Dániel Z. Kádár, Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual: Maintaining the Moral Order in Interpersonal Interaction [Book Review]

Dániel Z. Kádár has been the most vocal scholar of ritual in the field of pragmatics. His recently published monograph epitomises his ground-breaking exploration of the broad interface that exists between politeness, impoliteness and ritual. Its aim is to provide a research framework that captures the interface area. Specifically, it sets up the first (im)politeness-focused interactional model of ritual. Ritual is not a completely new concept for politeness researchers due to the fundamental impact of the works of renowned sociologist Erving Goffman (1955, 1967) on the theorising of politeness. Brown and Levinson (1978/1987) loosely adopted the notion of face from Goffman to build their seminal theory of politeness, which has been widely adopted and criticised, and recently there has been a call to return to the original Goffmanian notion of face (see Wang and Spencer-Oatey 2015 for a detailed discussion). Goffman used ritual to refer to all types of interpersonal interactions that involve face work. Within politeness research, it is Kádár and colleagues who, through a series of published studies (e.g. Kádár 2013; Kádár and de la Cruz 2016; Kádár and Ran 2015; Kádár and Robinson Davies 2016), have brought ritual to the fore of our attention. This volume defines it as a recurrent, emotively invested action that reinforces or transforms interpersonal relationships (p.12). Kádár’s definition is somewhat different from Goffman’s in that it aims to ‘capture the formal and functional interactional characteristics of ritual practices from the politeness researchers’ data-driven perspective’ (p.54). By focusing on the relational function of ritual action, Kádár approaches this phenomenon through an analysis of its role in maintaining a perceived communal moral order in interactions.

Conceptually, the book positions itself in the post-second-wave politeness research. That is, it avoids the rationalistic means-ends approaches of the first wave (Brown and Levinson 1978/1987), which have a universalistic focus, while acknowledging the important findings of second-wave discursive approaches (Linguistics Politeness Research Group 2011), which have a micro focus. Kádár approaches ritual as an interactionally (co-)constructed phenomenon by which moral order is maintained. (Im)politeness is situated within the ritual action ‘both as an interactional behavioural phenomenon (fringing) and as an inference triggered by the interactional action of ritual’ (p.221). ‘Fringing’ is a new analytic concept introduced by Kádár to replace ‘strategy’, because a ritual performer’s ‘decorative’ form of behaviour attempting to trigger im/politeness inferences in ritual action, which is emotively invested by nature, is a choice that is not always strategic (p.19). Methodologically, this volume looks at stretches of ritual interactions from different periods and genres, including historical and contemporary data in written and spoken forms, including emails; extracts from films, literary pieces and blogs; audio-recorded family conversations; and TV shows. Equally, if not more importantly, this book draws data from various languages and cultures, including Hungarian, English, Chinese and Japanese, extending the scope to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparisons and intercultural appropriation of ritual practices, the latter of which is a particularly under-researched area to date.