Eviatar Zerubavel

In Small Steps and Giant Leaps, Eviatar Zerubavel explores how categorizing affects our perception of distance through "The Neil Armstrong Effect," the cognitive tendency to exaggerate perceived differences between cultural categories. In Zerubavel's signature style, the book demonstrates the parallel manners in which we have traditionally polarized our conventional visions of categories such as masculinity and femininity or humanity and animality, as well as the parallel symbolic significance of weddings, New Year's Day, and the ritual display of passports upon crossing international borders. Viewing distance "topologically," it shows how we tend to mentally "compress" within-categorical "distances" while "stretching" those between categories. We do so collectively, as members of epistemic communities sharing the same norms, conventions, and traditions of categorizing. When lumping "similar" things together and splitting "different" categories from one another, we do so as social beings. Categorizing involves the social construction of both similarity and difference, and it is attentional norms rather than "logic" that determine which differences "make a difference" and which ones we can effectively disregard.

In Small Steps and Giant Leaps, Eviatar Zerubavel explores how categorizing affects our perception of distance through "The Neil Armstrong Effect," the cognitive tendency to exaggerate perceived differences between cultural categories. In Zerubavel's signature style, the book demonstrates the parallel manners in which we have traditionally polarized our conventional visions of categories such as masculinity and femininity or humanity and animality, as well as the parallel symbolic significance of weddings, New Year's Day, and the ritual display of passports upon crossing international borders. Viewing distance "topologically," it shows how we tend to mentally "compress" within-categorical "distances" while "stretching" those between categories. We do so collectively, as members of epistemic communities sharing the same norms, conventions, and traditions of categorizing. When lumping "similar" things together and splitting "different" categories from one another, we do so as social beings. Categorizing involves the social construction of both similarity and difference, and it is attentional norms rather than "logic" that determine which differences "make a difference" and which ones we can effectively disregard.

Along with the concepts of social role, social group, social network, social class, and social structure, the notion of impersonality is one of the pillars of the sociological imagination: the ability to think beyond individuals and see them as members of particular social categories. Although almost every sociologist is at least implicitly cognizant of the fundamental contrast between personalness and impersonality, it has yet to be explicitly conceptualized. Don't Take It Personally comprehensively addresses the fundamental distinction between the specific and generic visions of personhood. Over the course of the book, Eviatar Zerubavel articulates the fundamental features of impersonality; the process of producing impersonality; the impersonal logic underlying the notion of individuals as countable quantities; the relationship between modernity and impersonality; and considers what is gained and what is lost by impersonalizing so much of social life. Drawing on fascinating examples from diverse social contexts, Don't Take It Personally introduces a general framework to better understand the deeper connection between seemingly disparate phenomena, from racial profiling and hate crimes to "secret Santa" gifting.

Along with the concepts of social role, social group, social network, social class, and social structure, the notion of impersonality is one of the pillars of the sociological imagination: the ability to think beyond individuals and see them as members of particular social categories. Although almost every sociologist is at least implicitly cognizant of the fundamental contrast between personalness and impersonality, it has yet to be explicitly conceptualized. Don't Take It Personally comprehensively addresses the fundamental distinction between the specific and generic visions of personhood. Over the course of the book, Eviatar Zerubavel articulates the fundamental features of impersonality; the process of producing impersonality; the impersonal logic underlying the notion of individuals as countable quantities; the relationship between modernity and impersonality; and considers what is gained and what is lost by impersonalizing so much of social life. Drawing on fascinating examples from diverse social contexts, Don't Take It Personally introduces a general framework to better understand the deeper connection between seemingly disparate phenomena, from racial profiling and hate crimes to "secret Santa" gifting.

In this invitation to "concept-driven" sociology, defying the conventional split between "theory" and "methodology" (as well as between "quantitative" and "qualitative" research), Eviatar Zerubavel introduces a yet unarticulated "Simmelian" method of theorizing specifically designed to reveal fundamental, often hidden social patterns. Insisting that it can actually be taught, he examines the theoretico-methodological process (revolving around the epistemic and analytical acts of focusing, generalizing, "exampling," and analogizing) by which concept-driven researchers can distill generic social patterns from the culturally, historically, and domain-specific contexts in which they encounter them empirically. Disregarding conventionally noted substantive variability in order to uncover conventionally disregarded formal commonalities, Generally Speaking draws on cross-cultural, cross-historical, cross-domain, and cross-level analogies in an effort to reveal formal parallels across disparate contexts. Using numerous examples from culturally and historically diverse contexts and a wide range of social domains while also disregarding scale, Zerubavel thus introduces a pronouncedly transcontextual "generic" sociology.

