The politeness bias and the society of strangers

This paper argues that politeness, a notion central to many theories of social interaction and pragmatics, is fundamentally biased towards models of social interaction based on the ‘society of strangers’ (as opposed to the ‘society of intimates’; cf. Givón, 2005), consistent with the values and cultural ethos of Anglophone societies. It illustrates this by comparing Anglophone communicative styles to Chinese interactional style characteristic of the ‘society of intimates’, and by tracing its roots to eighteenth-century Britain, often referred to as the ‘age of politeness’ (e.g. Klein, 2002). It makes two points. First, the communicative style of undifferentiated social relations reflected in the politeness concept has left unexplored an important dimension of social relation categories in the study of human social interaction. Second, to break the spell of the politeness biases, it is important to examine native terms and concepts which are key to unlocking the interactional patterns and styles within a speech community. By offering a review of seminal critiques of the politeness theory written from the perspective of Japanese and Chinese, and by providing a Chinese perspective on the interplay between social categorisation and social interaction, this study is firmly placed in the emic tradition of East Asian pragmatics.