Prospectus

The Widow Douglas, she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn't stand it no longer, I lit out. I got into my old rags, and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied.
 

When we read Huck Finn's description of how harassed he was by the Widow Douglas's efforts to ‘sivilize’ him, our heart goes out to him. Mark Twain easily persuades us that the idea of civilizing an American boy is thoroughly absurd; Huck does not need any civilizing – he is just fine as he is. – The view that America is ‘nature's nation’ and that Americans need only follow their natural instincts is a staple of the liberal tradition – a tradition which has dominated, in one form or another, general and academic thinking about the United States throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Celebrating the 'authentic' and the 'natural' as the American norm, liberals have considered customs, manners, traditions, and rituals the ‘artifice’ of Old World societies – an artifice the United States was intelligent enough to abandon in the Revolution.

In the past two or three decades, however, the view of American society as ‘authentic’ or ‘natural’ has come under attack. Theoretical movements such as Postmodernism and Deconstruction have questioned whether anything in society can be termed ‘natural,’ insisting instead on the ‘constructedness’ of all human reality. The New Historicists and the advocates of Cultural Studies have rediscovered 'culture' as a realm in which the ‘reality construction’ of a society takes place. Their attention is primarily focused not on the visible, quasi-objective structures of society (governmental institutions, laws, class structure, economy), but on those forces that exert their influence on human perceptions and behavior invisibly, those that pass unnoticed. Both Michel Foucault's studies investigating the different ways in which power has infiltrated society over the course of Western history and Benedict Anderson's work exploring the modes in which modern nation-states instrumentalize the imagination and the aesthetic in order to create conformity and cohesion have provided important points of orientation for these movements. While Postmodernists, New Historicists, and Cultural Critics have revised the liberal view of American society as nature and brought back the idea of society as artifice, they have nevertheless retained the liberals' bias against such social artifice, viewing it as an infringement of the human potential.  This is somewhat paradoxical considering that their epistemology forecloses any return to the authentic. 

At about the same time that theorists started to conceptualize human identity and society as cultural constructs, historians, cultural historians, and literary scholars were beginning to explore the cultural dimensions of American identity- and nation-building. A great deal of revisionist work has concentrated on the colonial and early national periods. In the later sixties and seventies, the historians of the Republicanist and Civic Humanist Schools (B. Bailyn, G. S. Wood, J. G. A. Pocock) presented a new and highly influential 'cultural' reading of the American Revolution. The Republicanist historians drew their methodology in part from cultural anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, and in part they were influenced by the cultural ideas of the Founding Fathers themselves. The latter held a decidedly cultural view of politics, considering the newly established American republic to be determined by the manners and morals of its citizens rather than by its institutions and laws.

In the eighties, Linda Kerber and Mary Beth Norton drew on the framework set up by the Republicanist historians to develop a feminist historiography of the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary periods. They showed that while the Revolution did not improve women's political and legal status, it gave them a new cultural prestige. As wives, mothers, and educators, they were seen as fulfilling important functions in the republican community of virtue. Women's new cultural authority allowed them to play crucial roles in various popular movements in the nineteenth century (domesticity, anti-slavery and abolition, temperance, and public education).

Literary and cultural historians continued the historians' debates about women's role in the formation of republican society and American middle-class society. In the 1980s, two important traditions of American women's literature were rediscovered: the sentimental novels of the 1790s and the domestic novels of the earlier nineteenth century. Critics such as Nina Baym, Cathy Davidson, Ann Douglas, Jane Tompkins, Klaus P. Hansen, Winfried Fluck, Julia Stern, and Elizabeth Barnett have assessed the cultural work performed by these novels. While some critics see these fictions – and the ‘cult of womanhood’ they propagate – as democratizing and liberating forces within the emerging American nation-state, others consider them the unwitting accomplices of a patriarchal system which consolidated itself with the help of female sentimentality and female aesthetics.

