Crazy Polite Asians: Politeness Strategy and Cultural Relativism in Asian-Western Environment

Abstract

This study aims to discover the use of politeness strategy and its effectiveness in Asian environment represented through Crazy Rich Asians (2018). Given that this film is told in the combination existences of both Western and Asian cultures, this study intends to personify how politeness is performed in intracultural-situated interaction and to unravel whether or not that cultural matters give different response outcome towards the strategy. This study used qualitative method to analyse the data collected from the film. Using Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory as a main guide, this study analysed 15 selected conversations done by the characters from the film. The first finding shows that the interaction in Asian-Western society in the film can be identified and analysed using B/L’s politeness strategy and dominated with positive politeness strategy. The second finding shows that not all strategy done by the characters in the film received the expected response as theorised in so-called politeness strategy that tends to be over-generalized into western culture. This problem arises due to a perception inadequacy caused by the paradox known as cultural relativism.
Keywords: politeness, perception, intracultural, relativism.