Holiday Greeting Rituals as Expressions of Ambivalence and Indifference Toward Social Change

Abstract

Social change often is positioned as the gradual acceptance of one set of dominant ideas over another. Ambivalence and indifference, however, also play an important role in the development of social change. Participants in this study discussed their use of common holiday greeting rituals and their reasons for using one greeting over another. Through constant comparative analysis, it was revealed that practicing American Christians undesirably challenge social change, desirably support it, see it as inevitable and therefore regard it with ambivalence, or see social change as irrelevant and meet it with indifference. Importantly, the way individuals experience social change has direct and observable implications on patterns of talk, thus affecting the nature of social change over time.