Download or read book The Elephant in the Room written by Eviatar Zerubavel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-04 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Citing the fable of the Emperor's New Clothes as a classic example of a situation where everyone refuses to acknowledge an obvious truth, Zerubavel sheds new light on the social and political underpinnings of silence and denial--the keeping of "open secrets."
Download or read book The Elephant in the Room written by Eviatar Zerubavel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-01 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fable of the Emperor's New Clothes is a classic example of a conspiracy of silence, a situation where everyone refuses to acknowledge an obvious truth. But the denial of social realities--whether incest, alcoholism, corruption, or even genocide-is no fairy tale. In The Elephant in the Room, Eviatar Zerubavel sheds new light on the social and political underpinnings of silence and denial-the keeping of "open secrets." The author shows that conspiracies of silence exist at every level of society, ranging from small groups to large corporations, from personal friendships to politics. Zerubavel shows how such conspiracies evolve, illuminating the social pressures that cause people to deny what is right before their eyes. We see how each conspirator's denial is symbiotically complemented by the others', and we learn that silence is usually more intense when there are more people conspiring-and especially when there are significant power differences among them. He concludes by showing that the longer we ignore "elephants," the larger they loom in our minds, as each avoidance triggers an even greater spiral of denial. Drawing on examples from newspapers and comedy shows to novels, children's stories, and film, the book travels back and forth across different levels of social life, and from everyday moments to large-scale historical events. At its core, The Elephant in the Room helps us understand why we ignore truths that are known to all of us.
Download or read book Ancestors and Relatives written by Eviatar Zerubavel and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012-01-26 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noted social scientist Eviatar Zerubavel casts a critical eye on how we trace our past-individually and collectively arguing that rather than simply find out who our ancestors are from genetics or history, we actually create the stories that make them our ancestors.
Download or read book Living in Denial written by Kari Marie Norgaard and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-03-11 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of why people with knowledge about climate change often fail to translate that knowledge into action. Global warming is the most significant environmental issue of our time, yet public response in Western nations has been meager. Why have so few taken any action? In Living in Denial, sociologist Kari Norgaard searches for answers to this question, drawing on interviews and ethnographic data from her study of "Bygdaby," the fictional name of an actual rural community in western Norway, during the unusually warm winter of 2000-2001. In 2000-2001 the first snowfall came to Bygdaby two months later than usual; ice fishing was impossible; and the ski industry had to invest substantially in artificial snow-making. Stories in local and national newspapers linked the warm winter explicitly to global warming. Yet residents did not write letters to the editor, pressure politicians, or cut down on use of fossil fuels. Norgaard attributes this lack of response to the phenomenon of socially organized denial, by which information about climate science is known in the abstract but disconnected from political, social, and private life, and sees this as emblematic of how citizens of industrialized countries are responding to global warming. Norgaard finds that for the highly educated and politically savvy residents of Bygdaby, global warming was both common knowledge and unimaginable. Norgaard traces this denial through multiple levels, from emotions to cultural norms to political economy. Her report from Bygdaby, supplemented by comparisons throughout the book to the United States, tells a larger story behind our paralysis in the face of today's alarming predictions from climate scientists.
Download or read book Taken for Granted written by Eviatar Zerubavel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Generally Speaking written by Eviatar Zerubavel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-02 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 across disparate 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.
Download or read book Hidden in Plain Sight written by Eviatar Zerubavel and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of us take for granted that what we perceive is a completely accurate representation of the world around us. Yet we have all had the experience of suddenly realizing that the keys or glasses that we had been looking for in vain were right in front of us the whole time. The capacity of our sense organs far exceeds our mental capabilities, and as such, looking at something does not guarantee that we will notice it. Our minds constantly prioritize and organize the information we take in, bringing certain things to the foreground, while letting others - that which we deem irrelevant - recede into the background. What ultimately determines what we perceive, and what we do not? In this fascinating book, noted sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel argues that we perceive things not just as human beings but as social beings. Drawing on fascinating examples from science, the art world, optical illusions, and all walks of life, he shows that what we notice or ignore varies across cultures and throughout history, and illustrates how our environment and our social lives - everything from our lifestyles to our professions to our nationalities - play a role in determining how we actually use our senses to access the world. A subtle yet powerful examination of one of the central features of our conscious life, this book offers a way to think about all that might otherwise remain hidden in plain sight.
Download or read book Truth Silence and Violence in Emerging States written by Aidan Russell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-31 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around the world in the twentieth century, political violence in emerging states gave rise to different kinds of silence within their societies. This book explores the histories of these silences, how they were made, maintained, evaded, and transformed. This book gives a comprehensive view of the ongoing evolutions and multiple faces of silence as a common strand in the struggles of state-building. It begins with chapters that examine the construction of "regimes of silence" as an act of power, and it continues through explorations of the ambiguous limits of speech within communities marked by this violence. It highlights national and transnational attempts to combat state silences, before concluding with a series of considerations of how these regimes of silence continue to be extrapolated in the gaps of records and written history. This volume explores histories of the composed silences of political violence across the emerging states of the late twentieth century, not solely as a present concern of aftermath or retrospection but as a diachronic social and political dimension of violence itself. This book makes a major original contribution to international history, as well as to the study of political terror, human rights violations, social recovery, and historical memory.
