Volume 17, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Alternative Approaches to Politeness and Impoliteness Guest Editors: Dániel Z. Kádár, Vahid Parvaresh and Rosina Márquez Reiter

The roots of (im)politeness research in Durkheim’s sociology are neglected. Goffman is the go-to sociologist in (im)politeness research, and Goffman’s debt to Durkheim is substantial. This article argues that a renewed and broadened field of inquiry opens up around (im)politeness phenomena when we take seriously the centrality of Durkheim’s conception of the sacred to both the practice of everyday life and the analysis of everyday phenomena. To embed the sociology of the sacred into the analysis of (im)politeness phenomena, I develop an alternative conceptual architecture that both encompasses and expands the field. This involves two conceptual shifts that I draw out of contemporary Durkheimian cultural sociology. The first shift, from (im)politeness to (in)civility, brings a wider range of phenomena into our analytic purview, and the second, from face to ritual, displaces face as the central concept in (im)politeness research. The value of these conceptual shifts is illustrated using the example of an account of a racist encounter in public space. Consequences of these conceptual shifts for deeper and wider interdisciplinary exploration are explored.

This article presents an invitation to explore the benefits of adopting an ethnographic approach to (im)politeness research rather than an introduction to, or overview of, a well-established method in anthropology. It unfolds in four parts. In the first, I discuss some of the different ways in which (im)politeness scholars have grappled to reconcile lay and analyst understandings of (im)politeness with varying degrees of success. In the second, I offer the background of two examples which were gathered as part of ethnographic fieldwork in a contemporary migratory context. The examples deal with two classic topics in (im)politeness research: greetings and indirectness. The analysis demonstrates how insights from ethnography can enrich (im)politeness analysis by helping us to close the gap between lay and theoretical understandings of the practice. In the final section, I address the importance of delimiting the value of (im)politeness practices in the social reality of the speakers under study and invite colleagues to reflect on the societal impact of the discipline, including the expansion of the discipline beyond its middle-class milieu.

The human/divine relationship is a dynamic that does not easily fit into existing politeness research frameworks and approaches. This paper will look to explore this relationship further, within the ancient Egyptian Late Ramesside Letters (c. 1099-1069 BCE), in order to explore the limitations of facework and ritual in fully exploring the phenomenon, and offer an alternative approach - the ‘community-embedded’ model - which expands on principles from both facework and ritual, as well as collective prayer. The use here of the ‘community-embedded’ approach allows for the analysis of the impact of utterances to and involving God (the divine entity who assumes this role in the communicative interaction) within wider social networks, and how this supports simultaneous relationship maintenance between humans, God, and larger networks specific to the culture under review.

This paper revisits the concept of ‘politeness marker’, by proposing the bottom-up and corpus-based model of ‘ritual frame indicating expressions’ (RFIEs). Our central argument is that, in certain linguacultures, the relationship between ‘politeness markers’ and politeness itself is significantly stronger than in others. Therefore, any theory which argues that there is a definite relationship between form and politeness - or totally rejects this relationship - is potentially problematic if it does not take a contrastive pragmatic perspective, simply because this relationship is subject to significant linguacultural variation. The contrastive pragmatic study of RFIEs also helps us to determine the relationship between forms and speech acts and, indirectly, politeness. As a case study, we examine in this paper one-word and more complex expressions which are commonly associated with the speech acts of request and apology, drawn from the typologically distant Chinese and English linguacultures.

Many researchers in impoliteness studies have set themselves the task of determining, amongst other things, (i) what linguistic or non-linguistic phenomena can cause offence, and (ii) why people take offence. However, the reality of interaction clearly shows that, on many occasions, there appears to be a marked dissonance between the speaker and hearer in their evaluations of offensive language, even in locally situated interaction. More research is therefore needed to account for and explain why and how the hearer assigns a particularly offensive meaning to an utterance during the course of an interaction. With this aim, and by drawing on insight from what is referred to as “radical contextualism”, in this study we discuss the possibility of looking at how interactants can arrive at their own (subjective) evaluations of impoliteness in ways that do not match up with the alleged intentions of the so-called offender. Drawing on a number of exchanges that involve such instances of taking offence, we will argue that the taking of offence should best be viewed as a process over which the hearer has a more active control. Accordingly, the paper contributes to current attempts at explaining the variability involved in the taking of offence.