A ceremony (, ) is an event of ritual significance, performed on a special occasion. The word may be of Etruscan origin, via the Latin caerimonia.

The Veblenian dichotomy is a concept first suggested by sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen in 1899, in The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. Veblen made the concept fully into an analytical principle in his 1904 book, The Theory of Business Enterprise. Throughout these and many other writings by Veblen, this analytical principle was a distinction between what he called "institutions" and "technology".