Apart from some brief references to China and East Asia, Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process  focused on the history of manners in Western Europe, in particular the cases of France, Germany, and England. While manners and civility tend to be held in high regard in Southeast Asia (Reid 2015, 422) there have been few scholarly attempts to understand how such rules of behavior have evolved over time. The ahistorical treatment of manners has led to a tendency to essentialize them as one aspect of ‘cultural identity’. It rarely considers how the history of manners in Southeast Asia bears similarities with that in other countries around the world.

In this paper talk, part of the Gatty Lecture Series, Patrick Jory (Senior Lecturer in Southeast Asian History, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, University of Queensland) will attempt to show how Elias’s influential civilizing process paradigm can throw light on the history of manners in Thailand, an old and once-powerful kingdom, with a warrior tradition, a highly-developed courtly society, and a long history as a commercially dynamic state. The paper draws on research into a corpus of Thai literature on conduct and behavior produced over the last two centuries. It will present a periodization schema that accounts for the historical development of manners and civility in Thailand.   

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