Civility and the Civilising Process

This article examines the social significance of Real Tennis among the Western European nobility during its heyday of the sixteenth century. Underpinned theoretically by Norbert Elias’s seminal empirical work The Civilising Process, this article seeks to identify the societal preconditions for the emergence of Real Tennis, and provide explanations for its diffusion across Western Europe and subsequent boom in popularity among the nobility. A critique is offered of the current body of literature written on Real Tennis, with an aim to address a general lack of focus on the game’s ‘social’ elements and how their development is linked with structural changes to the game over the centuries. The article then goes on to examine the ways in which Real Tennis became a symbol of prestige and a tool for social mobility among the increasingly status-competitive royal court nobility. Played during royal festivals, the game provided opportunities for nobles to engage in conspicuous consumption through architectural, clothing and gambling displays; having an entourage in accompaniment to the noble players; and, through the style of play and behavioural control, exhibiting self-restraint and foresight. Overall, an attempt is made to apply Elias’s theoretical framework to aid our understanding of the development of Real Tennis, a game that has never been characterised by overt ‘violence’ of the kind examined previously by other sociologists employing an Eliasian framework.

In this article, I examine the meaning of the concept of ‘civility’ for Roger Williams and the role it played in his arguments for religious toleration. I place his concern with civility in the broader context of his life and works and show how it differed from the missionary and civilizing efforts of his fellow New English among the American Indians. For Williams, civility represented a standard of inclusion in the civil community that was ‘essentially distinct’ from Christianity, which properly governed membership in the spiritual community of the church. In contrast to recent scholarship that finds in Williams a robust vision of mutual respect and recognition between co-citizens, I argue that civility constituted rather a very low bar of respectful behavior towards others entirely compatible with a lack of respect, disapproval, and even disgust for them and their beliefs. I show further that civility for Williams was consistent with—and partially secured by—a continued commitment on the part of godly citizens to the potential conversion of their neighbors. Williams endorsed this ‘mere’ civility as a necessary and sufficient condition for toleration while also delineating a potentially expansive role for the magistrate in regulating incivility. Contemporary readers of William who conflate civility with other good things, such as mutual respect, recognition, and civic friendship, slide into a position much like that he was trying to refute.

Bu metinde daha önce başka bir makalemde işlenmiş olan, kurucu kavramların nitelikleri üzerinde farklı boyutları ile yeniden durulmuştur. Burada (daha önce imparatorluk kavramı seçilmişti) örnek olarak Kültür ve Medeniyet kavramları seçilmiştir. Bu kavramların etimolojileri ve tarihsel-sosyolojik temelleri üzerinde durularak göç etmiş oldukları farklı bağlam ve ortamlarda aslında nelere mal oldukları ve neye yol açtıkları irdelenmektedir.

The origin of clothing reflects the loss of hair cover in hominin evolution and the resulting vulnerability of humans to cold stress during the global climate changes of the ice ages. Other theories about the origin of clothes suggest a universal human inclination to cover the naked body for reasons of decorative display or modesty, yet these motives are not corroborated by ethnographic data from recent naked hunter-gatherers. A thermal origin is supported also by archaeological evidence which can link the development of clothing-related technologies in prehistory to past glacial cycles and environmental conditions - despite an absence of actual garments due to their perishability. Thermal physiology was similarly responsible for the advent of textile garments after the last ice age, in the context of global warming. Woven fabrics provided enhanced permeability to perspiration in the warmer and more humid conditions. Demand for textile fibres was a key aspect of the agricultural revolution, promoting the domestication of plants and animals. While biological factors were paramount in the prehistoric origin and development of clothes, subsequent psychosocial factors such as modesty - and the rise of fashion in dress as a motive for habitually covering the human body - profoundly influenced social evolution and the emergence of modern civilised life.

Expanding Christopher Browning’s concept of ‘ordinary men,’ two traditional versions can be identified, variously positing perpetrators as ‘ordinary humans’ (subject to social dynamics) or ‘ordinary Germans’ (subject to cultural-ideological indoctrination). Neither explanatory model is sufficient. Timothy Schroer’s “Ethos of Self-Control” provides a synthesis that salvages the ‘ordinary men’ thesis by integrating both ideology and social context.

