Thailand's Politics of Politeness: Qualities of a Gentleman and the Making of ‘Thai Manners’

Abstract

Appropriate personal conduct has long been intrinsic to notions of Thai national identity. Thailand has an especially large corpus of didactic works on proper manners. Formerly, one of the major sources of ideas about bodily comportment was Theravada Buddhism. From the late nineteenth century, however, another genre of literature on manners began to appear, written to instruct students in the newly established modern education system about the personal qualities necessary for a career in the expanding royal bureaucracy. This article examines the most famous of these didactic texts, Qualities of a Gentleman, written by the prominent educational reformer Chaophraya Phrasadet Surentharathibodi (1867–1916). Largely as a result of this work, the royal official became the new exemplar of proper social behaviour in Thai society. With the conservative political turn and the restoration of the monarchy in the late 1950s, the work was revived, and the social etiquette it taught was reproduced as the model not only for government officials, but for Thai citizens generally.