Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English

TAKEN FOR GRANTED

Eviatar Zerubavel

The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable

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”? Taken for Granted exposes the subtly encoded ways we talk about topics like race, gender, sexuality, and social status, offering a provocative look at the word choices we make every day without even realizing it. Eviatar Zerubavel describes how the words we use provide telling clues about the things we 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. Zerubavel shows how this tacit normalizing of certain identities, practices, and ideas helps to maintain their cultural dominance—and shape what we take for granted.

Eviatar Zerubavel is Board of Governors and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University.
Available products
Book

Published 2018-04-01 by Princeton University Press

Comments

"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 "Mind-opening. . . . Remarkable." —Dan Friedman, Los Angeles Review of Books "A special mind is at work in these pages." —Kai Erikson, Yale University "I dare Americans to read this revelatory book, and hope they will." —Catharine R. Stimpson, New York University

Quote Praise