How can ethnography contribute to understanding (im)politeness? (original) (raw)
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Politeness Across Cultures (Pagrave Macmillan, 2011)
This is the first edited collection to examine politeness in a wide range of diverse cultures. Most essays draw on empirical data from a wide variety of languages, including some key-languages in politeness research, such as English, and Japanese, as well as some lesser-studied languages, such as Georgian. The volume also includes four studies that discuss theoretical and empirical aspects of 'face', a construct that continues to attract much attention across disciplines. The specially-commissioned essays in this collection will be of interest to scholars, researchers and advanced students in sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse studies, anthropology and intercultural communication.
1. Introduction This chapter explores the relatively understudied area of intercultural (im)politeness. The fact that intercultural (im)politeness has not been a primary focus of (im)politeness researchers may be surprising in light of the fact that culture itself has played an extremely important role in the field since its foundations, albeit one that has been increasingly contested. However, the bulk of such explorations of (im)politeness have been cross-cultural rather than intercultural by nature. That is, the vast majority of studies have analysed (im)politeness in intracultural settings, and compared such cases across cultural groups, rather than in encounters between interactants with different cultural backgrounds. There are a number of possible explanations as to why (im)politeness in intercultural settings has been relatively neglected by researchers. One reason is the assumption that communication with others of more or less the same cultural background is the unmarked norm, and that intercultural encounters are somehow less ubiquitous. It is for that reason, perhaps, that a specific theory of intercultural (im)politeness has yet to be developed (Haugh, 2010; Kecskes, 2013), in spite of the fact that theories of intercultural communication abound. However, such an assumption seems out of step with the lived reality of migrants, increasing recognition of the fundamentally multicultural nature of societies, the possibilities afforded by a world wide web, and the ever increasing forces of globalisation. A second, somewhat related reason is that what counts as an intercultural encounter has become increasingly difficult to say. Sifianou (2013), for instance, has argued that politeness behaviour in institutional encounters is increasingly following 'international' norms due to the pressures of globalisation. In such cases, the encounters in question may not display any interculturally salient phenomenon, at least not of the sort studied by (im)politeness researchers to date. Consequently, if one places such interactions under the lens of putative cultural differences one risks forcing one's own analytic agenda onto the data studied (Kádár & Haugh, 2013). Third, a highly reductive notion of culture that is associated primarily with nation states has left (im)politeness researchers with an analytical tool that does not do justice to the inevitable complexity of social interaction. The traditional notion of culture its seemingly natural relationship with nation states, has come under considerable fire in the past few decades. It is broadly accepted in the humanities that culture has many layers (see Clifford's [1988] seminal study). Indeed, people frequently engage in intercultural interaction in their daily lives, often without noticing it: in a sense, asking an administrative colleague to help with an academic matter in a university may be construed as an 'intercultural' request, as different identifiable communities of practice within workplaces tend to have different interactional cultures (however small such differences might seem). Yet if we take such a stance to its natural conclusion, for instance, in the guise of Holliday's (1999) arguments regarding " small cultures " , it leads us to fracturing our analyses to the point that almost any interaction can be regarded, at least in some respects, as intercultural. This might seem, at
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