Michel de Certeau

The Practice of Everyday Life

Translated by Steven F. Rendall

$21.95, £12.95 paperback

978-0-520-23699-8

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253 pages, 6 x 9 inches,
December 2002, Available worldwide
Categories: Sociology; Cultural Anthropology; History; Social & Political Thought

Description | Table of Contents | About the Author

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Read the first half of the Introduction

"The Practice of Everyday Life . . . offers ample evidence why we should pay heed to de Certeau and why more of us have not done so. For one, the work all but defies definition. History, sociology, economics, literature and literary criticism, philosophy, and anthropology all come within de Certeau's ken . . . . De Certeau acts very much like his own ordinary hero, manipulating, elaborating, and inventing on the scientific authority that he both denies and requires."—Priscilla P. Clark, Journal of Modern History

"De Certeau's book is to be praised for setting out some of the practical procedures, in which we are all implicated, that are used to invent what appears to us as our reality, and for finding at least some ways in which the totalitarian nature of our current systems of sense-making can be subverted."—John Shotter, New Ideas in Psychology

Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws brilliantly on an immense theoretical literature in analytic philosophy, linguistics, sociology, semiology, and anthropology--to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.

Preface
General Introduction

PART I: A VERY ORDINARY CULTURE
1. A Common Place: Ordinary Language
2. Popular Cultures: Ordinary Language
3. "Making Do": Uses and Tactics

PART II: THEORIES OF THE ART OF PRACTICE
4. Foucault and Bourdieu
5. The Arts of Theory
6. Story Time

PART III: SPATIAL PRACTICES
7. Walking in the City
8. Railway Navigation and Incarceration
9. Spatial Stories

PART IV: USES OF LANGUAGE
10. The Scriptural Economy
11. Quotations of Voices
12. Reading as Poaching

PART V: WAYS OF BELIEVING
13. Believing and Making People Believe
14. The Unnamable

Indeterminate
Notes

The late Michel de Certeau was Directeur d' Études at the Ecole des Hautes Études et Sciences Sociales in Paris and Visiting Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego.