Maintaining Politeness in Film Tilik: A Study of Social Distance and Power Relations on Javanese Women

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.210514.003How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Javanese politeness, Cultural concept, Javanese women, Power relations, Social distance

Abstract

The paper aims to identify the Javanese cultural concept, especially from how the women preserve their politeness strategies in the short film, Tilik, produced by the Racavana Films in 2018. To accomplish the goals, this research applied a descriptive qualitative method that involves attention to document review. The data are gathered into the nine acts of the thirty-two-minute film to investigate an interpretive description of the Javanese women reflecting their socio-psychological behavior through the social distance and power relations. This sociolinguistic analysis benefits from decoding the gap between identity and language as part of the Javanese social and cultural phenomenon of the early millennials. The approaches applied in the study are based on the trichotomous politeness systems presented by Yabuuchi that fit in the framework of the Javanese social distance and power. Meanwhile, the theory of gender, language, and power relations contributed by Leech, Smith-Hefner, Wierzbicka, and Holmes might illustrate an outline of Javanese women’s politeness within their social distance and dominance that mainly occur in collectivistic cultures like Javanese society. Thus, a broad pattern is identified from the film: Javanese women have a complex strategy to sustain their politeness when interacting with other people. However, negotiating impoliteness from only linguistic perspectives is not enough. Hence, the identification of ingratiation triggered by power difference becomes one of the most significant features in maintaining politeness strategy.

Copyright

© 2021, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Fenty Kusumastuti
AU  - Muhammad Taufiq al Makmun
AU  - Karunia Purna Kusciati
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/05/17
TI  - Maintaining Politeness in Film Tilik: A Study of Social Distance and Power Relations on Javanese Women
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Politeness (ICLP 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 16
EP  - 22
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.210514.003
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.210514.003
ID  - Kusumastuti2021
ER  -