Abstract
Both ‘politeness’ and ‘culture’, the focal points of this volume, are multidisciplinary and multifaceted concepts which have, in the past, generated a huge amount of literature and come with a very considerable amount of intellectual, and perhaps equally important, emotional baggage. Both have proved surprisingly resistant to canonical definition and have largely shuffled off their historical associations with ‘refinement’, ‘high art’ and ‘polite society’, that is, Matthew Arnold’s nineteenth-century definition of ‘culture’ as “the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit” (Preface to the 1873 edition of Literature and Dogma). Yet both remain as crucially important concepts as ever, which reach well beyond the large number of academic disciplines that make use of them (perhaps particularly culture). Indeed, in his seminal book on Contesting Culture, Baumann (1996: 9) argues that
no idea is as fundamental to an anthropological understanding of social life as the concept of culture. At the same time, no anthropological term has spread into public parlance and political discourse as this word has done over the past twenty years.
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References
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© 2011 Sandra Harris
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Harris, S. (2011). Epilogue. In: Bargiela-Chiappini, F., Kádár, D.Z. (eds) Politeness Across Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305939_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305939_13
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