Times of Sociology. Eviatar Zerubavel in Conversation with Lorenzo Sabetta

Lorenzo Sabetta; Eviatar Zerubavel

doi:10.6092/issn.1971-8853/9747

Authors

Lorenzo Sabetta University of Rome, La Sapienza
Lorenzo Sabetta (1988) received his PhD in Methodology of Social Sciences at University of Rome, La Sapienza, in 2017. In 2017-2018 he has been Postdoc Fellow at the Department of Sociology of the University of Missouri/Columbia. Recent publications include "Interpreting Life Sociologically: The Cases of Merton and Bourdieu" (in Sociologia e Ricerca Sociale, 2018) and "Self-Defeating Prophecies: When Sociology Really Matters" in R. Poli and M. Valerio (Eds.), Anticipation, Agency and Complexity (Berlin: Springer, 2019).
Eviatar Zerubavel Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Eviatar Zerubavel (1948) is Board of Governors and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. In 2000-2001 he served as Chair of the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association. In 2003 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. His articles have been published in journals such as American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review; his many books are translated in several languages and include Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life; Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology; The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life; Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past; Taken for Granted: The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable. He is currently writing a book on “concept-driven sociology.”

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/9747

Keywords:

Social Theorizing, Taken-for-grantedness, Sociotemporal Order, Erving Goffman, The Social Construction of What?, Rutgers School, Concept-Driven Sociology.

Abstract

This interview offers a historical reconstruction of Eviatar Zerubavel’s work, from his pioneering studies of time to his not-yet-published analysis of “concept-driven sociology”, running the gamut of Zerubavel’s career and embracing a period of more than forty years of sociological research. The interview encompasses several major topics: the beginnings of Zerubavel’s own intellectual path and his move from Israel to the United States; the nuts and bolts of sociology of time and cognitive sociology; the underlying theoretical framework of a transcontextual and comparative mode of social inquiry; an in-depth analysis of the last books which Zerubavel has devoted to the study of phenomena such as backgroundness and taken-for-grantedness; the range of his academic and intellectual relationships (especially the one with his mentor Goffman, but also his rapport with Peter Berger, Lewis Coser, Renée Fox, and Murray Davis, among others); the polymorphic connection between sociological theory and politics; the development of the so-called “Rutgers School of Sociology”; the issue of “public sociology”; the future of sociology and academic research.

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Times of Sociology. Eviatar Zerubavel in Conversation with Lorenzo Sabetta

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