The Practice of Everyday Life
Michel de Certeau
Luce Giard
Pierre Mayol
Michel de Certeau
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Anti-conformist
Jesuit priest
Historian
Scholar in psychology
Anthropologist
What is culture ?
• Self creation
• Displacing attention from passive
consumption to anonymous creation
• Interest not in cultured products but in the
procedures that make use of them.
The Neighborhood
Organization of everyday life:
Behaviors and Expected symbolic benefits:
discourse of meaning
PROPRIETY
The Croix-Rousse Neighborhood
• Canut buildings
• Influx of artisans
• The R. family
Bread and Wine
• Bread is shared
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Wine is offered
There’s always Robert
• Grocer
• The Confidant
• Keeper of the passage of time and
moderation – The sticker card
Soup of the Day
• Food Behaviors
• Doing Cooking
• Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur L’Herbe
A Four Entry Dictionary
• Ingredients
• Cooking Appliances
• The performance
• Finished products
Ghosts in the City
• A population of legendary objects
– A city without a language – the spirits of the
place
– Restoration economy
A practical science of the singular
• Orality – founding role is in the relation to
the other
• Operativity – culture is judged by its
operations, not by the possession of
products
• The ordinary – making do (faire-avec)
The Practice of Everyday Life
Review by Beryl Lenger in
Contemporary Sociology, January
1988
Review
• The Practice of Everyday Life is an
attempt to theorize the tactics and
practices by which “ordinary people
subvert the dominant economic order from
within. …
• Everyday life, he says, reinvents itself by
poaching on the property of others.
The End
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