In The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 1: Arts of Doing, Michel de Certeau analyses the tactics and strategies through which individuals navigate and reappropriate the structures imposed by institutions, systems, and dominant cultural narratives. Strategies, associated with entities of power—such as governments, corporations, and city planners—seek to organise and control space and behaviour from a position of authority. In contrast, tactics are the improvised, opportunistic actions of ordinary people, operating without a place of their own, seizing moments to subvert or adapt imposed frameworks. De Certeau illustrates this dynamic through everyday activities like walking in the city, reading, and cooking, portraying them as creative acts that resist total control. Walking, for instance, transforms the fixed grid of urban planning into a lived, storied space; reading transforms the author’s fixed text into a field of personal interpretation; and cooking reconfigures prescribed recipes into unique, situated practices. By framing these acts as forms of poaching on the territory of the powerful, de Certeau reveals the subtle yet persistent ways in which individuals shape culture from below. His work invites us to see daily life not as passive consumption but as an arena of invention, where meaning is continuously renegotiated through the small, often invisible gestures of ordinary people.
De Certeau, M., 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