How the words we use—and don't use—reinforce dominant cultural normsWhy is the term "openly gay" so widely used but "openly straight" is not? What are the unspoken assumptions behind terms like "male nurse," "working mom," and "white trash"? Taken for Granted exposes the subtly encoded ways we talk about topics like race, gender, sexuality, and social status, offering a provocative look at the word choices we make every day without even realizing it. Eviatar Zerubavel describes how the words we use provide telling clues about the things we take for granted. By marking "women’s history" or "Black History Month," we are also reinforcing the apparent normality of the history of white men. Zerubavel shows how this tacit normalizing of certain identities, practices, and ideas helps to maintain their cultural dominance—and shape what we take for granted.

Most of us are fascinated by the conventional storybook account of Christopher Columbus' heroic discovery of America in 1492. Yet, should the credit for discovering America go to a man who insisted it was but a few islands off the shores of China?In Terra Cognita, Eviatar Zerubavel argues that physical encounters are only one part of the complex, multifaceted process of discovery. Such encounters must be complemented by an understanding of the true identity of what is being discovered. The small group of islands claimed by Columbus to have been discovered off the shores of Asia was a far cry from what we now call America. The discovery of the New World was not achieved in a single day but was a slow process--mental as well as physical--that lasted almost three hundred years. By celebrating 1492 as a year of discovery, we inevitably distort the reality of history.In vividly documenting how a slowly emerging New World gradually forced itself into Europe's consciousness, Zerubavel shows that Columbus did not discover America on October 12, 1492. Supplemented by fascinating old maps and a new preface written for this paperback edition, Terra Cognita will be of interest to historians, geographers, cognitive scientists, sociologists, and students of culture.

How the words we use—and don’t use—reinforce dominant cultural normsWhy is the term "openly gay" so widely used but "openly straight" is not? What are the unspoken assumptions behind terms like "male nurse," "working mom," and "white trash"? Offering a revealing and provocative look at the word choices we make every day without even realizing it, Taken for Granted exposes the subtly encoded ways we talk about race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, social status, and more.In this engaging and insightful book, Eviatar Zerubavel describes how the words we use—such as when we mark "the best female basketball player" but leave her male counterpart unmarked—provide telling clues about the things many of us take for granted. By marking "women's history" or "Black History Month," we are also reinforcing the apparent normality of the history of white men. When we mark something as being special or somehow noticeable, that which goes unmarked—such as maleness, whiteness, straightness, and able-bodiedness—is assumed to be ordinary by default. Zerubavel shows how this tacit normalizing of certain identities, practices, and ideas helps to maintain their cultural dominance—including the power to dictate what others take for granted.A little book about a very big idea, Taken for Granted draws our attention to what we implicitly assume to be normal—and in the process unsettles the very notion of normality.

Many of us have had the experience of suddenly realizing that the keys or glasses which we have been looking for in vain were right in front of us the whole time. Looking for something does not guarantee that you will notice it, as the capacity of our sense organs far exceeds our mental capabilities. Whether we know it or not, we organize our perception systematically and that requires focusing our attention: some things move to the foreground, other elements recede into the background. While neuroscience and psychology can tell us a lot about our cognitive hardware, the cognitive software we use often goes unnoticed. In this book, Eviatar Zerubavel argues that we notice and ignore things not just as human beings, but as social beings. What we attend and do not attend to is a function of the fact that we are lawyers rather than detectives, Koreans rather than Americans, theologians rather than economists, vegans rather than omnivores. It is our environment and our social lives that often determine how we actually use our vision and hearing to access the world. Drawing on fascinating examples from the art world, optical illusions, and all walks of life, Zerubavel investigates how what we notice or ignore varies across cultures and throughout history. A subtle yet powerful examination of one of the central features of our conscious life, this book offers a way to think about all that might otherwise remain hidden in plain sight.

