20011104: Zerubavel, The Social Lens

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Zerubavel, E. (1991). The social lends (p. 61-81). _The fine line:
    making distinctions in everyday life_. Chicago: University of Chicago
    Press.

Expands on the discussion of making distinctions to provide a large
number of examples of how individual distinction making behavior is
strongly influenced by social context and social upbringing.  

-=-=-

Two things to mention from this chapter.

At the start:

        Such discontinuity, however, is not as inevitable as we
        normally take it to be. 

Who is this "we"? If Zerubavel is going to spend so much ink to
distinguish disctinctions as socially constructed it is probably a
good idea to avoid the ambiguous. In my margin notes I have "who?"  

        ...objecting to experimentation with Jews would have been as
        the objection to experimentation  with animals seem to many of us
        today.   

This statement indicates that distinctions can change  with time. Will
there come a time when experimenting with animals is absurd? (I don't
wish to draw any moral equivalencies here, only parallels.) 


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