Civility

The term civility defines a state of cultural refinement associated with good citizenship. Sharing a root with the Latin word for city (civitas), it refers to the sophisticated behavior of an urbanite of the times, in contrast with rural coarseness or barbarism. Rules of civility govern areas of personal conduct and behavior in public, including table manners, bodily carriage, dress, conversation, courtship, and personal hygiene. The modern usage of the word can be traced to Erasmus, whose treatise De civilate morum puerilium (On Civility in Boys) (1530) described the need to instruct youth to control their behavior and appearance. The term was soon embraced across Europe, and Erasmus's treatise was used as a primer for young men.

Codes of civility are boundary-maintaining discourses that establish and reproduce hierarchical social relationships both within and between cultures. Etiquette and manners are requirements for entry into elite social and political circles. Although it is somewhat paradoxically rooted in self-presentation and performance, civility is understood as an indicator of good breeding. As an adage reminds us, a gentleman is known not by his circumstances, but by his behavior in them. Codes of civility can also be used chauvinistically as evidence of the superiority of one culture to another. Some nineteenth-century Western intellectuals used the rhetoric of civility to legitimate the colonization of Africa, Asia, and South America.

European and American elites have long conceived of their rules of social behavior as transcendent standards, yet the majority of these rules evolved over the past several hundred years. The decentralized and rigidly hierarchical societies of feudal Europe had relatively few constraints on biological processes, emotional expression, and indulgence of appetite, compared with modern standards. Only during the modern period did high levels of social anxiety and low thresholds of embarrassment begin to exert pressure on individuals to control their behavior in public situations. Before the sixteenth century, the passing of gas in public could politely be covered with a cough, but this was taboo by the seventeenth century. Since the time of Erasmus, there has been a steady increase in the pressure to hide bodily functions, to endow public behavior with dignity, and [Page 103]to conform to established standards of decency, beginning among elites but gradually diffusing to every stratum of society. The compulsion to conform to such standards can reach a fevered pitch of unreason, as in the case of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who died after his bladder burst at a banquet because he felt it would be impolite to leave the table during the meal.

Social theorists have tried to explain how rules for refinement flow from, and contribute to, the political and social context in which they are embedded. They use interpretive methods to suggest how specific rules reflect and reinforce class, gender, ethnic, and other social hierarchies by equating status with performance. Recognizing the reification of such rules by the people who use them, the critical project associated with the term seeks to reveal the historical development of civility and its relation to emerging social contexts. The result is a unique perspective on self-discipline that emphasizes the ways in which social relationships and codified rules of etiquette produce behavior that conforms to established standards.

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