Week 3 Blog Prompt: Making the Ordinary Extraordinary

In Horace Miner’s “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema,” everyday American spaces, objects and rituals are de-familiarized in order paint a picture of Americans as a strangely fastidious, ritual-obsessed culture (the way outsiders might describe us). This process of “making the familiar strange and the strange familiar” is something that ethnographers and fieldworkers must navigate as they investigate and write about cultures.

For this prompt, take something that’s familiar to you and reexamine it as if you were seeing it for the first time. Try something simple (an everyday object, the way you style your hair, drive a car, take in the mail, or prepare for a sporting event.) Describe the object or ritual in detail, and identify what might seem strange or extraordinary to others.