Eviatar Zerubavel is a Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Rutgers University. He is an internationally recognized authority on cognitive sociology, the sociology of time, the sociology of denial, the sociology of memory, and concept-driven sociology. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction's George Herbert Mead Award for Lifetime Achievement in Symbolic Interaction. He also served as Chair of the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association. He is the author of fourteen earlier books, and his work has been featured by numerous public media, including interviews on the BBC, The New York Times, Newsday, and NPR.

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.

• 1: Lumping and Splitting 2: Space 3: Time 4: Social Group Membership 5: The Social Construction of Similarity and Difference

Eviatar Zerubavel is a Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Rutgers University. He is an internationally recognized authority on cognitive sociology, the sociology of time, the sociology of denial, the sociology of memory, and concept-driven sociology. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction's George Herbert Mead Award for Lifetime Achievement in Symbolic Interaction. He also served as Chair of the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association. He is the author of fourteen earlier books, and his work has been featured by numerous public media, including interviews on the BBC, The New York Times, Newsday, and NPR.

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.

• 1: Lumping and Splitting 2: Space 3: Time 4: Social Group Membership 5: The Social Construction of Similarity and Difference

Eviatar Zerubavel is a Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Rutgers University. He is an internationally recognized authority on cognitive sociology, the sociology of time, the sociology of denial, the sociology of memory, and concept-driven sociology. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction's George Herbert Mead Award for Lifetime Achievement in Symbolic Interaction. He also served as Chair of the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association. He is the author of fourteen earlier books, and his work has been featured by numerous public media, including interviews on the BBC, The New York Times, Newsday, and NPR.

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.

• 1: Lumping and Splitting 2: Space 3: Time 4: Social Group Membership 5: The Social Construction of Similarity and Difference