Скачать или смотреть Short Story: Do you know the Nacirema tribe?

This is part of a 1956 paper by Horace Mitchell Miner, a professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan, in an academic journal 'American Anthropologist'. This paper surprised the academic world because it was the first to deal with a tribe called the Nacirema.
But the Nacirema doesn't actually exist. It is 'American' spelled backwards. And the 'mouth-rite' mentioned in this paper is a description of brushing teeth. So why were so many people deceived by his paper? This has to do with how much respect we treat people called 'experts'.
He used the authority of fellow scholars to add weight to his argument. He cited the researches of renowned professors such as Linton, Malinowski, and Murdock in his paper. We tend to absolutely trust the logic of 'experts', and this paper shows us that we should be wary of this idea.
#expert #authority #prestige