This book examines the meaning and implications of the sociological
maxim, 'make the familiar strange'. Addressing the methodological
questions of why and how sociologists should make the familiar strange,
what it means to 'make the familiar strange', and how this approach
benefits sociological research and theory, it draws on four central
concepts: reification, familiarity, strangeness, and defamiliarization.
Through a typology of the notoriously ambiguous concept of reification,
the author argues that the primary barrier to sociological knowledge is
our experience of the social world as fixed and unchangeable. Thus
emerges the importance of constituting the familiar as the strange
through a process of social defamiliarization as well as making this
process more methodical by reflecting on heuristics and patterns of
thinking that render society strange. The first concerted effort to
examine an important feature of the sociological imagination, this
volume will appeal to sociologists of any specialty and theoretical
persuasion.