Anthropological Theory

This article is an introduction to this special issue on civility. It asks what can anthropological insights contribute to debates about civility? We propose to understand civility as a “worldly concept.” We mean this in two senses. First, it is a concept that has traction in the world: a concern with civility and incivility can be found equally in public debate as in academic work. Second, civility is worldly in a more Arendtian sense. For Hannah Arendt, politics is about what it is between people – to act politically means to construct and enter a space which allows multiple people to be present. Civility is a concept that involves talking about how people relate to each other within non-familial settings and where people are fundamentally different from each other. We use the concept of civility as a lens that allows us to focus on moments where people try to understand what respect and restraint for each other might mean in the face of potential, and maybe radical, disagreement. In this introduction we begin to explore the key theoretical issues associated with civility, in order to examine the ways anthropology can benefit from these debates, as well as contribute to them. In particular, we ask the following questions: When do claims of civility move from a conservative stifling dissent to a radical call for change? When does civility move from being conformist to dissenting, and what are its limits? What are the specific histories that mark the ways in which people are civil or uncivil to one another? What are the cultural codes through which civility is expressed and understood?

This article explores the relationship between civility and diplomacy in the transnational commercial activities of traders from Afghanistan. The commodity traders on which the article focuses – most of whom are involved in the export and wholesale of commodities made in China – form long-distance networks that criss-cross multiple parts of Asia and are rooted in multiple trading nodes across the region, including the Chinese commercial city of Yiwu, Moscow and Odessa. Much scholarship associates both diplomacy and civility with impression management and dissimulation and therefore identifies such modes of behaviour as being inimical to the fashioning of enduring ties of trust. However, analysis of ethnographic material concerning the traders’ understandings of being diplomatic, as well as the ways in which they seek to conform to contested local notions of civility, furnishes unique insights into the ways in which they build the social relationships and ties of trust on which their commercial activities depend. By exploring the interrelationship between civility and diplomacy, the article seeks to move anthropological debate beyond the question of whether civility is either a form of artifice premised on performance or a deeper ethical virtue in and of itself. It suggests, rather, ambiguity, ambivalence, contradiction and imperfection are inbuilt aspects of the ways in which respect is communicated and evaluated, and ties of trust fashioned and maintained.

Is civility an end in itself, or a means to other ends? The relationship between means and ends marks theoretical debates about the meanings and implications of civility. This article addresses how these tensions played out in the context of the particular forms of civility promoted by pacifists in Second World War Britain. More specifically, it focuses on the experiences of those pacifists who set up community farms as a way to try and merge both means and ends through a form of sociality marked by love, mutual labour and conscience. The paper makes two arguments. First, the attempt to merge means and ends meant that the compromises of the present could be hard to overcome. The distinctly pacifist civility of Second World War Britain tended to reproduce particular middle class and masculine ways of being in the world. Second, it was the very tension between means and ends, however, that gave claims of pacifist civility fraught potency. For many British pacifists, pacifist forms of civility were an attempt to propose an alternative, not despite, but because of the space between their aspiration for cooperation and love, and the disappointments of experience. Pacifist civility was therefore understood as a form of potential. It is also important to note though that potentiality is marked by two possibilities: the potential to do; and the potential not to do. It is on this delicate balance between the inequities of the here and now and the aspired for future that pacifist civility stood.

