Twisted Civility

Comparing Courtesy, Coercion and Shaming in Southeast Asian Cities and Beyond

Dados Bibliográficos

ID13014692
AutoresAsmus Rungby (0000-0001-6627-1696, Yale University, autor correspondente), E Harms (0000-0002-4277-1490, Yale University)
Ano2023
Volume11
Fascículo2
Páginas121-140
Data de publicação2023-06-13
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoTRaNS Trans -Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2051-364X • E-ISSN: 2051-3658
EditoraCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/trn.2023.5
OpenAlexW4380482226
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências citadas55

The literature on civility navigates the gravitational pulls of binary camps: civility sceptics tend to emphasize how it operates as an instrument of power; civility optimists tend to emphasize its emancipatory potentials. While some scholarship has attempted to reconcile these perspectives by showing how civility can be both negative and positive, such theorization tends to describe this relation in terms of ambivalence. While these approaches rightly indicate that normative judgments about civility are largely a matter of perspective, the concept of twisted civility developed here focuses on the ways in which actors become trapped by the dynamic shifts of force embedded within civility. Comparisons across seemingly incommensurate examples suggest that such multidirectional dynamics are not culturally specific but rather more generalizable. Building our theoretical conception of twisted civility from a comparative approach based on research in Kuching and Saigon, and then using the concept to consider examples from the United States and Denmark, this article also reverses the direction of theorizing typically employed in scholarship on civility. Using postcolonial Southeast Asia as the source of theory rather than its afterthought, the method here uses anthropological comparison to generate theory and to problematize assumptions that universalize Euro-American trajectories of civility

Ambivalence · Civility · Coercion (linguistics · Courtesy · Epistemology · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Asian Studies and History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies