PopAnth - Hot Buttered Humanity: An anthropologist’s guide to choosing an engagement ring

One ring to rule them all? By 1791Rings (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.Shopping for an engagement ring can be a decidedly strange experience, especially for an anthropologist of material culture. Traipsing in and out of jewellery stores searching for my own ring back in 2011, I felt like I was wading through a symbolic supermarket. You might be surprised to realise how much your engagement ring actually conveys: it’s far more than a signal of love and a promise to get married sometime down the track. Here’s a small list of things that an engagement ring does:1. It symbolizes your relationship 2. It represents a social and legal contract 3. It communicates your individuality 4. It indicates your social status and beliefs 5. It stores economic valueSo, if you want your ring to have a really specific meaning, you might want to have a good think about what choices you are making and why. Otherwise your search for the “one ring to rule them all” could come to resemble a quest as large as the reclamation of Middle Earth.Symbolise your relationshipNow, in the most romantic sense of the engagement, the ring is supposed to be, above all, a symbol of love and a promise of life companionship. Because the marriage should ideally last for the rest of our lives, then the ring also needs to last at least that long. It therefore needs to be durable. Over the last few decades, the jewellery industry has encouraged us to think that the monetary cost of the ring should reflect the emotional value that we place on our relationship. As a result, the average woman in the Western world wears about $2000 of love on her finger. One way of getting around this is to choose an heirloom ring. Wearing your grandmother’s ring not only saves you a fair chunk of change, but also affirms a second relationship besides that embodied in you as a couple. Of course, then it’s not only about you – but can it ever really be?[Read the rest of the article]: An anthropologist’s guide to choosing an engagement ringAuthor informationErin TaylorPost Doctoral Research Fellow, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, University of Lisbon at Research Fellow, Digital Ethnography Research CentreErin originally studied fine art, but she defected to anthropology when she realised that she was far better at deploying a pen for writing than for drawing. She is a cultural anthropologist who is currently living in Lisbon, Portugal, where she has a full-time research position at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais (ICS).TwitterFacebookGoogle+LinkedInOriginal article: An anthropologist’s guide to choosing an engagement ring©2013 PopAnth - Hot Buttered Humanity. All Rights Reserved.