Eviatar Zerubavel

I found this interesting, as a layperson whose function in many social situations often seems to be the person saying, "hey, cool elephant; where'd you get it?" with all of the attendant fallout.

Or, in many cases, non-fallout, because the wish not to acknowledge the elephant most certainly extends to comments about the elephant, so for example:

Me: Hey, cool elephant; where'd you get it?
Them: I've often wanted to visit India.

Me: That's neat, but isn't it hard to enjoy the new TV with the elephant in the way?
Them: My favourite show right now is Scandal. It has great reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

Anyway. I enjoyed the book. My one caveat is the author's frankly bigoted commentary at some points. Examples:

Calling Jefferson's treatment of his slave Sally Hemings an "illicit relationship."
Stating that Bill Cosby was called out by the black community for his commentary on black youth for being too truthful, rather than for being a racist pack of lies.

Two examples of several, not all of which I can remember. Such bigotry makes this book itself part of ongoing conspiracies of silence on matters other than those he discusses, ironically, and I can't help but notice that other reviewers have failed to mention them. What is it called when book reviewers engage in a conspiracy of silence to let pass the conspiracy of silence perpetuated by the author of a book about conspiracies of silence?… (mehr)

All in all, this is a very short book (barely 110 pages of text, the rest are notes and bibliography), but Zerubavel has packed a lot into it. His approach is ambitious, he wants to show "how the past is registered and organized in our minds". Perhaps that's too ambitious, because his conclusion is actually the same as his starting point, namely that our view of the past is socially determined and uses narrative structures and approaches that are embedded in the community in which we live.

And of course it is. But Zerubavel succeeds in making that theoretical view very illustrative through an apprehensive overview of approaches and techniques of looking at the past, accompanied by a cartload of concrete examples from almost all over the world. In this sense, this work is closely related to that of David Lowenthal. The Past is a Foreign Country - Revisited, which is much more exhaustive and goes even wider, but then again lacks a clear structure; in that sense the two complement each other well.
See my more elaborate review in my History-account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... (less)… (mehr)