Judging from the spate of essays, blogs, websites, and conferences devoted
to the decline of civility in American society, it would appear that we indeed
ourselves in a dire crisis. Whether this crisis is real or imagined, there is little
doubt that it has come to define how we think about the whole problem of
public life today. If public opinion surveys are to be believed, the majority
of Americans (75 percent) now think that there is indeed a crisis and that it
is unprecedented in scope. Joe Wilson’s infamous “You lie!” outburst in the
middle of President Obama’s speech was just one more (albeit dramatic)
example of our decline into rampant rudeness. For some critics, the crisis
points to a kind of domestic version of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of
civilizations,” in which all are talking (very loudly) but no one is listening.
Indeed, the deafening cacophony of voices, say critics, is the increasingly
unbearable price we pay for our otherwise commendable commitment to
pluralism. Incivility , in short, is pluralism run amuck.
Rather than affirm that there is a crisis, I want to ask how the very concept
of civility is linked to particular normative conceptions of democratic
politics. Before turning to the core of my argument, we do well to note
that, historically speaking, rude and raucous behavior is hardly new in
American political life. As Cornell Clayton has written, venerated political
i gures such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams , those “models” of rational
political discourse, publicized outright lies and half-truths about their
opponents, more or less dragging them through the proverbial journalistic
mud. What is more, political arguments in those golden days of reasonable
debate often enough ended in deadly duels and fist fights. “We should resist golden-ageism on the subject of civility and American democracy,” declares Fredrik Logevall . “The halcyon days of political geniality and decorum in the United States never existed, not in the early days of the republic and not in the two-plus centuries that followed.”  The point is not that nothing has changed; new forms of media, for example, have altered
the ways in which extreme views can be publicly voiced and the tone in
which they are voiced. The point is not to get entangled in nostalgia for a
perfectly civil polity that never existed.
More importantly for my purposes, throughout American history, disenfranchised
minorities such as women and African Americans have been regularly accused of incivility just by virtue of daring to show up in public and press their rights claims. What counts as proper political behavior cannot be grasped apart from critical questions regarding equal political access and voice in the democratic public realm. As Susan Bickford writes, “norms of ‘good’ (i.e., rational) political communication are not neutral, but tend to reflect the communicative styles of already powerful groups.”  Those
who hold power can express their views within the framework of existing
institutions, but those who do not may lack the recognized channels for registering
their claims. American history is replete with examples of political
women who were seen as trespassing the code of civility by trying to speak in
public. This is the real issue that the debate over civility, as I argue in this essay, hides from our view.

การทำความเข้าใจกีฬาสมัยใหม่ในสมัยรัชกาลที่ 5 อย่างการชกมวย การแข่งว่าวทีมีกติกา ฟุตบอล ผ่านความเปลี่ยนแปลงมาตรฐานความรุนแรงในประวัติศาสตร์สยาม ช่วยคลี่คลายให้เห็นว่าความศิวิไลซ์ไม่ได้เป็นเพียงความสง่างามและทันสมัยเหมือนเช่นตะวันตกเท่านั้น แต่อันที่จริงแล้วการสร้างความหมายของความศิวิไลซ์ในบริบทสังคมสยามมีความเกี่ยวโยงกับการเปลี่ยนแปลงของอัตลักษณ์ของชายผู้เป็นนักรบในยุคก่อนรัฐชาติ ไปสู่การเป็นชายที่มีระเบียบวินัยและไม่นิยมความรุนแรง ในยุคก่อนรัฐชาติ การออกกำลังกายเป็นส่วนหนึ่งของการฝึกรบและสร้างความเป็นชายผู้ชำนาญในการศึก ขณะที่ในยุคอาณานิคม อัตลักษณ์ความเป็นชายชาตินักรบลดความสำคัญลงอย่างช้าๆ และเมื่อชนชั้นปกครองกรุงเทพฯพยายามสร้างรัฐชาติ พวกเขาได้ออกแบบกฎกติกาและรูปแบบการเล่นกีฬามาเพื่อใช้ฝึกให้ชายชาวสยามเลิกใช้ความรุนแรงและเคารพกฎระเบียบของสังคม ดังนั้นในบทนี้ ผู้เขียนมุ่งเน้นที่จะอธิบายความเปลี่ยนแปลงของอัตลักษณ์ความเป็นชายผ่านการออกกำลังกายจากยุคก่อนรัฐสมัยใหม่ไปสู่ยุคอาณานิคมและรัฐชาติ

Young people are underemployed because of a lack of soft skills that companies need.  IITTI enhances their soft skills such as professional appearance, empathy, and intercultural awareness.

We do so by creating a single number called 'World Civility Index' so that HRs can gauge a job applicant's level of awareness in soft skills.

So far, we went from zero in 2014 to 19 countries in 2019...and still growing.

Bouleversée par plus de vingt années de réformes initiées par Deng Xiaoping en 1978, par le basculement d'une économie planifiée vers une économie de marché et le développement d'une société de consommation de masse, la société chinoise du début des années 2000 est minée par des disparités socio-économiques et territoriales grandissantes. C'est dans un tel contexte que se constitue le discours de la “société harmonieuse” (hexie shehui 和谐社会), un programme officiel présenté par le président Hu Jintao dans l'intention de pacifier les tensions sociales. Notre travail sera de démonter les stratégies discursives mises en place par la “société harmonieuse” par une analyse de ses énoncés, pour démontrer que ce discours prône la construction de l'harmonie sociale par l'acceptation des inégalités et des injustices sociales, et qu'il s'inscrit dans un processus, global et plus ancien, de civilisation de la population chinoise défavorisée. La hexie shehui s'affirme comme un instrument de contrôle et de discipline des populations pauvres, et propose un traitement moral de la question sociale. Nous verrons enfin que la “société harmonieuse” met également en scène une Chine civilisée et que ce spectacle est au cœur de son programme.
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Chinese society in the beginning of this twenty-first century is undermined by growing socioeconomic and regional inequalities, as China has been disrupted by the reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping since 1978, by the transition from a planned economy to a market economy and by the expansion of a mass consumer society. The discourse of “harmonious society” (hexie shehui 和谐社会), an official program introduced by President Hu Jintao in 2005, took place in this particular context to pacify social unrests. This dissertation aims to dismantle the strategies used by the “harmonious society” and to reveal that this discourse advocates social harmony not by resolving social inequities but by accepting them. Hexie shehui is part of a larger and earlier civilizing process of Chinese underprivileged population, since it appears to be a tool to control and discipline the poor and offers ethics response to social issues. We will see, finally, how this “harmonious society” also targets to design a spectacular “civilised” China and the way this spectacle is the core of this program.

"Much of J. G. Ballard’s writing involves variations on a recurrent theme: the interaction between twentieth-century society and enduring human psychological drives. Impulsivity, self-control and aggression are central topics for him. Thus, it is curious that his fiction has yet to be examined in light of a theory with similar interests that has greatly influenced the historical and social analysis of violence: Norbert Elias’s ‘civilising process’. This paper examines how Ballard dramatises crises and tensions within the ‘civilising’ factors Elias identified.

Elias saw the long-term growth of self-control as a central feature of increasingly complex societies, driven by economic and social interdependence, centralised monopolisation of legitimate force and increasing social pressure to restrain sexual and aggressive impulses. Historians of violence have used this theory in explaining the centuries-long decline in everyday interpersonal violence in Western Europe; however, it is far from a naïve notion of historical progress.

Indeed, the novels High-Rise and Super-Cannes highlight two factors Elias recognised about the civilising process: its potential fragility and tendency toward creating psychological dissatisfaction. High-Rise stages a ‘de-civilising process’: internal and external interdependencies are disrupted, the monopoly of force breaks down and psychological self-restraint is relaxed. The sprawling business park in Super-Cannes allows Ballard to explore a more chronic and subtle civilisational tension. As Elias noted, the ‘quest for excitement in unexciting societies’ leads to the ‘controlled decontrolling of emotional controls’ in contexts such as sport, an analysis I extend to the violent ‘games’ and ‘controlled and supervised madness’ featured in the novel."

