Twisted Civility

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

Bibliographic Data

ID13014692
AuthorsAsmus Rungby (0000-0001-6627-1696, Yale University, corresponding author), E Harms (0000-0002-4277-1490, Yale University)
Year2023
Volume11
Issue2
Pages121-140
Publication date2023-06-13
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTRaNS Trans -Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2051-364X • E-ISSN: 2051-3658
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/trn.2023.5
OpenAlexW4380482226
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited55

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