Horace Mitchell Miner was born on May 26, 1912, in St. Paul, Minnesota, to James Burt and Jessie Leightner Miner. Horace grew up in Lexington, Kentucky because his father was a professor at the University of Kentucky. While studying at Ecole Alasacienne in Paris, the University of Munich, and the University of Kentucky, Horace became interested in archeology. After becoming a museum curator in the Museum of Anthropology at Kentucky, Horace studied further on the topic of anthropology as a graduate student at the University of Chicago.
In 1936, Miner married Agnes Murphy and moved to St. Denis, Canada where he conducted his study of modern communities with anthropological techniques. While he was working there he created one of his earliest books, St. Denis: A French Canadian Parish.
Miner then took a job as an instructor at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. In 1946 he left Wayne State University to take a job at the University of Michigan, as an Assistant Professor of Sociology. In 1947 he became an Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at University of Michigan. Although Horace had many activities that involved fieldwork, he was still a faculty member of the University of Michigan. He was on the Executive Committee of the Sociology Department for twenty-eight years, from 1951 to 1979. Because many of the faculty members at the university did not consider Horace an active member they did not utilize his expertise.
Horace is best known to American anthropologists for his writings about the Nacerima (American spelled backwards). In this article he describes American culture from a non American viewpoint. This article illustrates the ethnocentric ways that cultures can be misrepresented and the importance of understanding the cultural context behind the actions of people.
References:
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 139, No. 3, 1995
http://jarl.cs.uop.edu/cop/sociology/courses/soci51/nacirema.htm
http://www.msu.edu/~jdowell/miner.html
By Josh Hoogland
Edited by Marcy L. Voelker, 2007