Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Small Steps and Giant Leaps: The Social Phenomenology of Distance

Small Steps and Giant Leaps: The Social Phenomenology of Distance

Zerubavel, Eviatar

Paperback

PhilosophyGeneral SociologyGeneral World History

PREORDER - Expected ship date October 9, 2026

ISBN10: 0197832555
ISBN13: 9780197832554
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Oct 9 2026
Pages: 120
Weight: 0.35
Height: 0.31 Width: 5.63 Depth: 8.17
Language: English
In Small Steps and Giant Leaps, Eviatar Zerubavel explores how categorizing affects our perception of distance through The Neil Armstrong Effect, the cognitive tendency to exaggerate perceived differences between cultural categories. In Zerubavel's signature style, the book demonstrates the parallel manners in which we have traditionally polarized our conventional visions of categories such as masculinity and femininity or humanity and animality, as well as the parallel symbolic significance of weddings, New Year's Day, and the ritual display of passports upon crossing international borders. Viewing distance topologically, it shows how we tend to mentally compress within-categorical distances while stretching those between categories. We do so collectively, as members of epistemic communities sharing the same norms, conventions, and traditions of categorizing. When lumping similar things together and splitting different categories from one another, we do so as social beings. Categorizing involves the social construction of both similarity and difference, and it is attentional norms rather than logic that determine which differences make a difference and which ones we can effectively disregard.

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