Analyzing the relationship between collective action and civility within the world’s largest democracy, this essay argues that, rather than being a precondition for democratic participation or a quality of individual comportment or manners, civility can be analyzed as an effect of political recognition and of the existence of a responsive structure of authority. Using ethnographic examples of recent collective assemblies held in southern India, the essay demonstrates the limits of both deliberative democracy approaches (Dryzek, Habermas, Rawls, Benhabib, Cohen, Farrelly) and agonistic pluralist models (Mouffe, Connolly, Honig, Arendt) for understanding democracy. If individual speech action is understood to run the gamut from polite and constructive participation in deliberation to antagonistic incivility, collective action is framed by both models as inherently oppositional and adversarial, rejecting or resisting authority and protesting against it, running a narrower gamut from agonistic intervention, which frames others as adversaries, to antagonistic refusals that frame others as enemies (Mouffe). There appears no space within either deliberative or agonistic frameworks for approaching collective action as non-adversarial participation in the public sphere on par with individual participatory contributions to deliberation. The ethnographic examples presented in this essay illustrate examples of collective action as efforts to “hail the state” and be included in its decision-making processes. These examples demonstrate that collective action can function as amplification of earlier communicative efforts that have gone unheard or been silenced. Illustrating the failure of both models to capture the larger processes that result in collective action, I conclude by presenting an analytic approach from the perspective of a former British colony that offers deeper understandings of collective forms of action as they relate to civility not only in India, but elsewhere as well.

Are calls for civility necessarily elitist, serving to reproduce existing hierarchies of social and political power? Or, can they work to clear a space in which citizenship can be reimagined and new political demands can emerge? This article explores the contradictory politics of civility in pre-conflict Aleppo. Notions of incivility and disorder allowed Aleppo’s commercial middle classes to reimagine what citizenship might mean by expressing discontent with lethargic and repressive systems of government. However, the same language they mobilised to criticise the state also associated civility and order with a specifically bourgeois habitus, which was deployed to preserve existing domains of urban privilege and to entrench the social precedence of urban propertied elites over the dislocated rural poor. Calls for civility may be simultaneously elitist and emancipatory, envisaging new forms of citizenship and public life, while drawing their energy from sources that are implicated in other forms of hierarchy and exclusion. The article considers the implications of this analysis in relation to the outbreak of the Syrian uprising in 2011.

Based on two cases from Santiago, the article develops a theory of ‘civil victimhood’ to explore how civil conduct is paired with notions of victimhood in performances of citizenship in situations such as post-dictatorship Chile. In this context, victimhood is informed by two discourses, namely human rights and securitization. While the human rights discourse works to situate evil in the dictatorial past and victims as forgiving and deserving citizens, securitization practices operate within a temporality of the potential and generate new forms of othering and exclusion. This understanding of the civil citizen as (potential) victim delineates the forms of social and political action that are seen to have a legitimate place in public life. It is argued that the combination of civil victimhood and securitization is emerging as a form of governance that serves to exclude many of the poor from the full benefits of citizenship.

This article explores how, and why, the capacity for civic responsibility and civility of conduct became a central discursive and practical battleground in the colonial world. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in colonial and apartheid South Africa, where the putative benefits of self-government along separate racial lines became a crucial component of apartheid. Starting from a brief conceptual history of civility and colonialism, I argue that the principle of self-government was a central pivot of apartheid. I explore how the celebrated Civics movement that eventually brought apartheid down fostered civic ties and “ethno-civility” in a formerly Indian township in Durban from the 1970s to the 1990s. This legacy of ethno-civility has, however, turned out to be a major obstacle to the forging of relationships across racial boundaries in post-apartheid society. Deploying two ethnographic vignettes from this township, I argue that the ideals of global religious community today have taken the place as a promise of universality of mediation between groups and racial communities that the Civics movement used to occupy during the apartheid era. Yet, religious identities are unable to overcome deeper formations of racial and social difference.

