The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol. 2: Living and Cooking

The Practice of Everyday Life #2

by Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, Pierre Mayol (Contributor)

To remain unconsumed by consumer society—this was the goal, pursued through a world of subtle and practical means, that beckoned throughout the first volume of The Practice of Everyday Life. The second volume of the work delves even deeper than did the first into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make living a subversive art. Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol develop a social history of “making do” based on microhistories that move from the private sphere (of dwelling, cooking, and homemaking) to the public (the experience of living in a neighborhood). A series of interviews—mostly with women—allows us to follow the subjects’ individual routines, composed of the habits, constraints, and inventive strategies by which the speakers negotiate daily life. Through these accounts the speakers, “ordinary” people all, are revealed to be anything but passive consumers. Amid these experiences and voices, the ephemeral inventions of the “obscure heroes” of the everyday, we watch the art of making do become the art of living.This long-awaited second volume of de Certeau’s masterwork, updated and revised in this first English edition, completes the picture begun in volume 1, drawing to the last detail the collective practices that define the texture, substance, and importance of the everyday.Michel de Certeau (1925-1986) wrote numerous books that have been translated into English, including Heterologies (1986), The Capture of Speech (1998), and Culture in the Plural (1998), all published by Minnesota. Luce Giard is senior researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and is affiliated with the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. She is visiting professor of history and history of science at the University of California, San Diego. Pierre Mayol is a researcher in the French Ministry of Culture in Paris.Timothy J. Tomasik is a freelance translator pursuing a Ph.D. in French literature at Harvard University.

Genres: Philosophy, Sociology, History, France, Theory

340 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Michel de Certeau, historian, cultural theorist, psychoanalyst, and theologian was one of the most multifaceted French intellectuals and scholars of the late 20th century. His concept of everyday life practices was of signal importance for the development of cultural studies in the Anglo-Saxon world. His use of space as a key category in the history and analysis of cultural practices has also influenced the later “spatial turn” in history and art history. Finally, his works on early modern mysticism constitute ground-breaking research in religious studies and theology. Interestingly enough, these studies on mysticism were less influential in the Anglo-Saxon world than they were in France or Germany, whence the distinction between the “American” (of the cultural studies) and the “European” Certeau (the historian of mysticism). In spite of the diversity of his oeuvre, Certeau saw his scholarly work as one, integrated, intellectual enterprise. Asked about his scholarly profession, this French Jesuit used to answer that he understood himself in the first place as a historian of spirituality. Understanding the meaning of Christian mysticism in an era in which it started to lose its self-evidence required a broader focus, embracing the most divergent and complex cultural developments up to his own time. The gradual broadening of his interest field also required new methodological directions, which he found in Lacanian psychoanalysis and in semiotics, resulting in his own topographical way of thinking. He became a public intellectual in 1968, after the publication of his La prise de la parole, a book in which he applied his insights on the role of the mystics in the 16th and 17th centuries to the protesting students in the streets of Paris. From that moment onward he started to develop his theory of everyday life practices, resulting in a number of different books, of which L’invention du Quotidien 1980 was the most elaborate.

Reviews

[Gastjäle · Rating 4 out of 5]

For those who were daunted by de Certeau's florid ingenuity in the first volume, I have some good news: this book is mostly written by his two colleagues, Pierre Mayol and Luce Giard, and their input is far, far more legible. Furthermore, I would also say that one doesn't really need to have read the first volume in order to get plenty out of volume 2.

Volume 2 deals with the everyday aspects of living, shopping, sauntering, cooking, planning and, above all, discoursing about these things. Both Mayol and Giard have incorporated lengthy transcriptions of everyday people talking about the analysed topics, and they do so as any man in the street would. Naturally, this is a book of sociology / philosophy, so the subjects are also analysed accordingly, but the core of the work is definitely in how ordinary people experience and view things.

What makes this book extremely fascinating is how seriously it takes matters that would easily be shrugged off, like a housewife feeling insecure about their cooking ("Oh, it's nothing...") or a local shopkeeper dishing out routine compliments. From these quotidian ingredients a splendid analytical repast has been made: the district comes to life as a living and breathing organism, attempting to preserve itself through an all-encompassing aura of decency that dictates what one can talk about with neighbours and customers, what one should be wearing, how much one is allowed to drink etc. Habits and customs are not simply seen as tyrannical means of control that normal people have to counter with certeau-esque tactics, but rather it is also a way for the inhabitants to broach the topic of eroticism through a complex system of innuendo.

As for cooking, it is revealed to be a cornucopia of secret rules, codes and gestures. The book documents extensively different historical developments, attitudes, class distinctions, inherited whims, the complex calculations that go into grocery shopping and cooking for different people (such as what should be bought, which considerations should be taken into account, what does one know about the people who one will be cooking for, not to mention the recondite warfare of the past against decomposition) and so on. (Giard also adds a conspicuous feminist flair to the cooking section, which is at times very apposite and at times rather misplaced and preachy.)

This is the coalface brother to the ultra-theoretical volume 1, and it does an excellent job in arousing interest towards the quotidian. It serves to act as a humbling reminder of the multifaceted nature of the everyday networks of action and intercourse and to invite everyone both to appreciate its richness and its mysteries. At the same time, the work contains criticism towards the modern technological and consumerist developments that threaten to anonymise the common life in taking away opportunities for customisation and mundane ingenuity – all in the name of convenience.

(As for my edition, the Finnish version translated by T. Kilpeläinen and published by Niin & näin, I am rather puzzled by the alarming number of spelling mistakes and occasional omissions. What gives?)

[Türkay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Certeau ve çalışma arkadaşlarının günlük yaşam üzerine etnografik çalışmalarının yer aldığı ikinci cilt, kadınların hayatlarına daha yakından bakıyor.
Örneklem konusundaki zaafiyete rağmen, yöntem ve ele alınanlar açısından çok keyifle okunan, gündelik hayat konusunda düşünmeye çağıran bir kitap...

[Beyza Özdemir]

Özellikle mahalle kültürüne ve etrafında şekillenen günlük hayat pratiklerine odaklanan güzel bir araştırma. Dili çok ağır değil, konuya ilgili olanlara keyifli bir okuma sunacaktır. Araştırmacılara da güzel bir kaynak.

[Brycedwyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is "the shit"