Many of us have had the experience of suddenly realizing that the keys or glasses which we have been looking for in vain were right in front of us the whole time. Looking for something does not guarantee that you will notice it, as the capacity of our sense organs far exceeds our mental capabilities. Whether we know it or not, we organize our perception systematically and that requires focusing our attention: some things move to the foreground, other elements recede into the background. While neuroscience and psychology can tell us a lot about our cognitive hardware, the cognitive software we use often goes unnoticed. In this book, Eviatar Zerubavel argues that we notice and ignore things not just as human beings, but as social beings. What we attend and do not attend to is a function of the fact that we are lawyers rather than detectives, Koreans rather than Americans, theologians rather than economists, vegans rather than omnivores. It is our environment and our social lives that often determine how we actually use our vision and hearing to access the world. Drawing on fascinating examples from the art world, optical illusions, and all walks of life, Zerubavel investigates how what we notice or ignore varies across cultures and throughout history. A subtle yet powerful examination of one of the central features of our conscious life, this book offers a way to think about all that might otherwise remain hidden in plain sight.

Genealogy has long been one of humanity's greatest obsessions. But with the rise of genetics, and increasing media attention to it through programs like Who Do You Think You Are? and Faces of America, we are now told that genetic markers can definitively tell us who we are and where we came from. The problem, writes Eviatar Zerubavel, is that biology does not provide us with the full picture. After all, he asks, why do we consider Barack Obama black even though his mother was white? Why did the Nazis believe that unions of Germans and Jews would produce Jews rather than Germans? In this provocative book, he offers a fresh understanding of relatedness, showing that its social logic sometimes overrides the biological reality it supposedly reflects. In fact, rather than just biological facts, social traditions of remembering and classifying shape the way we trace our ancestors, identify our relatives, and delineate families, ethnic groups, nations, and species. Furthermore, genealogies are more than mere records of history. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Zerubavel introduces such concepts as braiding, clipping, pasting, lumping, splitting, stretching, and pruning to shed light on how we manipulate genealogies to accommodate personal and collective agendas of inclusion and exclusion. Rather than simply find out who our ancestors were and identify our relatives, we actually construct the genealogical narratives that make them our ancestors and relatives. An eye-opening re-examination of our very notion of relatedness, Ancestors and Relatives offers a new way of understanding family, ethnicity, nationhood, race, and humanity. "An erudite treatise about how culture drives human cognition about near and remote relatives, Ancestors and Relatives offers lay and academic audiences alike a great read."-Science "The author examines how genealogical structures have been used to organize not only kinship, but also other domains ranging from Supreme Court justices to religions. Genealogy is 'first and foremost a way of thinking' and not simply a way to represent biological ancestor-descendant relations."-CHOICE "In Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and Community, Eviatar Zerubavel, a sociologist at Rutgers, pulls back the curtain on the genealogical obsession. Genealogies, he argues, aren't the straightforward, objective accounts of our ancestries we often presume them to be. Instead, they're heavily curated social constructions, and are as much about our values as they are about the facts of who gave birth to whom."-The Boston Globe "Making the world seem strange is the first step to understanding it anew. Eviatar Zerubavel is a genius at doing this. Here he takes on kinship and shows us the profound, politically fraught, sometimes frightening, and often funny ways in which we take the biological fact that life creates life and fashion genealogy from it. This is a brilliant, witty, effortlessly well-informed book that anyone with ancestors or anyone who worries about ethnicity, race, and nationalism will read with pleasure and surprise."-Thomas Laqueur, University of California, Berkeley "While ancestors and relatives are genetically given, the genetics give us no clue how we should measure their relative importance to us. In this lively and well-written book, Eviatar Zerubavel avoids the aridity of technical kinship analysis and uses a personal perspective to show how humans fabricate, in the literal sense, their relatives, by a creative process of elimination and selection in the generation of rules. It is easily the most engaging introduction to kinship for the general reader that I have read, and a contribution in its own right to a wider understanding of our place in evolution."-Robin Fox, author of Kinship and Marriage and The Tribal Imagination "Kinship is a perennial staple-necessary but ordinarily dry as dust-of anthropology, sociology, and demography. In Ancestors and Relatives, Eviatar Zerubavel makes the topic new, bringing to it an encyclopedic knowledge and a powerful sociological imagination that brings to life the deeply social and cultural ways in which we talk about, imagine, and understand our ancestors and relations. Never has kinship been more interesting and never has it been as much fun."-Paul DiMaggio, Princeton University

