In the collective reflection initiated by Alessandro Duranti, Bergson's Discours sur la politesse, which was intended to edify high school students, becomes a profound and superb meditation, at the border between anthropology and linguistics, on the cultural, moral and political aspects of politeness - as it is and could be.
Alessandro Duranti is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. His books include From Grammar to Politics: Linguistic Anthropology in a Western Samoan Village (1994), the textbook Linguistic Anthropology (1997), The Anthropology of Intentions: Language in a World of Others (2015), and a number of edited volumes. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of the John Simon
Guggenheim Fellowship, the UCLA Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award, and the American Anthropological Association/Mayfield Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.