The Practice of Everyday Life Michel de Certeau

The Practice of Everyday Life Michel de Certeau Luce Giard Pierre Mayol

Michel de Certeau • • • 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 • 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 •