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intimated to be scholars such as Ho and Mao, has not been developed beyond
the dichotomous application marking much cross-cultural comparative facework
studies. It is however one that I shall return to below.
Although work coming out of an Asian and non-Western milieu has
responded to Brown and Levinson's positive - negative paradigm, much of the
argument still seems to recognise the two as cultural propensities for belonging
to yet being distinct from the wider social milieu within which one is interacting. I
want now to move on to briefly outline a quite different body of observations of
cultural variations in facework and politeness, ones which seem quite different
to the norms identified in Asian cultures and even suggesting a greater
orientation to individual autonomy than implicit in the work of Goffman and
Brown and Levinson.
Much of what has been said up to now, in both an Anglo-American and
Asian context, focuses on essentially how mutual recognition of face concerns
(albeit based in differing conceptions of the self) act as a kind of 'restraining'
factor on unfettered interest in self-concems. Even in individualistic Western
cultures such as the US and UK, persons regularly conduct themselves in an
other-oriented manner, that is, recognising in their expressive behaviour the
face needs of interlocutors. This is reflected in a mitigation of expression taking
into account the potentially disruptive influence this might have on interpersonal
relations. More specifically, facework in Goffmanian sense and politeness as
facework a la Brown and Levinson is generally associated with indirectness of
potentially face-threatening communicative behaviour. However, work from non-
Anglo-American cultures other than Asian ones has identified another set of
face practices in quite the opposite direction, namely, an apparent cultural
preference for direct expression and seeming interest in self concerns over the
feelings of others (e. g. Blum-Kulka 1987; Wierzbicka 1985; Katriel 1986;
Tannen 1981 a; 1981 b; Schiffrin 1984). Whereas facework and politeness has in
the preceding discussion been - albeit to varying cultural degrees - associated
with deference, these studies point to a cultural diminishing of attention paid to
deference, in favour of one paid to demeanour.
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