Cite as:
Salvatore, Armando. 2018. “Sufi Articulations of Civility, Globality, and Sovereignty.” Journal of Religious and Political Practice, 4 (2): 156-174.

This article provides an analysis of Sufi life and organization, combining historical depth and theoretical awareness. It investigates how Sufism emerged as an urban phenomenon. Sufi brotherhoods were at the forefront of a proto-globalization based on a hemisphere-wide networking between metropolitan regions, rural provinces, and nomadic formations. Furthermore, cities became nodes within wider circulations, rather than, as in European and Weberian models, centers of corporate powers. The emerging patterns of civility were open-ended, balancing inner cultivation, communicative skills, and outward etiquette. The article shows how this global civility translated into original conceptions of sovereignty that were more malleable than those of the European Leviathan. A millenarian universalism imbued with Sufi saintliness bolstered the centralized sovereignty of early modern Muslim empires. Sufi contributions to these empires nurtured a cosmopolitan culture, facilitating commercial exchange and intellectual connectedness between Europe and China. When Europe rose to global hegemony, neo-Sufi movements engaged in state-building processes which challenged European colonial presence. The article concludes by exploring how post-Sufi developments within Muslim-majority postcolonial societies re-oriented state power and led to the emergence of a trans-territorial notion of sovereignty.

This essay proceeds from the suggestion that Joseph Addison alludes to Michel de Montaigne's "Des Cannibales" in Spectator 50, when Mr. Spectator relates the visit to London of "four Indian kings." Addison adapts Montaigne's playful allegory of barbarism and civilization in service of his own project of constructing a discursive model of civic society, ultimately consigning Montaigne himself to the category of the barbaric in order to re-establish the distinction, which the "lively old Gascon" has mischievously undermined with the jest about breeches that concludes his essay. Montaigne implies that if civilization is reducible to its signs, then the civilized, decorous body that breeches signify is civilized precisely because the breeches displace— replace as well as conceal—it, and what breeches conceal may equally be the body of a barbarian. Indeed, the naked body must, according to the categorical limits established here, be barbaric. Breeches therefore are not just the sign of civilized decorum, they are its very substance. Addison's solution is to restabilize, by rhetorical means, the constitutive oppositions that Montaigne's breeches jest undoes. The figural logic that underpins the clothing tropes is metonymic in the first instance; breeches are associated with civilization and with masculinity. In Lockean linguistics the relationship between words and ideas/things is always metonymic contiguity. The relation between civilized man and barbarian, on the other hand, is comparative and hence metaphoric. In spite of his strenuously avowed mistrust of language that takes on the autonomous qualities of ideas or things, Addison is willing to locate what Locke calls "natural correspondence and connection" in relationships that are primarily and essentially metaphoric; constitutive oppositions that establish necessary difference rather than resemblance, but are nonetheless metaphoric in the first instance.

En quoi les Caractères se distinguent-t-il d’un traité de civilité ? En adoptant le modèle théophrastien, La Bruyère porte son attention moins sur les normes de la civilité que sur les conditions dans lesquelles il est possible de porter un jugement sur les comportements humains. La civilité, sous le regard du moraliste, devient objet de perplexité, mais aussi critère d’évaluation des conduites inciviles. L’indignation face à l’évidence qui se dégage alors est construite par le moraliste sur le modèle de l’expérience et vient justifier la prise de parole du moraliste.

Cite as:
Salvatore, Armando. 2019. Secularity through a ‘Soft Distinction’ in the Islamic Ecumene? Adab as a Counterpoint to Shari’a. Historical Social Research 44 (3): 35-51.

This article highlights a 'soft' distinction in the regulation of human conduct which emerged through various epochs of Islamicate history: between adab as the marker of an ethical and literary tradition, on the one hand, and the normative claims covered by shari'a and drawing particularly on the exemplary sayings of Prophet Muhammad, the hadith corpus, on the other. Adab became a counterpoint to the hadith-shari'a discourse by relying on non-Prophetic and, in this sense, non-divine sources of knowledge. The first part of the study reconstructs the trajectory of adab in pre-colonial times while the second part explores crucial transformations occurring under the impact of European colonial modernity, whose discourse propagated a strongly autonomous notion of secular civility. The interventions of several Muslim reformers of the era contributed to make adab the hub of an autochthonous type of secularity. Here adab still works as a marker of a soft distinction-only that it now becomes a 'double distinction': both between a mundane and a prophetic tradition within the Islamic ecumene, and between an emerging Muslim secularity and the European colonial one.