Genealogy has long been one of humanity's greatest obsessions. But with the rise of genetics, and increasing media attention through television programs like Who Do You Think You Are? and Faces of America, we are now told that genetic markers can definitively tell us where we came from. The problem, writes Eviatar Zerubavel, is that biology does not provide us with the full picture. After all, he asks, why do we consider Barack Obama black even though his mother was white? Why did the Nazis believe that unions of Germans and Jews would produce Jews rather than Germans? Are sixth cousins still family? In this provocative book, he offers a r s3h understanding of relatedness, showing that its social logic sometimes overrides the biological reality it supposedly reflects. In fact, rather than just biological facts, social traditions of remembering and classifying shape the way we trace our ancestors, identify our relatives, and delineate families, ethnic groups, nations, and species. Furthermore, genealogies are more than mere records of history. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Zerubavel introduces such concepts as braiding, clipping, pasting, lumping, splitting, stretching, and pruning to shed light on how we manipulate genealogies to accommodate personal and collective agendas of inclusion and exclusion. Rather than simply find out who our ancestors were and identify our relatives, we actually construct the genealogical narratives that make them our ancestors and relatives. An eye-opening re-examination our very notion of relatedness, Ancestors and Relatives offers a new way of understanding family, ethnicity, nationhood, race, and humanity.

The fable of the Emperor's New Clothes is a classic example of a conspiracy of silence, a situation where everyone refuses to acknowledge an obvious truth. But the denial of social realities--whether incest, alcoholism, corruption, or even genocide--is no fairy tale. In The Elephant in the Room, Eviatar Zerubavel sheds new light on the social and political underpinnings of silence and denial--the keeping of "open secrets." The author shows that conspiracies of silence exist at every level of society, ranging from small groups to large corporations, from personal friendships to politics. Drawing on examples from newspapers and comedy shows to novels, children's stories, and film, the book travels back and forth across different levels of social life, and from everyday moments to large-scale historical events. At its core, The Elephant in the Room helps us understand why we ignore truths that are known to all of us. Zerubavel shows how such conspiracies evolve, illuminating the social pressures that cause people to deny what is right before their eyes. We see how each conspirator's denial is symbiotically complemented by the others', and we learn that silence is usually more intense when there are more people conspiring--and especially when there are significant power differences among them. He concludes by showing that the longer we ignore "elephants," the larger they loom in our minds, as each avoidance triggers an even greater spiral of denial. Social life in families, organizations, communities and even entire nations is full of situations where the emperor has no clothes. The Elephant in the Room illuminates the dynamics behind these situations, revealing why we ignore obvious and alarming realities.

An examination of the social and political underpinnings of silence, denial, and keeping "open secrets" draws on examples from newspapers, comedy shows, novels, children's stories, and film to illustrate that conspiracies of silence exist at every level of society, ranging from small groups to large corporations and from personal friendships to politics.

"Time Maps extends beyond all of the old clichés about linear, circular, and spiral patterns of historical process and provides us with models of the actual legends used to map history. It is a brilliant and elegant exercise in model building that provides new insights into some of the old questions about philosophy of history, historical narrative, and what is called straight history."-Hayden White, University of California, Santa CruzWho were the first people to inhabit North America? Does the West Bank belong to the Arabs or the Jews? Why are racists so obsessed with origins? Is a seventh cousin still a cousin? Why do some societies name their children after dead ancestors?As Eviatar Zerubavel demonstrates in Time Maps, we cannot answer burning questions such as these without a deeper understanding of how we envision the past. In a pioneering attempt to map the structure of our collective memory, Zerubavel considers the cognitive patterns we use to organize the past in our minds and the mental strategies that help us string together unrelated events into coherent and meaningful narratives, as well as the social grammar of battles over conflicting interpretations of history. Drawing on fascinating examples that range from Hiroshima to the Holocaust, from Columbus to Lucy, and from ancient Egypt to the former Yugoslavia, Zerubavel shows how we construct historical origins; how we tie discontinuous events together into stories; how we link families and entire nations through genealogies; and how we separate distinct historical periods from one another through watersheds, such as the invention of fire or the fall of the Berlin Wall.Most people think the Roman Empire ended in 476, even though it lasted another 977 years in Byzantium. Challenging such conventional wisdom, Time Maps will be must reading for anyone interested in how the history of our world takes shape.

