Michel de Certeau: Analysing Culture (review)

Michel de Certeau is undoubtedly one of the postwar era’s most important intellectuals and cultural theorists. Yet to date, his contributions have not been as widely recognized as those of other leading contemporary thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, or Jacques Derrida, to name but a few of his most prominent peers. Currently, scholarship on de Certeau’s work remains scarce. Even in the U.S. academy, where “French theory” has been more fully institutionalized than anywhere else (including France), the corpus of de Certeau’s work has not been sufficiently read or studied. As a consequence, he is still largely known only for his groundbreaking ethnographic work on contemporary popular cultural practices, which he introduced in 1980 in his two-volume work L’Invention du quotidien (The Practice of Everyday Life).