Monday, August 3, 2015

Yessir, ji madam.

What does it mean to respect somebody? Is personal expression integral to respect, or must it be enacted in socially acceptable terms to be meaningful? Is it possible, within an institutional setting, to eschew existing socially acceptable expressions of respect and create another vocabulary; what sort of consequences would such an experiment entail?

I ask these questions in the context of a seemingly innocuous conflict I am faced up with: the use of first names while addressing those senior to me. The terms ma'am and sir make me uncomfortable, as do, indeed, all terms that require me to address persons as positions. The fact that ma'am and sir have such evidently classist roots does nothing to endear them to me. But they are seemingly ubiquitous. When I began referring to a university professor by her name to my parents, my mother (a teacher, herself) chided me several times about being disrespectful. My mother, however, was also the person who would come back fuming from work, disgruntled by the superficial ways in which students sometimes ritually enact respect <cue: "good morrrning ma'am"> but do not mean it in any kind of depth. Whenever I've conversed with anybody about the rationale behind sticking with terms like ma'am and sir instead of simply calling people by their names, respect has been central. I thought, therefore, that it would likely be useful to unpack the idea of respect, a little bit, to make sense of the confusion in my head. As always, the confusion is deeply personal and to do with a month of intense agonising about the ways in which I wish to negotiate working within institutions. This question of names, positions and respect speaks to, in many ways, the bigger questions one is always faced up with, while trying to, simultaneously, work within a system created by others and remain one's own person.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines respect in two ways that are relevant to this post:
  1. A feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements
  2. Due regard for the feelings, wishes, or rights of others
The second, I think, we owe to all human beings. Some would say all creatures, but being non-vegetarian I am a little unsure of my footing on that debate: can you respectfully kill? But if we view ourselves as engaged in the messy business of living, then is killing for food part of healthy (and essential) competition; in which case, is respectful competition, enough? I'm not sure. Anyhow, for the mean time, we'll run with it being essential that we be considerate towards the feelings, wishes and rights of all persons. I do not think position or seniority has anything to do with this understanding of respect. Should someone higher up in terms of educational qualification, seniority, age, status deserve more consideration by virtue of their position, than a person say at the foot of the same ladder? I should think not. In fact, we call that expectation of greater consideration, which folk who're at the top of the ladder tend to have, 'entitlement' and we tend to wrinkle up our noses at it. This cannot, then, be the respect that is spoken of, when we think about why we use ma'am/sir.

The first definition is evidently more complex. A feeling of admiration is something that is deeply personal; for instance, I do not admire all my professors, even if they've all got the same educational qualifications or are at the same position in my university. This reminds me of something rather cliched that my parents often said to me: respect is commanded, not demanded. If I am told to refer to a person as ma'am or sir as a symbol of respect for their position or seniority, it sounds to me like a demand, though a fairly hollow one. I can address a whole horde of people as ma'am or sir, but respect (as in, admire) maybe two of them. What value should one attach to that symbol then?

If I were to decide to address somebody as ma'am/sir, perhaps I would be enacting a well-worn socially acceptable ritual of respect. But I think something else is at play when institutions make it mandatory that persons in particular positions be addressed in particular ways. In those settings, I think the use of ma'am and sir is used to reinforce authority and create a sort of distance between the two persons involved in an interaction. It serves as a means to constantly remind one of the power imbalance that exists, and to reify it. It is of little wonder, then, that the military is one context within which the practice is most rigorously observed.

Does that make the requirement unequivocally problematic, I don't know. I can see why it is important for certain sorts of identities, especially, to set up that distance and to assert authority. A brahmin man can afford to be pally and on first-name basis with his junior colleagues yet be able to assert authority when required. The same behaviour from a woman in the same position would likely result in a certain familiarity on the part of the junior colleague, and could well lead to the woman's authority being undermined. The examples of differential readings of and responses to similar behaviour can be multiplied. The point is that this overt assertion of a difference in positions can sometimes be a person's only tool towards being taken seriously in that position. What does one do, then?

The trouble with demanding the use of sir or ma'am, though, is that I feel it reduces two people to two positions. There is something impersonal about the use of these terms that pushes aside the softer, caring parts of me. In essence, I feel that with me, personally, to insist that I address somebody as sir/ma'am is to ask that I enact respect and recognise authority, while reducing my ability to actually be considerate and compassionate. I have found, interestingly, that each time I have connected with somebody senior to me, I've found a way by which to refer to them by their names or by nicknames that they accept, and worked around the sir/ma'am conundrum. But that is not always going to work; there are some people and some organisations that treat their norms for addressing people as non-negotiables. Being faced up with one such situation, I have been wondering about what I should do, and how I should process this.

I've come to realise two sets of things: first, that not every disagreement between my personal preferences and an organisation's norms, irreconcilable as it might be, threatens my fundamental values and second, that while standing dramatically firm and true to oneself is often valorised, most meaningful engagement happens in the grey area of give and take. I would be taking myself a little too seriously, if I raised every conflict situation to the level of a moral dilemma. In this particular case, then, if somebody insists that I refer to them as ma'am/sir, I'd do it, to the extent that the insistence does not in any which way quell democratic speech within the institution. Perhaps I will learn, with time, to use the terms shorn of the negative connotations they carry for me, and perhaps then I will find it easier to see the person, despite the stress on the position. Or perhaps those who insist on creating that distance will just have to live with the fact that while they gain something in doing so, they also lose out on a range of possibilities in the process, if that means anything to them in the first place.

If I ever have somebody junior to me working with me, though, I know I would be happy to have them refer to me by name. And, knowing my proclivity towards bluntness, I would probably also not hesitate in giving anybody who took that as license to be disrespectful, a piece of my mind. I am also sure that if I ever run an organisation, it would not welcome essentially gendered terms like ma'am and sir. But these are castles in the air. Right now, I've got to go back to figuring out whether, when you want to say belonging to ma'am, you can say ma'am's or you must use madam's. All help on this front would be welcome. :) 

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