An original and highly imaginative analysis of the role time schedule plays in social life. Focusing on social time, it provides a penetrating and profound analysis of the subtle and diverse significance of time in organizing our social relationships and lives.
Challenging the conventional narrative of Columbus' discovery of America, Eviatar Zerubavel presents a nuanced view that emphasizes the complexity of discovery beyond mere physical encounters. He argues that Columbus' claims of finding islands near China misrepresent the vast and distinct identity of the New World. The book details a gradual process of awareness that unfolded over nearly three centuries, suggesting that celebrating 1492 as a singular moment distorts historical reality. Enhanced with old maps and a new preface, it appeals to a diverse audience interested in history and culture.
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 acrossdisparate 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.
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
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
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.
In Don't Take It Personally, Eviatar Zerubavel comprehensively addresses the fundamental distinction between the specific and generic visions of personhood. While the former focuses on specifically "who" individuals are, as embodied by their driver's license and signature, the latter vision concerns itself with "what" they are, as interchangeable members of particular social roles or groups. Over the course of the book, Zerubavel articulates the fundamental features and underlying logic of impersonality and considers what is gained and what is lost by impersonalizing so much of modern social life.