Body Ritual Among The Nacirema Summary

Body Ritual Among the Nacirema

Feed

Identity crises, consumerism, and star-crossed teenage love in a futuristic society where people connect to the Internet via feeds implanted in their brains. Winner of the LA Times Book Prize. For Titus and his friends, it started out like any ordinary trip to the moon - a chance to party during spring break and play around with some stupid low-grav at the Ricochet Lounge. But that was before the crazy hacker caused all their feeds to malfunction, sending them to the hospital to lie around with nothing inside their heads for days. And it was before Titus met Violet, a beautiful, brainy teenage girl who knows something about what it’s like to live without the feed-and about resisting its omnipresent ability to categorize human thoughts and desires. Following in the footsteps of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., M. T. Anderson has created a brave new world - and a hilarious new lingo - sure to appeal to anyone who appreciates smart satire, futuristic fiction laced with humor, or any story featuring skin lesions as a fashion statement.

Distant Mirrors

Most young students of American culture believe many of the cultural assumptions they grow up with are universal. As insiders, speaking a common language, following the accepted patterns of behavior embedded in a particular way of life, most of us take our own social actions for granted, and it is a challenge to realize the strangeness and wonder of our own behaviors. The distinct aim of each edition of this popular classroom supplement has been to enable students to better understand themselves by casting American culture into sharper relief—offering other mirrors, other reflections. The latest edition’s twenty-one personalized narratives, of which seven are new, unveil fresh portrayals of American culture. Each contribution offers unique ethnographic perspectives of various aspects of American culture that enable us to better understand ourselves.