The evolution of greeting rituals: beyond mere politeness

The doorway on Via Maqueda

A Sunday morning in Palermo, just past eleven, and the stairwell of an apartment building off Via Maqueda fills with the particular chaos of a family arriving for lunch. Four adults, two teenagers, a dog that clearly knows the smell of the building. Before anyone says a word, before anyone even fully clears the doorframe, cheeks touch cheeks. Right, then left. Aunt to niece, cousin to cousin, the older man in the doorway to the toddler being held up for him. Nobody counts the kisses out loud, but everybody knows the number, and everybody knows it's two, not three, because three would mean you'd crossed some invisible line into France or maybe Belgium, where the count runs higher and gets stranger by region.

It takes maybe ninety seconds. Nobody hurries it, and nobody treats it as a formality to get through before the food comes out. It looks, if you're standing there with a coffee in your hand watching, like the whole point of the visit has already happened before anyone sits down. In a way it has. If you want to see what that same ritual looks like stretched across an entire afternoon, once the kissing gives way to the table, Sunday Family Lunch Traditions in Central Italy's Villages follows it from the church bells to the last espresso.

What's odd, watching this from the outside, is how little of it is actually about affection in the moment. A cheek-kiss doesn't tell you anything new about how much someone likes their cousin. The ritual isn't reporting information. It's marking time, holding space, and once you start noticing that, you start noticing it everywhere: the bow in a Tokyo train station, the double handshake-and-shoulder-clasp between two men who haven't seen each other since a funeral, the elbow-bump that arrived, uninvited, in March of 2020 and outstayed everyone's welcome.

The handshake's violent bookkeeping

The handshake gets told, most often, as a story about weapons. You extend an open right hand to show you're not holding a blade, the story goes, and the shake itself was a way to check whether your counterpart had a knife hidden up a sleeve. It's a tidy story, and it's mostly true as far back as it can be traced. Britannica's account of the handshake's disputed origins points to imagery from ninth-century BCE Assyria, where a relief shows the king of Assyria clasping hands with a Babylonian ruler to seal an alliance. The gesture wasn't a courtesy exchanged between friends. It was a piece of diplomacy, captured in stone because it needed to be remembered and enforced.

By the time the Quakers picked up the handshake in the seventeenth century, the weapons-check logic had mostly faded, replaced by its opposite: a refusal. Quakers used the handshake instead of bowing or removing a hat, because bowing acknowledged rank, and the Society of Friends did not believe in acknowledging rank. A handshake between equals, given to everyone from a duke to a dockworker, was a small act of political defiance dressed up as manners. That's the thing about greeting gestures. They can carry a weapons check and a religious argument about equality in the same motion, decades apart, without changing shape at all.

The grip itself has never been neutral either. A firm handshake reads as confidence in most of the English-speaking business world, a limp one as weakness or disinterest, and an overlong one as a power play, the kind a certain type of executive uses to make a room notice who's in charge before anyone's spoken. None of that is written down as a rule anywhere. It's absorbed the way a toddler absorbs which fork goes where, by watching adults do it ten thousand times before anyone explains why.

The bow and the architecture of rank

If the handshake claims to erase hierarchy, the bow does the opposite job openly. In Japan, the depth and duration of a bow, an ojigi, are calibrated with a precision that would embarrass most Western etiquette manuals. A fifteen-degree nod, eshaku, covers casual acknowledgment between coworkers of similar rank. A thirty-degree bow, keirei, is standard for greeting a client or a superior. A forty-five to seventy-degree bow, saikeirei, is reserved for apology or the deepest respect, the kind offered to a company president or, historically, to the emperor.

What makes this system fascinating isn't the geometry so much as what the geometry is doing socially. Every bow is a small, public negotiation of where two people stand relative to each other, settled before either of them has said a word. Get the angle wrong, bow too shallow to a senior colleague or too deep to a junior one, and you've made a statement whether you meant to or not. The etiquette around bowing shows up constantly in Japan's after-work drinking culture too, where rank at the office doesn't fully dissolve just because everyone's now holding a beer. Izakaya Culture in Japan: Unpacking the Social Etiquette of Post-Work Gatherings walks through how those hierarchies survive the transition from boardroom to bar stool, and the bow is often the first sign of how much they do.

