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Taken for Granted: The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable (Princeton University Press
How the words we use--and don't use--reinforce dominant cultural norms
Why 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.
Why 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.
- GenresSociologyNonfiction
160 pages, Hardcover
Published April 24, 2018
11 people are currently reading
134 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
July 7, 2020
Zerubavel is a brilliant sociologist. However, this book was painfully repetitive, both in content and in wording (not sure how many more times I could stand reading the word ‘hitherto’). This material would’ve been much stronger if it were broken down into a couple good journal articles.
November 29, 2021
TAKEN FOR GRANTED, THE REMARKABLE POWER OF THE UNREMARKABLE
Eviatar Zerubavel
This is an academic dissertation in its purest not, of course, because of the sheer number of sources cited and footnotes used (an average of 17 per page, after all) but mainly owing to how it treats one cherry-picked topic and weaves it deftly into a well-structured social theory.
The book starts with an epistemological treatment of semiotics as a form of human interaction and communication. It moves on to explain how and why certain social and/or individual attributes are regarded as the norm or the ordinary, hence not worthy of being ‘marked’, while others as exceptional, aberrant, or special, hence not worthy of being marked. It provides case after case showing how politics, socio-economic, historical, and situational factors and trends have interplayed in the dyadic labeling of attitudes, traits, and characteristics classifying them either as normative or as exceptional. It offers countless examples of developments and social preferences that have led to the changing of places between what was regarded as ordinary and what was not through ‘foregrounding’ of the ordinary and ‘backgrounding’ of the salient. And it shows how semantics have been both a cause (determinant) and an effect (derivative) in the asymmetrical definition of what was to be taken as the common and what of the uncommon.
In a way, the book is an eye opener (particularly for those who have invested time and taken epistemological interest in behavioral sciences, socio-cultural semantics, and in semiotics that has come in recent times to be popularly related to body language.
Read it if you want to indulge yourself in academia and feel prepared to hit by terminology like syntactic, cisgender, asynchronous, andronormativity, heteronormativity, leukonormativity.
Personally, never had I read (or had come across) before a book with about 500 subject and 400 authors indices, 400 biographical references, and 400 footnotes supporting a total of almost 100 pages!
I did enjoy reading it, though, I must say --despite its being so repetitive.
Eviatar Zerubavel
This is an academic dissertation in its purest not, of course, because of the sheer number of sources cited and footnotes used (an average of 17 per page, after all) but mainly owing to how it treats one cherry-picked topic and weaves it deftly into a well-structured social theory.
The book starts with an epistemological treatment of semiotics as a form of human interaction and communication. It moves on to explain how and why certain social and/or individual attributes are regarded as the norm or the ordinary, hence not worthy of being ‘marked’, while others as exceptional, aberrant, or special, hence not worthy of being marked. It provides case after case showing how politics, socio-economic, historical, and situational factors and trends have interplayed in the dyadic labeling of attitudes, traits, and characteristics classifying them either as normative or as exceptional. It offers countless examples of developments and social preferences that have led to the changing of places between what was regarded as ordinary and what was not through ‘foregrounding’ of the ordinary and ‘backgrounding’ of the salient. And it shows how semantics have been both a cause (determinant) and an effect (derivative) in the asymmetrical definition of what was to be taken as the common and what of the uncommon.
In a way, the book is an eye opener (particularly for those who have invested time and taken epistemological interest in behavioral sciences, socio-cultural semantics, and in semiotics that has come in recent times to be popularly related to body language.
Read it if you want to indulge yourself in academia and feel prepared to hit by terminology like syntactic, cisgender, asynchronous, andronormativity, heteronormativity, leukonormativity.
Personally, never had I read (or had come across) before a book with about 500 subject and 400 authors indices, 400 biographical references, and 400 footnotes supporting a total of almost 100 pages!
I did enjoy reading it, though, I must say --despite its being so repetitive.
December 15, 2024
The core idea and marked/unmarked distinction is great, but as other reviews already have stated: this book is incredibly repetitive after explaining its core idea within the first 15 pages. Zerubavel introduces a lot of concepts that I believe would've been much more interesting to discuss in-depth, than stating the 10th examples of something being marked/unmarked in a row. Why not go into depth on collective attention patterns (p. 6), the processes of semiotic asymmetries (p.10), the power to otherize and cognitive hegemony (p. 58) or sociosemiotic patterns (p.98)? Sharpening those in relation to the marked/unmarked concepts and not just bridge them by giving examples seems much more fruitful to me.
Nevertheless, it is a neat short book that can be built upon!
Nevertheless, it is a neat short book that can be built upon!
January 3, 2022
The author's core arguments can be summarized in one page; the rest 99 pages are all about examples.
There was one point that did strike me. "As we are reminded by Durkheim, the distinction between the moral and the immoral pales in significance to the fundamental distinction between the sacred, which includes both of them, and the profane or amoral" (p. 61) serves as a nice hypothesis that can be tested in the brain -> moral content fMRI, GLM, two contrasts: (1) good vs. bad, (2) moral vs. amoral (social norm); then we do a directional paired t-test on two contrasts to see whether (2) is larger than (1).
There was one point that did strike me. "As we are reminded by Durkheim, the distinction between the moral and the immoral pales in significance to the fundamental distinction between the sacred, which includes both of them, and the profane or amoral" (p. 61) serves as a nice hypothesis that can be tested in the brain -> moral content fMRI, GLM, two contrasts: (1) good vs. bad, (2) moral vs. amoral (social norm); then we do a directional paired t-test on two contrasts to see whether (2) is larger than (1).
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 11, 2025
I enjoyed the easy to read writing style although at some point the books becomes repetitive. The examples start to feel repetitive and I wonder how many times Zerubavel has used ‘by the same token’ across the book (spoiler: a lot). Having that said, the author makes an interesting case for how marked and unmarkedness are constructed in language, and therefore constructs our cognition on what is considered to be the norm and what is ‘other’. He also argues well how these may change contextually, culturally and historically and is thus flexible. The books shows how language may be shaped by social divides and marking but also how social divides shapes language. 3.5/5
December 30, 2019
Taken for Granted is about the theory of markedness—asymmetry in language and culture—a topic that I have a long standing interest in. Zerubavel’s book brings together the social and cultural aspects of asymmetry. A solid non-academic style, but the examples are sometimes dated and some terms could have been defined more sharply.
July 25, 2020
The most extreme form of oppression is the one considered as normality - it remains unrecognized and unmarked. It really is unfortunate that the book on such an extremely important topic is so poorly edited (repetitions etc.).
February 3, 2024
Got it as a gift. Important but a little dull and hard to follow. I’m not a linguist or sociologist, so some of the content meshed together for me. But it has got me thinking about the world in different ways.
October 4, 2018
Repetitive.
February 6, 2020
Brain flatulence of a small mind. Mostly word games and cute quotes. Unremarkable.
November 1, 2020
This is a good book to know about a theory of markedness & unmarkedness but too repetitive not only words, phrases and arguments but examples too.
January 25, 2021
I wrote this review
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/t...
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/t...
August 21, 2022
Excellent, thought-provoking book that I plan to use in my graduate classes. However, it was unnecessarily repetitive and therefore tiring at times.
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April 3, 2023what a terrible year of reading, way too much nonfiction - no offense to this particular book but come on man
April 12, 2025
oggi mi sentivo generosa, evidentemente.
April 12, 2021
"la "normalità" ha una natura fluida, storicamente contingente, e il dato per scontato di oggi può essere lo straordinario di domani."
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews