Dato per scontato. La costruzione sociale dell'ovvietà

by Eviatar Zerubavel

Perché mentre l'espressione "dichiaratamente gay" è così usata l'equivalente "apertamente etero" non lo è? Quali sono gli assunti che stanno alle spalle di locuzioni come "donna in carriera" o "infermiere maschio"? Perché Obama è considerato un uomo di colore con una madre bianca anziché un uomo bianco con un padre di colore? È davvero così naturale scandire lo scorrere del tempo con cicli di sette giorni che chiamiamo settimane? Se è vero che ci vuole una mente davvero insolita per intraprendere l'analisi dell'ovvio, insolitamente affascinante è il viaggio che Zerubavel - figura singolare nel panorama della sociologia contemporanea - compie fra i mari (fra gli oceani) di ciò che diamo per scontato: l'infinità di fatti sociali che prendiamo per buoni senza neanche rendercene conto, senza neanche pensare che siano qualcosa di sociale.

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction

159 pages, Hardcover

Published March 21, 2019

Reviews

[Xylia · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Oktay Yagiz · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Till Sunfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

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!

[Yibei · Rating 3 out of 5]

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).

[Emmy Hermans · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Edwin Battistella · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Dariusz Gzyra · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.).

[Axell · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Lloyd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Repetitive.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Brain flatulence of a small mind. Mostly word games and cute quotes. Unremarkable.

[Sadiq Bhanbhro · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[D Friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wrote this review
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/t...

[Alexia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent, thought-provoking book that I plan to use in my graduate classes. However, it was unnecessarily repetitive and therefore tiring at times.

[Alex Turvy]

what a terrible year of reading, way too much nonfiction - no offense to this particular book but come on man

[花 nala !! ☽ · Rating 2 out of 5]

oggi mi sentivo generosa, evidentemente.

[Ilaria Coppari · Rating 5 out of 5]

"la "normalità" ha una natura fluida, storicamente contingente, e il dato per scontato di oggi può essere lo straordinario di domani."