Taken for Granted

Original, engaging, and very readable. Taken for Granted links semiotics, social theory, and contemporary issues with great facility, yielding wonderful insights. --Ari Adut, author of Reign of Appearances: The Misery and Splendor of the Public Sphere An interesting and remarkable read. Zerubavel offers a prism through which to see our world differently, and a theoretical provocation that calls for further debate. --Iddo Tavory, author of Summoned: Identification and Religious Life in a Jewish Neighborhood One of Eviatar Zerubavel's remarkable gifts is his ability to see things about the way we human beings behave and think that we are for the most part unaware of. Another of his remarkable gifts is the ability to convey what he can see with that finely tuned vision of his in a way that becomes instantly clear to us. That is a rare combination, and it is in full force throughout this new gift to us. His mind turns with a special grace and skill to things left out even though obvious to the core, things unseen even though there in plain sight, things that dominate the scene without being noticed, and, in this case, words and phrases that organize our arrangements of reality without our knowing so. What we humans learn of the shape of the world is not simply a product of what our sensory organs tell us but what the screens we peer through from the social order allow us to experience. A special mind is at work in these pages. --Kai Erikson, professor emeritus of sociology and American studies, Yale University I dare Americans to read this revelatory book, and hope they will. For Eviatar Zerubavel shows us how we think and speak. We consider some things simply unremarkable, comfortably normal. But others are remarkable, uncomfortably abnormal. Often dangerously, we act on these assumptions. Lucidly, without any guilt-tripping, this leading thinker enables us to live together--with greater justice and understanding. --Catharine R. Stimpson, New York University [Taken for Granted is] a forceful work, requiring us to acknowledge our biases and how they are articulated -- whether we realize the implications of what we're saying, or not.---Grace Parazzoli, Sante Fe New Mexican