Building on more than ten years of ethnographic research in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina, this article documents discourses and practices of civility as mutuality with limits. This mode of civility operates to regulate the field of socio-political inclusion in Bosnia-Herzegovina; it stretches to include self-described “urbanites” while, at the same time, it excludes “rural others” and “rural others within.” In order to illustrate the workings of civility as mutuality with limits, the focus is on interconnections and messy relationships between different aspects of civility: moral, political/civil, and socio-cultural. Furthermore, by using ethnography in the manner of theory, three assumptions present in theories of civility are challenged. First, there is an overwhelming association of civility with bourgeois urban space where civility is located in the city. However, the focus here is on how civility works in the context of Balkan and Bosnian semi-periphery, suspended between urbanity and rurality. Second, much literature on civility implies that people enter public spaces in ways that are unmarked. As is shown here, however, people’s bodies always carry traces of histories of inequality. Third, scholarship on civility mainly takes the materiality of urban space for granted. By paying careful attention to what crumbling urban space looks and feels like, it is demonstrated how civility is often entangled with, experienced through and articulated via material things, such as ruins. These converging, historically shaped logics, geographies and materialities of (in)civility illustrate how civility works as an “incomplete horizon” of political entanglement, recognition and mutuality, thus producing layers of distinction and hierarchies of value, which place a limit on the prospects of democratic politics in Bosnia-Herzegovina and beyond.

The question asked by this article is as follows: How do different kinds of people live together in a hierarchical world that has been challenged and transformed through the leveling effects of deep ethnicization and war? I examine two different kinds of relationships in contemporary postwar Jaffna: first, an inter-ethnic, external Tamil/Muslim division that has led to people relating to each other as categorical strangers; and second, an intra-ethnic, internal caste relationship through which different castes relate to each other as intimate strangers. These inter-ethnic and intra-caste distinctions have been forged through recent histories of violence and struggle, and indicate key tensions and transformations around postwar life on the Jaffna peninsula, part of the former warzone during the Sri Lankan civil war and long considered the ideological heart of Tamil nationalism. When ethnic mobilization—the possibility of egalitarian mutuality and solidarity as well as the pain, trauma and sacrifice of war, and ethnic cleansing—emerges within deeply hierarchical worlds that continually produce modes of distinction, what kinds of struggles arise within inter-ethnic and intra-caste relations? Given that public life is historically built on unequal participation, and that living together has been a historical struggle, we need to ask how we understand the particular embedded civilities that have made living together such a problem over time. Rather than see civility as an abstract code of prescriptions in relation to the maintenance of non-violent order, I suggest that it is possible to see different modalities of civility produced with regard to specific others/strangers. These modalities can conflict with each other, given that civility can be either hierarchically produced or governed by an egalitarian drive toward public forms of dignity and equality. I propose that civility has a social location, discourses, and understandings in hierarchical worlds that are necessarily different depending on who is speaking.

What do situations of chronic violence and resulting polarizations do to civility, and especially to its more horizontal forms? Using an account of everyday pluralism in an impoverished Christian neighbourhood of Karachi, this article addresses this question by examining how marginalized groups of that embattled city have been cobbling together forms of coexistence in the midst of ethnic and sectarian conflicts. Focusing in particular on the moral career of a local strongman, the practical and ethical dilemmas encountered by populations surviving at the margins of the city are considered, as they try to engage with others while struggling with the often violent economy of scarcity that structures their experience and vulnerability. In doing so, this article makes a case for a conceptualization of civility as a matter of building bonds as much as setting certain limits, in relation to identity and violence in particular. Civility, here, does not amount either to the preservation of peaceful coexistence or to the orderly reproduction of society. It thrives on various forms of connections and multiplicities, contesting hegemonic discourses on difference; instead of being external to violence, it operates within a world of violent possibilities, to which it aims to put some bounds.

The various progressive and conservative governments that administered Buenos Aires from the 1990s onward implemented strikingly similar policies that were aimed at transforming the city and metropolitan region into a market-centered society. Their policies caused a record number of citizens to lose their jobs in the formal sector and to become scavengers almost overnight. As they crisscrossed daily the city’s neighborhoods gathering paper, plastic and other recyclable materials, these socially stigmatized, politically disenfranchised and economically pauperized scavengers practiced civility from below with many neighborhood residents from all walks of life in civil society and, occasionally, with municipal officials and members of one or another environmental NGO and waste disposal company in political society. In dialogue with Norbert Elias’s and Cheshire Calhoun’s accounts of liberal civility, and Etienne Balibar’s revisionist conception of radical civility, my study discusses them from the perspective of Buenos Aires’ waste pickers.