The Practice of Everyday Life. Volume 2: Living and Cooking

The final volume in de Certeau's magnum opus-now in English for the first time.

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.

"De Certeau's panegyric to everyday human actions eloquently portrays the conversion of the routine and repetitive acts of domestic life into experiences of creativity and pleasure." -Gwendolyn Wright in Lingua Franca

"This book offers not only an interesting and uniquely reversed perspective on the flow of consumption but equally as important, it offers the reader an insider's glance at a historical moment in the evolution of cultural studies, and particularly an insight into French collaborative research practices, something perhaps unfamiliar to many American academics, especially in the humanities." -Symploke

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). Luce Giard is senior researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales, Paris) and 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.