On ne s’attendrait pas à trouver à Port-Royal, haut lieu de la rupture et de l’affrontement, un des grands penseurs de la civilité au XVIIe siècle. Dans les Essais de Morale (1671-1675) de Pierre Nicole, se développe cependant une pensée originale, souvent paradoxale, de la civilité, de ses mécanismes et des bénéfices qu’on peut en attendre dans une perspective chrétienne. La délicatesse du lien social et la fragilité des « appuis » dont chacun, malgré soi, se montre tributaire, justifient une attention aux formes, qui relève pour Nicole de la vertu de condescendance. A un moment où l’idéal mondain de l’honnête homme fait l’objet du soupçon des moralistes, l’auteur des Moyens de conserver la paix avec les hommes et de la Civilité chrétienne analyse l’art de paraître comme un art de ressentir et la paix civile comme une figure évangélique.

Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference reveals the relationship between racial discrimination and the struggle for upward social mobility in the early modern world. Reading Shakespeare's plays alongside contemporaneous conduct literature—how-to books on self-improvement—this book demonstrates the ways that the pursuit of personal improvement was accomplished by the simultaneous stigmatization of particular kinds of difference. The widespread belief that one could better, or cultivate oneself through proper conduct was coupled with an equally widespread belief that certain markers, including but not limited to “blackness,” indicated an inability to conduct oneself properly, laying the foundation for what we now call “racism.” A careful reading of Shakespeare's plays reveals a recurring critique of the conduct system voiced, for example, by malcontents and social climbers like Iago and Caliban, and embodied in the struggles of earnest strivers like Othello, Bottom, and Dromio of Ephesus and Dromio of Syracuse, whose bodies are bruised, pinched, blackened and otherwise indelibly marked as un-cultivatable. By approaching race through the discourse of conduct, this volume not only exposes the epistemic violence toward stigmatized others that lies at the heart of self-cultivation, but also contributes to the broader definition of race that has emerged in recent studies of cross-cultural encounter, colonialism and the global early modern world.

C’est à l’occasion d’un travail sur les usages de l’application dans les correspondances féminines du XVIIIe siècle que nous nous sommes interrogée sur le rôle des détours intertextuels. En rhétorique, l’application est une « figure consistant à adapter un texte, une citation connus à une circonstance pour laquelle ils n'étaient pas prévus » . De facto, la plupart des épistolières ont recours à la citation, à l’allusion ou à la référence pour désamorcer un conflit avec leur interlocuteur. La légèreté, le badinage, plus que la stricte stratégie épistolaire, en sont la fin. Il s’agit moins d’atténuer l’accusation par le recours à des modalisateurs du discours que de détourner la pensée de l’interlocuteur des reproches plus ou moins virulents qui lui sont adressés en usant des mots d’autrui. Dès lors, les accusations atteignent leur cible tout en s’enveloppant d’un voile intertextuel qui, signe d’un respect de la civilité épistolaire, garantit la continuité de l’échange. Notre objet d’étude portera essentiellement sur le genre judiciaire mais inclura aussi, dans une moindre mesure, le genre épidictique (blâme), que nous réexaminerons à la lumière des lettres féminines du XVIIIe siècle.

Over the past decade, commercial social media platforms have scaled up, in terms of the number of users, and scaled out, in terms of integration into public life, taking on infrastructural significance. This paper adapts sociologist Norbert Elias' conceptualization of the civilizing process to examine the role of social media in society, arguing that social media platforms establish socially sanctioned categories of people and modes of conduct. Taking Facebook as an exemplar, the paper analyzes the pedagogical, punitive, and incentivizing practices through which platforms produce social norms and societal ideals. From the company's ambition to become the social infrastructure of the globe and its expansionist history, to policy documents and moderation practices, to formatted interactions and incentive structures, Facebook universalizes appropriate conduct and emotional expression in accordance with the interests of brands and advertisers. With its integration of information technology and automated decision making, Facebook takes over tasks traditionally associated with institutions like the home, the school, and the workplace and acts as a civilizing infrastructure in a double sense: first, infrastructure itself is civilized by the ability to sense and judge people and actions, and second, infrastructure becomes a civilizing force in the world on the basis of these abilities. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion of the implications of civilizing infrastructure for our understanding of civility, Facebook, and infrastructural politics.

