1.   And its teachings of obedience, social ritual and respect for elders are clashing with more modern notions of flexibility and directness, leaving many Chinese conflicted and uncertain.

2.   As a social ritual, the idea of Sunday lunch certainly belongs more to the world of Winesburg, Ohio, than to Sixth Avenue and Houston Street.

3.   At the outset, I was nervous because I know all too well that wrapping gifts is an important social ritual.

4.   Besides, added Delavault, the advertisements serve a useful purpose in a country where whiling away spare time in a cafe is part social ritual, part therapy.

5.   A pall has also enveloped the social rituals of childbearing.

6.   But some clergy and religious scholars are afraid that baptism is becoming trivialized, a social ritual detached from its deeper spiritual meaning.

7.   Camera hidden in the brush, he captures our species as it conducts its exotic social rituals.

8.   Hog-killing was an annual organized social ritual when self-sufficiency was necessary in the countryside.

9.   Its highly structured social rituals are giving way to raucous new freedoms that have not yet settled into clearly defined new forms.

10.   Louse and others tend him amid elaborate hygienic precautions and social rituals.