Anthropologists studying gesture across cultures have long argued that bowing lowers the body specifically to signal submission, a physical vocabulary that predates language and shows up in primate behavior too. A subordinate chimpanzee crouches before a dominant one. A human employee bows to a department head. The mechanics are older than any culture that formalized them, which is why a bow can travel so easily between contexts, from throne rooms to sumo rings to the entrance of a ramen shop, without losing its meaning.

Compare that to the Maori hongi, a pressing of foreheads and noses shared between two people, which is read not as a hierarchy gesture but as the mingling of breath, the ha, believed in Maori tradition to carry the breath of life itself. Two people who exchange a hongi are, in the traditional understanding, no longer strangers. There's no ranking involved, no measured angle. The gesture flattens distance rather than marking it.

Why once is never enough

Here's the part of greeting rituals that gets the least attention and deserves the most: repetition. A single handshake would do the job of acknowledgment just fine, mechanically speaking. So would one kiss on one cheek. Instead, cultures build in doubling, tripling, whole sequences that seem, on the surface, wildly inefficient.

In France, the number of cheek kisses, les bises, changes depending on which department you're standing in, a fact documented well enough that a crowdsourced map, combinesbises.free.fr, exists purely to track it region by region. Two kisses is standard in Paris. Some parts of the south and west run to three or four. Nobody agrees on why the count varies, but everyone agrees it does, and getting it wrong, going for a third kiss when the other person has already pulled back after two, produces a small, awkward collision that both people will remember longer than the greeting itself.

The French anthropologist and sociologist Marcel Mauss argued, in his early twentieth-century work on gift exchange, that reciprocal social acts carry an obligation baked into their structure: you give, you're obliged to receive, and receiving obliges you to give back. A greeting works on the same logic in miniature. One kiss offered demands one kiss returned, and if the ritual calls for two, stopping at one leaves a debt hanging in the air, unpaid, awkward, felt by both parties even if neither can name what's missing. JSTOR Daily's exploration of Mauss's theory of exchange and obligation lays out how thoroughly that logic runs through rituals that look, at a glance, like nothing more than good manners.

Repetition also buys time. A greeting sequence that takes ninety seconds instead of five gives both parties a chance to read each other's mood, posture, and tone before any real conversation starts. Watch two Italians greet each other at a train platform and you'll see this play out almost like choreography: a handshake that becomes a shoulder clasp, a half-hug, sometimes a cheek kiss layered on top of the handshake, three or four gestures stacked in a way that would look absurd written down as instructions but reads as completely natural in real time. The excess isn't waste. It's the negotiation happening in plain sight.

The greeting as contract

The sociologist Erving Goffman spent much of his career studying exactly this kind of interaction, and his work on what he called "face-work" gives the clearest account of why skipping a greeting feels so much worse than skipping, say, a compliment. Every person entering a social exchange, Goffman argued, presents a version of themselves, a face, that they expect others to acknowledge and protect. A greeting is the smallest, most efficient unit of that acknowledgment: it confirms that the other person has been seen, registered, and granted the status of someone worth acknowledging at all.

This is why being ignored on a greeting (a hand extended and left hanging, a nod met with nothing) registers as an insult disproportionate to the size of the gesture. It's never about the hand or the nod. It's the refusal to confirm that the other person exists socially in that moment. Diplomatic incidents have been built on less. Heads of state have walked back handshakes, offered them at the wrong height, or refused eye contact during one, and the footage circulates for days because everyone watching understands, at some instinctive level, exactly what's being communicated.

Smithsonian Magazine's look at the cultural history of greeting gestures traces how European monarchs used the timing and formality of greetings as deliberate political tools, extending a hand a beat too late to a rival, or bowing a fraction too shallow, as a calculated slight that everyone in the room would clock without a word being exchanged. None of that subtlety has disappeared. It's just moved from throne rooms to conference tables and, increasingly, to the split-second footage of a handshake gone wrong at a G7 summit.

