The Practice of Everyday Life / Edition 3

by Michel de Certeau, Steven Rendall

Overview

In this incisive book, 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 to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520271456
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	12/01/2011
Edition description:	Third Edition
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	424,215
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Michel de Certeau (1925–1986) was Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and Visiting Professor of French and Comparative Literature at University of California, San Diego.

Table of Contents

Preface
General Introduction

PART I: A VERY ORDINARY CULTURE
I. A Common Place: Ordinary Language
II. Popular Cultures: Ordinary Language
III. Making Do: Uses and Tactics

PART II: THEORIES OF THE ART OF PRACTICE
IV. Foucault and Bourdieu
V. The Arts of Theory
VI. Story Time

PART III: SPATIAL PRACTICES
VII. Walking in the City
VIII. Railway Navigation and Incarceration
IX. Spatial Stories

PART IV: Uses of Language
X. The Scriptural Economy
XI. Quotations of Voices
XII. Reading as Poaching

PART V: WAYS OF BELIEVING
XIII. Believing and Making People Believe
XIV. The Unnamable

Indeterminate
Notes

What People are Saying About This

Gwendolyn Wright

De Certau's panegyric to everyday human actions eloquently portrays the conversion of the routine and repetitive acts of domestic life into the experiences of creativity and pleasure.

Editorial Reviews

"The book retains its freshness and relevance."

Journal of Business Anthropology

"Whether writing about madness and mysticism in the seventeenth century, South American resistance movements in the past and present, or the practice of everyday life in the twentieth century, Certeau developed a distinctive way of interpreting social and personal relations."

New York Review of Books

"We are fortunate to have de Certeau's work available in English, and in such a graceful and meticulous translation."

Comparative Literature

"The Practice of Everyday Life, published in 1974 and now the first of his books available in English translation, offers ample evidence why we should pay heed to de Certeau. . . . The work all but defies definition. History, sociology, economics, literature and literary criticism, philosophy, and anthropology all come within de Certeau's ken."

Journal of Modern History

"The Practice of Everyday Life, published in 1974 and now the first of his books available in English translation, offers ample evidence why we should pay heed to de Certeau. . . . the work all but defies definition. History, sociology, economics, literature and literary criticism, philosophy, and anthropology all come within de Certeau's ken."

The Journal of Modern History

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.
—Journal of Modern History

Priscilla P. Clark

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.
—New Ideas in Psychology

John Shotter