Cite as:
Salvatore, Armando. 2011. “Eccentric Modernity? An Islamic Perspective on the Civilizing Process and the Public Sphere,” European Journal of Social Theory, 14 (1): 55-69.

This article engages with Johann Arnason’s approach to the entanglements of culture and power in comparative civilizational analysis by simultaneously reframing the themes of the civilizing process and the public sphere. It comments and expands upon some key insights of Arnason concerning the work of Norbert Elias and Jurgen Habermas by adopting an ‘Islamic perspective’ on the processes of singularization of power from its cultural bases and of reconstruction of a modern collective identity merging the steering capacities and the participative ambitions of an emerging urban intelligentsia.
The Islamic perspective provides insights into the interplay between civilizing processes and the modes through which cultural traditions innervate a modern public sphere. By revisiting key remarks of Arnason on Elias and Habermas, the Islamic perspective gains original contours, reflecting the search for a type of modernity that is eccentric to the mono-civilizational axis of the Western-led, global civilizing process.
While this eccentric positioning entails a severe imbalance of power, it also relativizes the centrality of the modern state in the civilizing process and evidences some original traits of the public sphere in a non-Western context.

Keywords: civilizing process, Islam, modernity, public sphere, tradition

El objetivo que persigue esta ponencia es retomar algunas de las principales aportaciones teóricas de la obra del sociólogo alemán Norbert Elias (1987-1990) a la luz de los estudios sociológicos de las ciencias. En particular, dado sus rendimientos cognitivos, nos interesa desarrollar tres problemáticas teóricas que forman parte del legado sociológico de nuestro autor con relación al problema de la constitución de las ciencias como monopolios de saber enmarcadas en el proceso de la civilización de las sociedades altamente industrializadas y diferenciadas como características propias del devenir de la modernidad: 1) La constitución de las ciencias como procesos de larga duración; 2) Los saberes científicos producto de las relaciones interdependientes entre individuos; y 3) Las prácticas cotidianas como formas de constitución de figuraciones de larga duración.
Postulamos estas tres premisas como fundamento teórico que permite entender la emergencia de los saberes científicos en el contexto de la sociedad moderna toda vez que entendemos que encierran uno de los principales puntos de vista de Norbert Elias: la vida humana se desarrolla gracias a las relaciones sociales cotidianas que entablan los individuos entre sí y con la naturaleza  a lo largo de procesos históricos de larga duración; al mismo tiempo, estos entramados de relaciones constituyen figuraciones que delinean la construcción de medios de orientación social como formas de interdependencia  entre las estructuras sociales y las estructuras psíquicas del comportamiento humanas.

What did it mean to be a man in Baroque Europe? The answer was crucial for men aspiring to success, whether in everyday society or in the rarefied culture of the court. While the concept of manliness was defined by clothing and articulated in conduct books, it was most clearly demonstrated in portraits. Portraits involved not just likenesses but the carefully arranged iconography of clothes and accessories, how they were worn, and their associations. The masculine ideal shifted perpetually from looseness to restraint, from sensitivity to strength, from meditation to sociability. A survey of portraits over a 150-year period reveals how the civil servants of Europe, equipped with their knowledge of fashion and behavior and sustained by the skills of artists, achieved a complex, dignified version of the public masculine self.

Le Paris de la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle compte près d’un demi-million de personnes, des hommes, des femmes qui tous ont leur quotidien, leur quartier, leurs amis, leurs espoirs, leurs déceptions et leurs drames. À l’occasion, au détour d’une rue, ils achètent du papier et inscrivent sur celui-ci des traces de leur existence. Ils se livrent, mais rarement dans l’idée de passer à l’histoire : ils notent pour expliquer, pour se rappeler ou encore pour informer des amis ou de la famille. Enfouis dans des boîtes d’archives et livrés à la poussière du temps, les trois textes qui constituent ce recueil (Détail de tout ce qui c’est (sic) passée Depuis le 30 mars 1774 ; Voyage qui n’est point sentimental, comme ceux de Mr Stern anglois ; Comptabilité d’une bourgeoise anonyme) revivent aujourd’hui et éclairent, chacun à sa façon, l’ordinaire de la vie parisienne.

