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Introduction
- University Press of Mississippi
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Introduction Ted Ownby The topic of manners isimmediately interesting to most scholars in southern history, but the question of how to study manners—or even how to define the term—is not so clear. The literature on manners and southern history is small, with just a few important works showing the potential of investigating manners, if we askthe right questions. The papers in this volume began as contributions to the Porter FortuneJr. History Symposium at the University of Mississippi.Scholarsinvited to the symposium had considerable freedom in defining manners and deciding how to approach the topic. As the organizer of the conference, I asked the scholars to consider manners not as customs or mores, but as etiquette, considered broadly and with an eye toward connecting manners to issues central to southern history. Scholars once tended to define manners ascustoms or mores or even folkways in which long-held habits and expectations had deep roots in the history of the groups that practiced them. That israrelythe approach of today's scholars. Discussion of the history of manners moved forward with scholars who in the 19708 and 1980$ discovered the earlierwork of Norbert Elias, whose book The Civilizing Process influenced considerable scholarship about how to conceptualize and write about manners. Takinga broad approach to European history, Elias argued that in the Middle Ages, an open approach toward the human body gave way to numerous calls for privacy. Elites in government and outside it tried to set standards about speech, clothing, and especially things like food and sex that set clear lines between classes and established certain forms of behavior as uncivilized and hence undesirable .1 Notions that human behavior was divided between the civilized and uncivilized, and that people whose manners showed they were uncivilized deserved to be ruled or enslaved or uplifted became crucial to numerous major events in human history, from the coronation of Europeanroyalty vii viii Introduction to the enslavement of millions of Africans.2 Some but not manyAmerican historians have used the start Elias made by analyzing how Americansoffered manners either to try to uphold hierarchies or to break them down.3 Southern historians Jane Dailey, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, KennethGreenberg, Stephen Berry, and Stephen Stowehavecome to exciting conclusions by analyzing nineteenth-century uses of concepts of manners.4 Many historians of the past generation or so, inspired by Michel Foucault , Pierre Bourdieu, and other theorists and by their own imaginations, havebeen aggressivein analyzingways people with powertried to makeparticular , contingent, changeable power relations seem that they were in fact permanent, natural, and not open to question. From such a perspective, the life of a group took the form of a contest among a range of interests and expectations , with one group wishing not merelyto win and dominate but to convince everyone else to stop competing and adopt their rules. Manners, from such a perspective, operated as a social construction of people who wanted the world to work smoothly according to their expectations, without repeated contests about how to speak, act, gesture, and do virtually anything else that dealt with other people. Manners thus seemed above all to have servedasways for somepeople to convince everyoneelseto accept their rules. Tomakethe point another way,such a perspective suggests that manners represented an attempt to turn politics into something that no longer seemed likepolitics. Such a conception of manners asawayto support clear structures of power emphasizes how overt expressions of hierarchy such as bowing, ceremony, differences in dress and address, but also more subtle forms of human relations celebrated and reinforced social distinctions. In most conceptions of manners, having good manners means fitting in by knowing the rules and using them. Badmanners (or the absence of manners) can mean either rebellion—conscious, intentional rejection of the rules—or they can mean not knowing or caring about what some people expect. To study bad manners reminds one of a rare coffee-mug/t-shirt/ bumper sticker slogan authored by a historian, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's often quoted maxim that "well-behaved women rarely make history." The maxim's suggestion that only those willing to deconstruct conventional manners do something important enough to be historically notable seems to undermine the historian's obligation to study all ofthe human past, including those who embraceand livebythe rules, squirmunder them, and wonder or worryabout them. Studyingmanners surelymeans studying the rulesand [34.204.3.195] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:52 GMT) Introduction ix the makersof rules, the breakersof rules, and also the vast range of people who...