In the contemporary world of the “global village”, ways of promoting understanding across cultures are of critical importance. An increasing body of sociolinguistic studies shows the cultural specificity of many types of speech acts (see, eg, Kasper and Blum-Kulka 1993; Wierzbicka 1991). Often the source of inadvertent cross-cultural misunderstanding, politeness conduct is one such area where misinterpretation can easily occur. A vast body of anthropological enquiry shows that different cultures have their own systems of rationality and their own internal logic. In my view, the task of anthropology is an interpretative one (cf. Geertz 1973, 1983), and in this way it makes sense, in terms of western European logic, of the logical patterns of other systems of thought and action, including verbal conduct (cf. Crick 1976; Parkin 1982). The premise of rationality informs linguistic studies (Tyler 1978), including the field of the ethnography of speaking where the specificity of cultural patterns is a fundamental precept (though claims to universality also are made, eg Grice 1975; Brown and Levinson [1978] 1987). In the approach from anthropology adopted here, the presumption is that apparently unrelated phenomena can be seen to make sense if interpreted in a holistic way within the overall socio-cultural context. The aim of this kind of anthropological approach and, indeed, of much sociolinguistic enquiry, is to make sense of the conduct of any group, and to explicate patterns which are coherent within the system but which may not be apparent to outsiders. The effort is to overcome what Tannen (1984: 152) rightly calls “the trauma of cross-cultural communication”.