This review article provides an overview of important, recent approaches to conceptual history from scholarship on South Asia. While conceptual history is not a consolidated fi eld in South Asia, the colonial encounter has greatly stimulated interest in conceptual inquiries. Recent scholarship questions the uniformity even of well-researched concepts such as liberalism. It is methodologically innovative in thinking about the infl uence of economic structures, for the development of concepts. Rethinking religious and secular languages, scholars have furthermore stressed the importance of smaller communicative units such as genre or hermeneutical practices to shape ideas e.g. of the political. As part of global and imperial formations, scholars are well aware of the link between power and colonial temporalities. Lastly, they have suggested new sources for conceptual history , such as literature, fi lm, and sound.

Stille, M. (2019). Conceptual history and South Asian history: State of the art. Contributions to the History of Concepts, 14(2), 91-112. doi:10.3167/choc.2019.140205.

Download this PhD thesis:
https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/17747

Abstract:
This thesis is a contribution to two bodies of scholarship: first, the historical understanding of the modernisation process in Siam; second, one of the central bodies of scholarship used to analyse sport sociologically – Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning’s study.

Previous studies of the emergence of a more civilised form of manner in modern Siam highlight the imitation of Western civilised conducts, overlooking the continued role of violence in this change in Siamese behaviour from the pre-modern to modern periods. According to evidence, from around the 1900s, Siamese elites engaged in deliberate projects to civilise prevalent non-elites’ aggressive conducts. This, in turn, has implications for the Eliasian understanding of sports and civilising process, which emphasises their unplanned development in Europe, at the expense of grasping the deliberate interventions of the Siamese elites. To fill this gap, I apply the concept of the “civilising offensive” to underline the planned process of civilisation.

The thesis discusses how aggressive masculinity was expressed legitimately during the pre-modern age, and how this violent behaviour was transformed by the elites’ promotions of civilising plans and sports under contexts of colonisation and nation-state building processes. I examine how civilised self-images were produced from interactions between Siamese elites, non-elites and Westerners. I use autobiographies, government documents, newspapers, match reports, chronicles, poems, travel writings and so on to explore first-hand accounts of behaviours, identities and values related to the presence of violence in sports and politics.

From the 1820s onward, Westerners used what they perceived to be their higher civilisation standards as an excuse to interfere in Asia. In response to the Westerners’ perceptions of the Siamese as barbarous, Siamese elites promoted civilised identities through sports and education. In the 1900s, to avoid being shamed, the non-elites learned to act in a civilised manner temporarily when interacting with elites and Westerners in sports fields. The civilising effect of interdependence between these actors showed that planned and unplanned processes of civilisation coexisted in Siam.

This paper contains the introduction to the new book, All Judges Are Political—Except When They Are Not: Acceptable Hypocrisies and the Rule of Law (Stanford University Press, 2010).
The book begins with the observation that Americans are divided in their beliefs about whether courts operate on the basis of unbiased legal principle or of political interest. This division in public opinion in turn breeds suspicion that judges do not actually mean what they say, that judicial professions of impartiality are just fig leaves used to hide the pursuit of partisan purposes.
Comparing law to the practice of common courtesy, the book explains how our courts not only survive under such suspicions of hypocrisy, but actually depend on them. Law, like courtesy, furnishes a means of getting along: it frames disputes in collectively acceptable ways, and it is a habitual practice, drummed into the minds of citizens by popular culture and formal institutions. The rule of law, understood as the rules of etiquette, is neither particularly fair nor free of paradoxical tensions, but it endures. Although pervasive public skepticism raises fears of judicial crisis and institutional collapse, such skepticism is also an expression of how our legal system ordinarily functions.

