Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life Book

Trickster-intellectualism that's sweet, subversive and easy to read. Recommended.

Really helpful for perspective on seeing in new ways into the Ashtanga Yoga community circa 2019. Our themes are ongoing silence about sexual abuse and grooming in an era that ended 10 years ago. We are also as a community attempting to perceive and heal legacies of emasculation and misogyny.

In a time when division is easy, this study of the unsaid brings to light the limited nature of each human's perspective. It doesn't give the reader easy tools or answers for understanding the totality of the unsaid. It poses more questions than answers. It sensitizes the reader to the confusing, elephantine quality of that which is made invisible and unsayable. This is inherently compassionate. Very helpful for navigating toxic environments such as Facebook.

Zerubavel has a beautiful mind. He is the hanged man of my Social Theorist Trading Card deck. He writes about the sociology of time, the sociology of the unsaid, and all manner of almost unconceptualizable social phenomena.

But this book is an easy read. He wrote it for everyone trying to get their heads around a culture of silence in any form. His examples are from the Clinton years, and are plentiful enough to take you back into the headspace of that time in a way that creates an illuminating contrast with the mindscramble of the post 2016 years in America.

If you love this book because of the style of sexily unexpected deep thinking and meta-perceiving Zerubavel makes progressively more normal and easy chapter by chapter, go back and read Erving Goffman as well as the Symbolic Interactionist school. This way of seeing the world - through the empty spaces in social logic, the performative contradictions, the construction of normalcy, and perhaps the "breaching experiments" that shore up the unspoken social order - is itself metanormal for a certain kind of social scientist.

Curious, uncomplicated, moral intelligence. Such is what is needed when there is an elephant in the room.

Two more recent concepts adjacent to this work. Zerubavel doesn't get into this but may as well have. I'm mentioning them here so I remember to weave them in later to my own work.

1. Preference Falsification. Timur Kuran's idea from the mid-90s. Written about by the brilliant Sarah Perry at Ribbonfarm.

2. Evaporative Cooling. Learned about this from Rin'dzin Pamo, a polymath who writes this gorgeous journal

Evaporative cooling as applied to social networks is described well here

And this is a great resource for the concept of evaporative cooling as applied to a culture such as Ashtanga Yoga.