Grooming rituals express two kinds of binary opposition: private/public and work/leisure. Many beauty rituals reflect a transformation from a natural state to the social world (as when a woman “puts on her face”) or vice versa. To her, a bath may be a cleansing time, a way to wash away the “sins” of the profane world. In these daily rituals, women reaffirm the value their culture places on personal beauty and the quest for eternal youth. This cleansing ritual is clear in ads for Oil of Olay Beauty Cleanser that proclaim, “And so your day begins. The Ritual of Oil of Olay.”
Gift-Giving Rituals
In a gift-giving ritual, we procure the perfect object, meticulously remove the price tag. Carefully wrap the object (where we symbolically change the item from a commodity to a unique good), and deliver it to the recipient. Gifts can be store-bought objects, homemade items, or services. Some recent research even argues that music file-sharing systems such as Napster, KaZaa, or Morpheus are really all about gifting. This work finds, for example, clear evidence of the gift-giving norm of reciprocity; people who download files but who don’t leave their own files available to others are “leeches.”
Researchers view gift-giving as a form of economic exchange in which the giver transfers an item of value to a recipient, who in turn must reciprocate. However, gift-giving also involves symbolic exchange; for example, when a giver like Rose wants to acknowledge her friend Evey’s intangible support and companionship. In fact, researchers who analyzed the personal memoirs of World War II concentration camp inmates found that even in such a brutal environment, where people had to focus primarily on survival, a need to express humanity through generosity prevailed. The authors found that gift-giving, which symbolized recognition of others’ plight as