15 Biggest Hoaxes That Fooled The World

The Body Ritual Among the Nacirema Poeple is an anthropological study of a tribe  of people living in North America, focusing on their complex rituals regarding oral cleanliness and moral purity. The study reveals that "the fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease" and that this can be warded off using a mixture of potions contained in a shrine with a fountain of water. It is at this shrine that the tribe perform the daily "mouth ritual".

The paper, which goes in to great detail, is in fact a hoax designed to satirise the way that anthropologists study "other" cultures. It is simply describing the practice of westerners brushing their teeth, but using the language of anthropological papers that invariably describe their subjects with a huge emphasis on exoticism and otherness.

"Nacirema" is just "American" spelt backwards and the paper is now often used to demonstrate to students how easy it is to fall in to the trap of viewing other cultures as highly ritualised, strange and exotic (all underpinned by a vaguely smug sense of superiority), whilst failing to see it in their own.