonder what kind of messed-up people such a reality-denying culture would produce – until you get the joke. (Spell it backwards.) But it’s not just the Nacirema. All we supposedly rational modern people construct our lives so as to feel, as much of the time as possible, like we won’t have to die.

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from Health & wellbeing | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1Fefba6
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