ABSTRACT
This chapter integrates two general styles of cognitive sociological theorizing, one focused on cultural vision (e.g. Goffman, Zerubavel), and the other focused on practical action (e.g. Bourdieu, Lizardo), to illuminate the ways in which culturally produced cognitive defaults shape perception and construct social reality. Understanding the interplay between defaults in cultural vision and defaults in practical action helps illuminate the power of the unmarked, the mundane, and the taken-for-granted. Sociocultural defaults at rest, hidden behind specially marked categories in language and other visible cultural structures, implicitly define normalcy and social value, and thus reproduce the dominance of that which is unmarked. Culturally produced taken-for-grantedness is, in turn, set in motion through routine, habit, and embodied practical action. Defaults at rest and in motion are analysed from both the level of individual social actors as cultural “seers” and “doers” and from the level of collective cultures. Employing motion metaphors, such as repetition, drift, migration, leap/flight, and braking, illuminates processes of social maintenance, social shift, and social change.
