ABSTRACT
Worship exaggerates politeness, even to the point of caricature. Imaginary entities are flattered in ways that parody the obsequious and pseudo-obsequious behaviour and talk of everyday life. In the effervescent festivity of forest-dwelling Irula people of the Nilgiri mountains in southern India, indirectness in general is both indulged and parodied, and this involves a jumbled complementarity of politeness and rudeness. Politeness phenomena generate and maintain those aspects of ‘face’ (of deities, people and society) associated with order, hierarchy and social distance. Rudeness generates disorder, equality, and social proximity. There is more to rudeness than the fun and laughter of festive occasions. It is part of the work which, as Parkes has shown (Chapter 14 in this volume), people in relatively and relationally egalitarian ‘enclave societies’ must put in to counter tendencies towards hierarchy.
