Part of the Ronald and Janette Gatty series

Patrick Jory, Senior Lecturer in Southeast Asian History, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, University of Queensland

Apart from some brief references to China and East Asia, Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process focussed 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 behaviour have evolved over time. The ahistorical treatment of manners has led to a tendency to essentialise 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, based on a forthcoming book, I 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 behaviour produced over the last two centuries. It will present a periodization schema that accounts for the historical development of manners and civility in Thailand.