Culture, cognition, events, and infrastructures

In this chapter, we aim to show how some concepts derived from a particular sociological approach to everyday life – known as the sociology of the unmarked and taken-for-granted – can be put into use for analyzing the conceptual couple “event/infrastructure” as elaborated within the framework of critical event studies (henceforth, CES; see Spracklen & Lamond, 2016). As part of a cognitive-oriented perspective flourished in the broader subfield of cultural sociology (DiMaggio, 1997; Brekhus & Ignatow, 2019; Cerulo et al., 2021), the sociology of unmarkedness and taken-for-grantedness (Brekhus, 1998, 2015; Zerubavel, 2018) is focused on how our attention and semiotic emphasis towards social reality are asymmetrically distributed. Following culturally determined processes of cognitive socialization (Zerubavel, 1997, p. 15), people highlight as significant only a relatively small number of phenomena, mostly disregarding the taken-for-granted background and its neglected features, which usually go unquestioned, if not altogether unnoticed. Adopting this standpoint, scholars can analyze why (and how) certain phenomena are deemed worthy of our interest and become the objects of our attention – an increasingly scarce, volatile resource (Campo, 2022) – while others are perceived only residually as background-like blind spots (Friedman, 2019).