The practice of everyday life

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 subjectsʹ 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 Certeauʹs 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.

History of a research project --- Times and places --- Entrée --- The annals of everyday life ---- Part I. Living. 1. The neighbourhood --- 2. Propriety --- 3. The Croix-Rousse neighbourhood --- 4. The street trade --- 5. Bread and wine --- 6. The end of the week --- 7. And so for shopping, threʹs always Robert? -- Intermezzo --- 8. Ghosts in the city --- 9. Private spaces ---- Part II. Doing cooking. 10. The nourishing arts --- 11. Plat du jour --- 12. Gesture sequences --- 13. The rules of the art --- 14. When it comes down to it, cooking worries me ... --- Envoi --- A practical science of the singular.