More recently, Richard L. Bushman and David S. Shields have assessed the role of cultural manners in the modernization of American colonial societies. Bushman has observed in eighteenth-century colonial elites an increasing desire to model their identities (and their houses) on the British gentry. Bushman cautions us against viewing this as a social anachronism: In the eighteenth century, British civilization was considered on both sides of the Atlantic the most advanced in Europe, and American colonials were proud to belong to this cultural world and felt justified in aspiring to humanity's highest achievements. According to Bushman, this gentry ideal of cultivation helped to unify the different colonial elites in pre-Revolutionary America; in the nineteenth century, it was instrumental in 'homogenizing' the American middle classes. Shields, too, is interested in studying how a "disparate population works toward mutuality by making use of manners, polite discursive formulas, rituals, play, and entertainment." In his view, British-Americans of the middling ranks organized themselves into private societies which took their tone from British polite society. These societies were dedicated to conversation, dilettante belles-lettres, and the pursuit of communal pleasure. While they did not subscribe to any overt political goals, they provided a setting in which people of different social backgrounds could converse in an atmosphere of  civility and mutual respect. Here, in the pursuit of aesthetic activities, American colonials gained practical lessons in equality and democracy.  To Shields,  these private societies can provide models for the self-organization of a society – a self-organization effected not by political means, but through aesthetic activities and manners. Shields registers with some regret that during the time of the American Revolution and the early republic, these societies lost their playful, pleasure-seeking character and were subjected to a new political and moralistic rigor.

These examples of more recent research testify to the emergence of a new 'cultural sociology' of colonial America and the United States which supplies a corrective to the liberal ‘nature’ sociology. Revisionist work has been carried out not only for the colonial and early national periods, but for all phases of American history and literature, which suggests that the paradigm of culture is as productive for the analysis of modern societies as it is for the investigation of traditional ones.

When reviewing the revisionist work of the past three decades, one becomes aware of an ideological split in the field: There is a clear divide between critics and cultural historians with strong theoretical interests and those historians and cultural historians who take a pragmatic approach. While both camps consider culture a major force in the process of society- and nation-building, they differ in their assessment of whether this process is desirable. The 'theorists' tend to regard cultural processes as being dominated by institutional politics and economic interests; to them, culture is an instrument through which the established powers control populations and coax them into an identification with the system. The 'historians' take a more affirmative view of culture. They more readily grant it a certain independence from political and economic interests, and view its disciplining and integrative functions as an asset rather than a liability: They appreciate the fact that culture can create unity among different populations without the use of force. For the 'historians', then, culture is socially creative; its informal – sometimes  experimental – processes can induce changes in the institutions of the state.

The aim of the conference is to gather samples of the various contributions to a new 'cultural sociology' of America.  Its scope is deliberately kept wide: All periods of American culture (from colonial times to the present) will be represented. The subject will be approached from the perspectives of different disciplines: history, cultural history, literary history and criticism, cultural and literary theory, sociology, and social psychology.

 The concepts that have been chosen as signposts for the conference – "manners" and "civility" –  originate not in contemporary theory, but from European sociological thought of the Renaissance and the eighteenth century. From the late Middle Ages until the late eighteenth century, manners and civility figured as central categories for the analysis of societies and human behavior; frequently, the place of a society in a scheme of progress was measured by the 'refinement' of its manners. In the course of the American and French Revolutions, which brought the rise of liberal theories of politics and society, and established the 'nature' sociology as a standard, the paradigm of manners lost its centrality – at least in more 'serious' intellectual discourse. Manners and civility were henceforth identified with the superficial, ornament-loving aristocratic cultures of the ancien régime and relegated to the nostalgia departments of the popular media.

This conference aims to revive an interest in these pre-modern concepts of social analysis, because we think that they are relevant to contemporary discussions about the role of culture in modern nation- and identity-building. From Baldassare Castiglione to Edmund Burke, the older theorists conceived of manners as a semiotic-aesthetic-moral system which provides a means of communication while acting as an instrument of social discipline – a view that in many respects resembles the cultural concepts developed by modern thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Benedict Anderson, and Clifford Geertz. The conference aims to encourage a dialogue between contemporary theory and the theoretical work of the past. This dialogue will deepen our understanding of the issues at stake and give us a greater awareness of our own ideological biases. It might also help bridge the gulf that has opened up in recent years between those who believe in historical work of a more traditional kind and those who engage in theory-oriented research.

The initial section of talks will be concerned with the evolution and development of the paradigm of manners in the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, drawing primarily on European sources. Special emphasis will be given to thinkers such as Shaftesbury and the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, who modernized the court society's concept of manners, adapting it to the requirements of commercial society and its proto-democratic institutions. Other talks will deal with the new role of women's manners in eighteenth-century society and with the tensions between the manner-oriented concept of society and the new liberal concept of society. The idea behind these talks is to raise awareness of the wealth and sophistication of eighteenth-century theorizing about manners – a wealth and sophistication that inspired political, cultural, and literary thought on both sides of the Atlantic until well into the nineteenth century and has yet to be properly appreciated by cultural historians and literary critics.