Download or read book Privilege Power And Difference written by Allan G. Johnson and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Revolution of Everyday Life written by Raoul Vaneigem and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2012-10-05 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published just months before the May 1968 upheavals in France, Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life offered a lyrical and aphoristic critique of the “society of the spectacle” from the point of view of individual experience. Whereas Debord’s masterful analysis of the new historical conditions that triggered the uprisings of the 1960s armed the revolutionaries of the time with theory, Vaneigem’s book described their feelings of desperation directly, and armed them with “formulations capable of firing point-blank on our enemies.” “I realise,” writes Vaneigem in his introduction, “that I have given subjective will an easy time in this book, but let no one reproach me for this without first considering the extent to which the objective conditions of the contemporary world advance the cause of subjectivity day after day.” Vaneigem names and defines the alienating features of everyday life in consumer society: survival rather than life, the call to sacrifice, the cultivation of false needs, the dictatorship of the commodity, subjection to social roles, and above all the replacement of God by the Economy. And in the second part of his book, “Reversal of Perspective,” he explores the countervailing impulses that, in true dialectical fashion, persist within the deepest alienation: creativity, spontaneity, poetry, and the path from isolation to communication and participation. For “To desire a different life is already that life in the making.” And “fulfillment is expressed in the singular but conjugated in the plural.” The present English translation was first published by Rebel Press of London in 1983. This new edition of The Revolution of Everyday Life has been reviewed and corrected by the translator and contains a new preface addressed to English-language readers by Raoul Vaneigem. The book is the first of several translations of works by Raoul Vaneigem that PM Press plans to publish in uniform volumes. Vaneigem’s classic work is to be followed by The Knight, the Lady, the Devil, and Death (2003) and The Inhumanity of Religion (2000).
Download or read book Smokescreen written by Philip J. Hilts and published by Addison Wesley Publishing Company. This book was released on 1996 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cigarettes, smoking, intrigue and a troubling look at the abuses of corporate power.
Download or read book Living My Life written by Emma Goldman and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 1970-01-01 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The autobiography of the early radical leader and her participation in communist, anarchist, and feminist activities
Download or read book A Stranger in the House of God written by John Koessler and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2009-08-30 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Growing up the son of agnostics, John Koessler saw a Catholic church on one end of the street and a Baptist on the other. In the no-man’s land between the two, this curious outside wondered about the God they worshipped—and began a lifelong search to comprehend the grace and mystery of God. A Stranger in the House of God addresses fundamental questions and struggles faced by spiritual seekers and mature believers. Like a contemporary Pilgrim’s Progress, it traces the author’s journey and explores his experiences with both charismatic and evangelical Christianity. It also describes his transformation from religious outsider to ordained pastor. John Koessler provides a poignant and often humorous window into the interior of the soul as he describes his journey from doubt and struggle with the church to personal faith
Download or read book The Voice of the Silence written by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE following pages are derived from "The Book of the Golden Precepts," one of the works put into the hands of mystic students in the East. The knowledge of them is obligatory in that school, the teachings of which are accepted by many Theosophists. Therefore, as I know many of these Precepts by heart, the work of translating has been relatively an easy task for me. It is well known that, in India, the methods of psychic development differ with the Gurus (teachers or masters), not only because of their belonging to different schools of philosophy, of which there are six, but because every Guru has his own system, which he generally keeps very secret. But beyond the Himalayas the method in the Esoteric Schools does not differ, unless the Guru is simply a Lama, but little more learned than those he teaches. The work from which I here translate forms part of the same series as that from which the "Stanzas" of the Book of Dzyan were taken, on which the Secret Doctrine is based. Together with the great mystic work called Paramartha, which, the legend of Nagarjuna tells us, was delivered to the great Arhat by the Nagas or "Serpents" (in truth a name given to the ancient Initiates), the Book of the Golden Precepts claims the same origin. Yet its maxims and ideas, however noble and original, are often found under different forms in Sanskrit works, such as the Dnyaneshvari, that superb mystic treatise in which Krishna describes to Arjuna in glowing colors the condition of a fully illumined Yogi; and again in certain Upanishads. This is but natural, since most, if not all, of the greatest Arhats, the first followers of Gautama Buddha were Hindus and Aryans, not Mongolians, especially those who emigrated into Tibet. The works left by Aryasanga alone are very numerous.
Download or read book Sophie s World written by Jostein Gaarder and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 735 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.
Download or read book Talk at the Brink written by David R. Gibson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-29 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uses the tools of Conversaton analysis to show how the decisions of the ExComm were made during the Cuban Missile Crisis, based on audio tapes made by President Kennedy.
Download or read book Grave s End written by Elaine Mercado and published by Llewellyn Worldwide. This book was released on 2001 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You leave us alone; we'll leave you alone. When Elaine Mercado and her first husband bought their home in Brooklyn, N. Y., in 1982, they had no idea that they and their two young daughters were embarking on a thirteen-year nightmare. thin a few days of moving in, Elaine and her older daughter began to experience the sensation of being watched. Then came scratching noises and weird smells, followed by voices whispering, maniacal laughter, shadowy figures scurrying along baseboards, and small balls of light bouncing along the ceilings. From the beginning of the haunting, "suffocating dreams" were experienced by everyone except the younger daughter. These eventually accelerated to physical aggression directed at Elaine and both the girls. This book is the true story of how one family tried to cope with living in a haunted house. It also describes how, with the help of parapsychologist Dr. Hans Holzer and medium Marisa Anderson, the family discovered the tragic and heartbreaking secrets buried in the house at Grave's End. I struggle to open my eyes, but achieve nothing but frustration and failure. I am not asleep. I am fully conscious, in a state of panic unthinkable during the day intolerable in the dark of night, held prisoner by some tortured, invisible presence, insistent on abruptly invading my slumber. The more I struggle toward freedom, the more I am pushed into the mattress, perspiring, heart palpitating, a scream involuntarily silenced within my throat. Some nights I experience my skin being stroked while I fight to regain control of my body, my sight. Thank God, this was not one of those nights. Tonight it lets me open my eyes, shaken but unviolated, frightened, but not as frightened as I know I can become. First Runner up for the 2001 Coalition of Visionary Resources (COVR) Award for Best Biographical/Personal Book