Chinese society in the beginning of this twenty-first century is undermined by growing socioeconomic and regional inequalities, as China has been disrupted by the reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping since 1978, by the transition from a planned economy to a market economy and by the expansion of a mass consumer society. The discourse of “harmonious society” (hexie shehui 和谐社会), an official program introduced by President Hu Jintao in 2005, took place in this particular context to pacify social unrests. This dissertation aims to dismantle the strategies used by the “harmonious society” and to reveal that this discourse advocates social harmony not by resolving social inequities but by accepting them. Hexie shehui is part of a larger and earlier civilizing process of Chinese underprivileged population, since it appears to be a tool to control and discipline the poor and offers ethics response to social issues.

In 2010–2011, Europeanisation equated with modernisation of the state and society represented a key policy of the Serbian government. The sociopolitical forces known as ‘Other Serbia,’ ‘Civil Serbia’ or ‘civil society,’ which had always identified as ‘pro-European,’ criticised the process of Europeanisation as formal rather than substantial. Yet these ‘civil’ critics, of which particular attention is paid to the work of the historian Dubravka Stojanović, shared with the government the same basic understanding of Europeanisation which could be described as a Balkan variation on evolutionist modernisation theories. Furthermore, Stojanović and other ‘civil’ historians contextualised this ‘blocked’ Europeanisation as the most recent episode in a long history of perpetual Serbia’s failure to modernise. This narrative was based on the essentialist idea of Serbian ‘premodern political culture,’ a teleological and ideologically driven notion of modernisation, and a pre-theoretical concept of the state. Building on contemporary approaches to modernity and the state in anthropology and other disciplines, the paper suggests ways of reframing these issues and identifies possible avenues of an alternative research programme.

Dieses Kapitel verfolgt, wie sich neue Geschlechtermodelle und Selbstbilder bei weiblichen und männlichen Jugendlichen herausbildeten - und zwar in Auseinandersetzung mit dem militaristischen Erbe Nazi-Deutschlands wie mit den US-amerikanischen Körperidealen der Lässigkeit und körperbetonter Weiblichkeit. Weitere Impulse in Richtung Zivilität gaben das "tolerante, kosmopolitische" Selbstverständnis der Jazz-Kultur, die Auseinandersetzung mit der "Rassenfrage" in den USA sowie die Auseinandersetzung der Jugendlichen mit "Materialismus"-Vorwürfen. Dabei wird besonders das transformative Potenzial der damals als konformistisch und konsumistisch abgestempelten Teenager-Kultur herausgearbeitet.

"Pretende-se, neste estudo, recolher os vestígios de “civilidade” (conforme a caracterizou Norbert Elias na sua obra O processo civilizacional) na Pérsia do século XVI. Partindo dos relatos das embaixadas portugueses às terras do Xeque Ismael, observaram-se vários costumes e ritos, diferentes e novos aos olhos dos portugueses. A Expansão Portuguesa possibilitou o contacto com novas sociedades e novas culturas, abrindo novos horizontes para o processo civilizacional europeu. Este estudo pretende ser, em última análise, uma reflexão, através das fontes, acerca da visão portuguesa do Oriente.
This study envisages to collect the signs of “civility” (as Norbert Elias called it) in 16th century Persia. Based on the reports of the Portuguese missions to the land of Sheik Ismael, several customs and rituals – different and new in the Portuguese eyes – were observed. The Portuguese Expansion fostered the contact with new societies and cultures, hereby opening up the European civilisational process to new horizons. This study aims ultimately at providing – through its sources - a reflection of Portuguese views on the East"

When Deng Xiaoping decided in 1978 to put China on track towards the market economy and to this end planned to implement and initiate a policy of “reforms and openness” (gaige kaifang 改革开放), he did so by building a specific ideological framework in order to create an imaginary around the changes to come. This imaginary is most evident in Deng’s “two civilisations” or “two wenming” program (liangge wenming 两个文明), which differentiates between “material civilisation” (wuzhi wenming 物质文明) and “spiritual civilisation” (jingshen wenming 精神文明). But does wenming (文明) correspond to the English term civilisation? What does civilisation actually mean? And what does wenming imply in Chinese contemporary political propaganda? This article proposes to explore these questions.