Section two – which will contain the bulk of the conference's talks – will deal with the various aspects of manners and civility in America and the United States. We encourage papers assessing the role of manners in the formation of colonial and early national societies. These periods have inspired extensive research in recent years, and the ideas, concepts, and methods developed in these fields may prove useful for the discussion of manners in later phases.  Other talks will assess the function of manners in the United States at different historical stages. In some instances, the U.S. seems to have developed equivalents to traditional European systems of manners (e.g. the urban socialites – and later, the celebrities – who haven taken over the role of the aristocracy; ethnic manners as equivalents of 'peasant' manners), while in other instances, it has created new types of manners regimes (such as the self-fashioning of the self-made man, the manners of professional classes, the manners of political correctness). Of particular interest are contemporary phenomena of manners such as the new forms of self-stylization that have emerged in the postmodern media and consumer society, the new manners politics of the ethnic movements, and the idea of multicultural manners.

While contributors are encouraged to draw their material from a variety of sources, it is to be expected that most of them will make literary works the basis of their analyses. Literature has particular affinities with manners and we hope these will be explored. Until well into the nineteenth century, literature and manners were both considered civilizing instruments working through the aesthetic sense. The novel as a genre was for a long time dedicated to the depiction of manners, and novels can thus serve as archives yielding information about the manners systems of the past. Quite a few American writers have also engaged in theoretical discussions about the relationship between manners and literature. It is significant that American novelists held on to the sociology of manners much longer than social and political scientists. The frequent complaints about "the absent things in American life"  – a staple of nineteenth-century American literary theory –  point to the problems many American writers had with the liberal concept of American society and the 'nature' sociology. When the novelists expressed their desire for a system of American manners, they were motivated not by social elitism, but by the conviction – substantiated by modern anthropology – that social life, whether under feudalism or democracy, requires a semiotic-aesthetic system of manners. The novelists' defence of the manners society must also be seen as a defence of the value of the aesthetic. As American novelists of the nineteenth century always worked with a 'nature' sociology looking over their shoulders, most of them became theorists of manners; later in the century, they also engaged in an 'ethnological' reconstruction of American manners – thus preparing the ground for the revisionist work done by this conference.

[In the third section, the talks will discuss more recent approaches in the social and political sciences which have drawn on the paradigm of manners. Norbert Elias's cultural sociology - developed in the nineteenth-thirties, yet discovered by a larger audience only recently - is most deeply grounded in the historical idea of manners. Pierre Bourdieu's habitus theory and Erving Goffman's concept of human identity as performance provide interesting modern formulations of the manners concept. ]

Program Sections and General Areas for Presentations

1)	Towards a history of the concept of manners   Theorizing about manners from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century; on the modernization of manners in Shaftesbury and the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment; the manners of women; manners and liberalism.
2)	Manners in British America and the United States   Colonial period: Discussions of the manners of indigenous populations in European and British-American Writing; Puritan writing on manners; manners in the literatures of the Middle and Southern states. Early National Period: Manners and the republic; manners and the nation-state; women's manners and the republic; multi-national and multi-ethnic manners at the frontier; the early novel and the early drama and the manners of the Republic; educational tracts and periodical literature and the manners of the Republic; manners in the literature of domesticity and the domestic novel; manners in advice literature; the debates on manners in Euro-American travel literature; the role of manners in the debates about a national American literature. American Renaissance: Manners in the writings of the Transcendentalists; manners in the novel of the American Renaissance; the role of manners in the debates concerning the American novel (manners and American democracy, "absent things", "American Romance"). Later Nineteenth Century: manners in Realist and Naturalist Writing; the manners of American capitalism in the debates concerning the American novel; manners in sociological and philosophical writing. Modernism: Manners in the novel and the drama; art vs. manners (social aesthetics) in the aesthetic writings of the Modernists. Postmodernism: new concern with "surfaces" and "constructedness" in Postmodernist theory, art and writing; anti-universalism of ethnicity movements and ethnic writing; ethnic manners.
[3)	Recent Approaches   Manners in cultural anthropology; manners in Norbert Elias's cultural sociology; manners in Republicanism and Civic Humanism; manners in Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of habitus; manners in Erving Goffman's theory of social psychology. ]