Summary
Title:The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life
Author: Eviatar Zerubavel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195187172
Pro:
• Nice introduction to a topic people tend not to talk much about
Con:
• Nothing dramatically new on the subject
Description:
• Analysis of conspiracies of silent: individuals and groups keeping quiet about something embarrassing
• Multidisciplinary project covering many fields: politics, sociology, psychology, more
Book Review
Conspiracies of silence (which people are almost invariably silent about) touch upon politics, sociology, religion, history, family relationships, and more. It is for good reason then that Eviatar Zerubavel’s book The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life is a multidisciplinary project covering numerous different subjects in a relatively short span of time. The “elephant in the room” of the title refers to things everyone knows about, but which everyone has to maneuver around in order to participate in social relationships.
The political and social implications of conspiracies of silence should be obvious. Catholic church leaders participated in a very organized conspiracy of silence about priests who sexually abused children, a silence which only served to make the problem worse. Many people were clearly aware of how George W. Bush suffered from detachment and poor judgment, and the collective failure to deal with it ensured that the government’s response to hurricane Katrina was far worse than it had to be.
The problems with silence aren’t restricted to the larger public sphere, however. Families can participate in conspiracies of silence about things like sexual abuse or alcoholism; this prevents the problems from being addressed and may even allow them to continue harming people into the future. Indeed, enforcing a conspiracy of silence serves to victimize people over and over as they are denied the ability to seriously deal with what happened to them.
Just how is it that everyone manages to agree to keep quiet about something even as they are keeping quiet about their silence? How can social arrangements be created on the basis of silence? Is being in denial about some moral problem just as bad as actively contributing to it? Questions such as these are discussed by Zerubavel, and while he doesn’t provide any definitive answers, raising them can by itself be productive.
The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life, by Eviatar Zerubavel
One thing lacking in this book is a serious engagement with the possibility that silence might sometimes be a good thing. There are plenty of examples of where silence causes harm and where people are keeping quiet about things they should talk about — every child who has heard the story of the Emperor's New Clothes understands this. Zerubavel’s book would have been a bit more interesting, I think, if he had included a chapter that goes against conventional wisdom and explores the ways in which silence may help. There is a chapter which seems to go in this direction, but I found it more dismissive of the idea than it probably should have been.
This is not a ground-breaking work with dramatic new conclusions. If you are looking for something previously unknown, this is not the book for you. On the other hand, it is a very good overview of research about silence thus far — there are 60 pages of references for just 85 pages of text (a ratio which may make the book more expensive than is worth it for some), which should show just how broadly read Zerubavel is. So, if you are looking for an introduction to the topic, this would be a good place to start.
