Impoliteness in a cultural context

In this article I analyse the way that generalisations about impoliteness at a cultural level are frequently underpinned by stereotypical and ideological knowledge. Both politeness theorists and more popular commentators on politeness often draw on emotionally charged views of other groups of people whom they characterise as not belonging to society, either because of their class or their ethnicity, and they exclude them from the social body through judgements about their supposed incivility. Statements about the growth of incivility and the decline of politeness are based on these ideological views. I argue that these views of outgroups and their levels of politeness are in part occasioned by the use of models of impoliteness which were developed to describe interaction at the level of the individual, rather than social models of politeness. We therefore need to develop models of analysis which can more adequately capture changes which are taking place at the cultural level.