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In June 1956, Horace Miner, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, published an article that electrified the anthropology community.

The journal he wrote in, the American Anthropologist, was already accustomed to colourful studies of exotic tribes: the same issue contained articles about kinship networks among the Araucanian Indians of Chile and lineage in the Mundurucú society of Brazil. But Miner’s latest study was something else. He was describing a tribe, the Nacirema, for the very first time.1

No one, it seemed, had written or even heard about this tribe ever before.

It wasn’t just that the Nacirema were new. Their tribal practices seemed particularly bizarre too. Practices that were so unusual, and so shocking, said Miner, that they might even be described as ‘an example of the extremes to which human behaviour can go’.

The Nacirema were gripped by magic. Their days were marked by a parade of rituals based on the human body. This in itself was not exceptional: countless tribes performed body rites, from fasting to tattooing. But what stood out about this tribe was their wacky beliefs about bodies.

To the Nacirema, the human body was fundamentally ugly and prone to decay. Their every ritual was dedicated to reversing this process at all costs. Some of the steps they took to do this verged on the barbaric. The men lacerated their faces with sharp instruments; the women baked their heads in small ovens. They also displayed a curious preoccupation with the mouth, which they would ritually fill with hog hairs and holy powders. It followed that Nacirema society conferred special status on the wise elders – the medicine men, the herbalists – who provided them with the charms and magical potions to stave off decay.

The spectre of physical deterioration was not the only thing that preoccupied the tribespeople: their very peculiar take on aesthetics also seemed to dominate their lives. The Nacirema were consumed by disgust for the body’s natural state. When a member of the tribe was too fat, they performed a ritual fast to become thin; when a member of the tribe was too thin, they held a ceremonial feast to become fat. The female breast was singled out for particular concern: the Nacirema used outlandish body-modification techniques to make women’s breasts ‘large if they are small, and smaller if they are large’.

Given the burdens they have imposed on themselves, Miner concluded, it is astonishing that the Nacirema have survived for so long.

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What have you learned about the Nacirema?

That they are barbaric, masochistic? That they have questionable values? Do you see them as primitive, foreign, strange?

If these are the words that spring to mind, you’re on the same page as anthropology students today when they are given this study.

The thing is – and forgive me if you’ve already cottoned on to this – the Nacirema isn’t actually some weird, primitive tribe: it is ‘American’ written backwards.

Now that you’re in on Miner’s joke (or rather, his pedagogical tool), you can see that the behaviour and practices you found so strange are actually rather ordinary. When the men lacerated their faces, they were shaving; when the women put their heads in small ovens, they were under hair-dryers in a salon (this is the 1950s we’re talking about). When the Nacirema filled their mouths with hog hairs and magical powders, they were brushing their teeth; when they performed ritual fasts or feasts, they were watching their weight.

So why have so many people from the 1950s to the present day been tricked by Miner’s study?

In part this relates to how deferential we are to those who are labelled as ‘experts’. Miner was President of the American Anthropological Association, his article appeared in its house journal, and in it he deployed fellow academics to add weight to his assertions: Professors Linton, Malinowski and Murdock were all cited. We’ll be returning to the sway of experts in the next Step.

But it’s also down to something else.

The answer lies primarily in the power of language, the ability of carefully chosen words to shape our reactions, change the way we think and influence our decisions.

Think about Professor Miner’s choice of language. He introduced his subjects using the word ‘tribe’; and not any old tribe, but one with ‘particularly unusual aspects’. Throughout the text he used words like ‘rites’, ‘exorcism’, ‘natives’, ‘body rituals’ to further convey a sense of otherness, primitiveness and foreignness, when what he was really describing was the American citizen.

It’s a simple technique, but it’s very powerful. With just a few words, Miner takes the reader a long way from Manhattan or Kansas City. Unfamiliar language, unfamiliar reference points make the local and known feel distant and alien.

How easily manipulated we are.

The way things are communicated to us – the choice of words, images and metaphors used – has a huge impact on how we process and evaluate information and then go on to make decisions.