ABSTRACT
Attention to relatively sophisticated forms of social life may deny us insight into deep structures of community life that are so important to us we can hardly perceive them. Grooming for a man is the whole range of social activities that have to do with the well-being and being well of the community. In Europe and North America, which are ambivalent indeed about the luxury of personal grooming behavior, the medical profession is able to perform grooming acts and ceremonies in the careful privacy of its offices and the bizarre hotel-hospitals in which the distraught are placed under the care of the inept. Good health means high status, because of the amount of grooming available as much as the high intake of favorable foods. Young infants also are greatly in demand for grooming, which is clearly to their advantage. Communal grooming and communal health are inseparably intertwined.
