Zerubavel, Eviatar

Created: 2022-Oct-26

Bio: (1948-) Israeli-American sociologist. Eviatar Zerubavel was born in Israel and spent his entire academic career in the United States. He holds a Ph.d. from the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at Columbia University and Rudgers University.

Zerubavel first became known for his sociological study of time in the works Patterns of Time in Hospital Life (1979), Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (1981), „The Standardization of Time: A Sociohistorical Perspective”, in American Journal of Sociology (1982), and The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week (1985). Researching the organization of time in hospitals, calendars, and diaries, the division of time into months and weeks, he concluded that there is a social basis for time or temporal patterns. Society produces a specific "sociotemporal order" that is different from biological or physical time patterns.

Zerubavel singles out four types of socio-temporal conventional regularities: 1) sequential structure - the correct chronological order of activities; 2) duration - how long some activities should last; 3) temporal location - what needs to be done at what time (diaries); 4) rates of recurrence - how often some activities are performed. All these forms of socio-temporal order have their normative and prescriptive side and they all form part of the organization of the whole society. In different societies, but also in the same society in different historical periods, there are different time categories, and changes in time categories directly depend on broader social changes.

Zerubavel is also known as one of the founders of cognitive sociology, and his most important book in this field is Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology (1997). This approach to sociology is focused on how society influences the creation of cognitive processes by which people distinguish between different phenomena and how they classify these phenomena.

In the book The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life (2006), Zerubavel explores how and why some things are kept secret, or their existence is completely denied. Cultural practices and social norms create filters in the individual and social perception of people, in relation to events, things, and other phenomena, directing attention to some, while at the same time blocking the perception of others. Examples he points to are societies where there is fear of foreigners, in which any negative behavior of someone who is considered a foreigner receives much more attention than the behavior of someone who is not considered a foreigner; or cases where the whole society refused to notice any very negative behavior, for example, when the Germans during World War II refused to notice or accept the existence of concentration camps near them.