In Culture in the Plural, Michel de Certeau challenges monolithic definitions of culture, proposing instead a plural, heterogeneous conception rooted in everyday practices and localised forms of meaning-making. He critiques institutional and academic tendencies to present culture as a unified, codified system, arguing that such views erase the multiplicity of voices and the dynamic interplay of traditions, adaptations, and resistances that constitute lived culture. For de Certeau, culture is less a fixed heritage than an ongoing negotiation, shaped by exchanges between dominant structures and the tactics of ordinary people. He foregrounds the role of marginal and popular cultures, which, far from being passive recipients of elite norms, actively reinterpret, transform, and sometimes subvert them. Everyday actions—storytelling, local rituals, vernacular language, informal economies—are presented as sites where alternative cultural logics persist and evolve, resisting total absorption into mass culture or state narratives. This pluralistic vision situates culture as a field of struggle and creativity, where meaning emerges from the constant tension between imposed systems and lived realities.
De Certeau, M., 1997. Culture in the Plural. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