Who were the first people to inhabit North America? Does the West Bank belong to the Arabs or the Jews? Why are racists so obsessed with origins? Did the terrorist attacks of September 11 mark the end of an era? Or the beginning of a new one? As Eviatar Zerubavel demonstrates in "Time Maps", we cannot answer burning questions such as these without a deeper understanding of how we envision the past. In a pioneering attempt to map the structure of our collective memory, Zerubavel considers the cognitive patterns we use to organize the past in our minds, the mental strategies that help us string together unrelated events into coherent and meaningful narratives, and the social grammar of battles over conflicting interpretations of history. Drawing on fascinating examples that range from Hiroshima to the Holocaust, from Watergate to the West Bank, and from ancient Rome to the former Yugoslavia, Zerubavel shows how we construct historical origins; how we organize time into stories; how we tie discontinuous events together into eras; how we link families and entire nations through genealogies; and how we separate distinct historical periods from one another through watersheds, such as the invention of fire or the fall of the Berlin wall. Most people think the Roman Empire ended in 476, even though it lasted another 977 years in Byzantium. Challenging such conventional wisdom, "Time Maps" should be valuable reading for anyone interested in how the history of our world takes shape.

Most of us are fascinated by the conventional storybook account of Christopher Columbus' heroic discovery of America in 1492. Yet, should the credit for discovering America go to a man who insisted it was but a few islands off the shores of China?In Terra Cognita, Eviatar Zerubavel argues that physical encounters are only one part of the complex, multifaceted process of discovery. Such encounters must be complemented by an understanding of the true identity of what is being discovered. The small group of islands claimed by Columbus to have been discovered off the shores of Asia was a far cry from what we now call America. The discovery of the New World was not achieved in a single day but was a slow process--mental as well as physical--that lasted almost three hundred years. By celebrating 1492 as a year of discovery, we inevitably distort the reality of history.In vividly documenting how a slowly emerging New World gradually forced itself into Europe's consciousness, Zerubavel shows that Columbus did not discover America on October 12, 1492. Supplemented by fascinating old maps and a new preface written for this paperback edition, Terra Cognita will be of interest to historians, geographers, cognitive scientists, sociologists, and students of culture.

Why do we eat sardines, but never goldfish; ducks, but never parrots? Why does adding cheese make a hamburger a "cheeseburger" whereas adding ketchup does not make it a "ketchupburger"? By the same token, how do we determine which things said at a meeting should be included in the minutes and which ought to be considered "off the record" and officially disregarded? In this wide-ranging and provocative book, Eviatar Zerubavel argues that cognitive science cannot answer these questions, since it addresses cognition on only two levels: the individual and the universal. To fill the gap between the Romantic vision of the solitary thinker whose thoughts are the product of unique experience, and the cognitive-psychological view, which revolves around the search for the universal foundations of human cognition, Zerubavel charts an expansive social realm of mind--a domain that focuses on the conventional, normative aspects of the way we think.With witty anecdote and revealing analogy, Zerubavel illuminates the social foundation of mental actions such as perceiving, attending, classifying, remembering, assigning meaning, and reckoning the time. What takes place inside our heads, he reminds us, is deeply affected by our social environments, which are typically groups that are larger than the individual yet considerably smaller than the human race. Thus, we develop a nonuniversal software for thinking as Americans or Chinese, lawyers or teachers, Catholics or Jews, Baby Boomers or Gen-Xers. Zerubavel explores the fascinating ways in which thought communities carve up and classify reality, assign meanings, and perceive things, "defamiliarizing" in the process many taken-for-granted assumptions.

For anyone who has blanched at the uphill prospect of finishing a long piece of writing, this book holds out something more practical than hope: it offers a plan. The Clockwork Muse is designed to help prospective authors develop a workable timetable for completing long and often formidable projects.The idea of dashing off a manuscript in a fit of manic inspiration may be romantic, but it is not particularly practical. Instead, Eviatar Zerubavel, a prolific and successful author, describes how to set up a writing schedule and regular work habits that will take most of the anxiety and procrastination out of long-term writing, and even make it enjoyable. The dreaded ‘writer’s block’ often turns out to be simply a need for a better grasp of the temporal organization of work.The Clockwork Muse rethinks the writing process in terms of time and organization. It offers writers a simple yet comprehensive framework that considers such variables as when to write, for how long, and how often, while keeping a sense of momentum throughout the entire project. It shows how to set priorities, balance ideals against constraints, and find the ideal time to write. For all those whose writing has languished, waiting for the “right moment,” The Clockwork Muse announces that the moment has arrived.

Eviatar Zerubavel argues that most of the distinctions we make in our daily lives and in our culture are social constructs. He questions the notion that a clear line can be drawn to separate one time or object or concept from another, and presents witty and provocative counterexamples in defense of ambiguity and anomaly.