"With Small Steps and Giant Leaps, Eviatar Zerubavel tackles one of the most important questions for social life today: how do we classify people and things? Showing how we minimize difference within categories while emphasizing distance across them, this book reveals the role mental distance plays in reifying social life. By scrutinizing how we think about space, time, and group membership, it invites us to reconsider the giant leaps we take by treating the dividing lines through which we parcel reality as given. A welcome balm to the binarized thinking we currently live under." -- Claudio Benzecry, Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology, Northwestern University"Over a half century, Eviatar Zerubavel has transformed sociology, emphasizing the salience of cognitive boundaries for social life. In his latest work, Small Steps and Giant Leaps, he has provided a rich and necessary overview of the divisions through which we construct social life. From defining a single step as 'one giant leap for mankind' to our chosen moral separation between human primates and our cousin, the apes, Zerubavel reminds us that divisions we find 'obvious' matter because we choose to make them so." -- Gary Alan Fine, Visiting Researcher, Emory University and author of Joy to the World: The Performance of Collective Pleasure"Small Steps and Giant Leaps is vintage Zerubavel. With wit and grace, he upends our taken-for-granted ways of seeing the world.

Examples from every age, continent, and science illustrate how we 'stretch' or 'chunk' distance as we categorize time, space and social relationships. We categorize chimpanzees as 'animals,' thus far from 'humans' and closer to cats; we homogenize 'male' and 'female,' ignoring the huge overlaps; and we imagine time as discrete weeks, days, hours, and minutes. Analyzing the patterns underlying our socially constructed world offers profound insight into the limits and possibilities of social perception." -- Ann Swidler, Professor of the Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley"Zerubavel's elegance in sketching a unified phenomenology of social space, time, and group membership is matched by his characteristic attention to revealing nuances of our language and categorization practices that other analysts routinely miss. The result in his persuasive telling is a giant leap toward generalization across contexts, on the basis of his keen insights into our everyday cognitive habits." -- Ronald Breiger, Regents Professor Emeritus, University of Arizona.