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.

About the Author
Eviatar Zerubavel is Board of Governors and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. His many books include Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology, The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life, and Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and Community. He lives in East Brunswick, New Jersey.

Reviews
"Winner of the Charles Horton Cooley Award, Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction"
"Winner of the Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form, Media Ecology Association"
"The book . . . is rich in insight and has the power to shift a reader's worldview. . . . As broad questions of racial, gendered, and religious intolerance are raised nationally by the exclusionary words and actions of the current administration as well as by the revelations of the ongoing Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements, the nation is searching for common ground. But a national conversation cannot take place until we have the tools for that dialogue, and this remarkable book shows us how to make the language we need."---Dan Friedman, Los Angeles Review of Books
"[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
"Taken for Granted is an interesting, thought-provoking, easy read, and the bibliography presents a wealth of impressively cross-disciplinary influences, each worth investigating. The book is most poignant, though, in revealing how quickly use of 'marked' language, and underlying cultural norms, can shift."---Andrea Macrae, Times Higher Education



Book Information
ISBN 9780691177366
Author Eviatar Zerubavel
Format Hardback
Page Count 160
Imprint Princeton University Press
Publisher Princeton University Press
Weight(grams) 340g