ISBN:
9781108491242
Language:
English
Pages:
x, 269 pages :
,
illustrations ;
,
24 cm.
DDC:
395.09593
Keywords:
Etiquette / Thailand / History
;
Habitus (Sociology)
;
Conduct of life / Religious aspects / Buddhism
;
Buddhism / Social aspects / Thailand
;
Habitus (Sociologie)
;
Buddhism / Social aspects
;
Etiquette
;
Habitus (Sociology)
;
Manners and customs
;
Thailand / Social life and customs
;
Thailand
Abstract:
"Aristocrats, prime ministers, monks, army generals, politicians, poets, novelists, journalists and teachers have produced a large corpus of literature that sets out models of appropriate behaviour. It teaches such things as how to stand, walk, sit, pay homage, prostrate oneself and crawl in the presence of high-status people, sleep, eat, manage bodily functions, dress, pay respect to superiors, deal with inferiors, socialize, use one's time, work, and play. These modes of conduct have been taught or enforced by families, the monastery, court society, and, in the twentieth century, the state, through the education system, the bureaucracy, and the mass media. Modern thinking about manners, despite the outwardly secular ends to which it is directed, contains within it echoes of an older Buddhist theory about how to master the self that teaches control of bodily action (kai), speech (waja), and one's mental disposition (jai). The inculcation of good manners thus has as its objective the shaping of the whole person. This book is the first to examine how models of good behaviour in Thailand were formed historically, dating from the early nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century"--
Description / Table of Contents:
Introduction. Manners and the Thai habitus -- Buddhist ethics of conduct and self control -- Manners and the monarchy : prostration and civilization -- The making of the gentleperson -- Manners in a time of revolution -- From courtiers to ladies -- Royalist reaction : Thai manners as submission -- The passing of the gentleperson -- Manners in Thailand's civilizing process
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