Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual: Maintaining the Moral Order in Interpersonal Interaction

Ritual is popularly associated with ceremonies, though in real life it plays a significantly more important role, reinforcing what people perceive as the appropriate moral order of things, or challenging what they perceive as the inappropriate flow of events. This book introduces the reader to how people use ritual in interpersonal interaction and the interface that exists between ritual and politeness and impoliteness. As rituals have a large impact on the life of people and communities, the way in which they use politeness and impoliteness in a ritual action significantly influences the way in which the given ritual is perceived. Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual examines this complex relationship by setting up a multi-layered analytic model, with a multidisciplinary approach which will appeal to interaction scholars, politeness researchers, social psychologists and anthropologists, and moral psychologists. It fills an important knowledge gap and provides the first (im)politeness-focused interactional model of ritual.

Provides a model that can be used to analyse a wide variety of data types
Provides a multidisciplinary approach to (im)politeness and ritual, by utilising politeness research, pragmatics, cross-cultural and historical interaction research, and social psychology
Provides an in-depth framework of social aggression, including phenomena that generate public attention such as bystander intervention
Utilises both metapragmatic and discourse analytic research