Hospitality as the greeting that never stops

Some cultures don't treat the greeting as a discrete event that ends once hands are released. They treat it as the opening move of an obligation that keeps running for hours. The Ethiopian coffee ceremony is the clearest version of this I've come across. A guest arriving at a home in Addis Ababa isn't handed a coffee and sent on their way. Green beans are roasted over charcoal in front of them, ground by hand, brewed in a clay jebena, and served across three rounds, abol, tona, and baraka, each one considered weaker than the last but no less obligatory to drink. Ethiopian Coffee Ceremony: A Sacred Social Ritual of Hospitality and Connection describes the smell of the roasting beans and the smoke curling up before anyone's spoken more than a greeting.

What's happening there is a greeting stretched out into an hour-long performance of welcome, and refusing to sit through all three rounds can read as a small rejection of the household itself. The ceremony functions the way a handshake does, as an acknowledgment that the guest has been seen and accepted, but it refuses to compress that acknowledgment into a gesture that takes two seconds. It insists on time as the proof of sincerity. A quick hello would feel almost insulting in that context, like offering a stranger's greeting to someone who's supposed to be family for the afternoon.

That same logic (hospitality as extended greeting, greeting as ongoing obligation) shows up in versions all over the world, from the tea ceremonies of rural China to the extended toasting rituals in the Republic of Georgia, where a tamada, a designated toastmaster, structures an entire meal around a sequence of greetings to ancestors, guests, and hosts that can run twenty toasts deep before the meal is considered properly opened.

When the ritual breaks

Greeting rituals travel badly, and history is full of the wreckage. European explorers and colonial administrators, arriving in societies whose greeting customs they hadn't bothered to learn, routinely misread gestures of welcome as submission, or gestures of caution as hostility. Early contact accounts from across the Pacific and the Americas describe Europeans interpreting a lack of a handshake, a gesture their own culture treated as the baseline of civility, as evidence that the people they'd met were somehow lacking manners entirely, when in fact the handshake simply didn't exist in that vocabulary and never had.

The damage wasn't only historical. It shaped how colonial administrations organized who counted as a reliable partner and who didn't, decisions that had real consequences in treaty negotiations and trade agreements. A greeting gesture, misread, could end up encoded into policy.

The more recent version of a ritual breaking happened fast and everywhere at once. In early 2020, health authorities around the world, including guidance published by the World Health Organization on reducing person-to-person transmission, advised against handshakes entirely, and within weeks a gesture with a documented history stretching back nearly three thousand years simply stopped happening in public. Elbow bumps, fist bumps, and a strange, hovering wave-and-nod hybrid filled the gap. Some of those replacements have stuck around in offices and gyms even as handshakes have crept back elsewhere, which tells you plenty about how quickly a ritual can be improvised when the old one becomes physically risky, and how much harder it is to fully retire once it's been in use for three millennia.

Bowing cultures had an easier pandemic, structurally speaking. Japan's greeting customs required no contact to begin with, and public health commentary at the time noted, sometimes with a little too much satisfaction, that a culture built around the bow had one less adjustment to make than a culture built around the handshake. It's a small, telling detail: the ritual that had always been read as more formal, more distant, turned out to be the one better suited to a crisis that made contact itself the risk.

The elevator, six months later

I think about that Palermo doorway more than I'd expect to, mostly because of what happened six months after, in an office building elevator in Los Angeles, of all places. A colleague from Milan stepped in, someone I'd met twice before over video calls, and without thinking about it, he leaned in for the cheek kiss before catching himself halfway, laughed, and stuck out a hand instead. We both stood there for a second not quite sure which greeting had actually happened. Two systems colliding in an elevator that smelled like carpet cleaner, neither of us offended, both of us a little thrown.

That half-second of confusion is, I think, the whole argument in miniature. The gesture wasn't a courtesy either of us needed to perform. It was a small test of whether we'd read each other correctly, whether the right amount of respect, warmth, or distance had been signaled and received. We got it wrong and fixed it in under two seconds, and neither of us thought about it again until the doors opened. That's usually how these rituals work when they're working: invisible until they're not, and only noticed, like most of the machinery holding a room together, in the moment right after something's slipped.