DOI: 10.5176/2345-7163_1.1.18
Authors: Arul Kumaran
Abstract:
In this age of globalization and “clash of civilizations,” 1 where a great mingling of the world’s various populations and cultures has been hastened by emigration, trade, the Internet, and social media, the concept of civility and manners needs a fresh look. Western manners, especially, need to be reexamined since the word “civilized” is understood largely as “westernized.” Early modern England is a good place to start, since hundreds of behavior manuals were written and published during this period, and the code of conduct known in medieval times as “courtesy” slowly transformed into the notion of “civility” over the sixteenth century, and, later, into “civil behavior” from seventeenth century onwards. And through trade and colonization, this concept was transported abroad and used as a rationale for conquests and exploitation of natural resources in various regions on the planet. Sigmund Freud tried to understand the phenomenon of civilization though his psychoanalytical prism in the beginning of the twentieth century;2 Norbert Elias, building on Freud, conducted a sweeping study of western manners that he called “sociogenic and psychogenic investigations,” seeing civilization as a specific transformation of human behavior effected by conscious control of bodily functions and by the exercise of “self-constraint” in various modes of behavior. 3 Scholars have also studied the most popular of courtesy books in the sixteenth century, such as Il Cortegiano by Baldassare Castiglione as well as other notable courtesy books such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke of Governour, Roger Ascham’s The School Master, and Thomas Wilson’s The Art of Rhetoric.4 These studies have focused on the phenomenon of courtesy from the perspective of Renaissance humanism, court politics, and upper class self-fashioning. But a specific look into the ways in which courtly selffashioning transcended class barrier and became a prevalent mode of self-expression and identity constitution remains elusive.
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