The Practice of Everyday Life is a book by Michel de Certeau that examines the ways in which people individualise mass culture, altering things, from utilitarian objects to street plans to rituals, laws and language, in order to make them their own.
The Practice of Everyday Life re-examines related fragments and theories from Kant, Freud, and Wittgenstein to Bourdieu, Foucault and Détienne, in the light of a proposed theoretical model.
This is a dangerous omission, de Certeau argues, because in the activity of re-use lies an abundance of opportunities for ordinary people to subvert the rituals and representations that institutions seek to impose upon them.
With no clear understanding of such activity, social science is bound to create nothing other than a picture of people who are non-artists (meaning non-creators and non-producers), passive and heavily subject to received culture.
De Certeau defines "strategies" as the hidden means in which institutions and structures of power, or "producers", circumscribe a place as proper and generate relations with targeted individuals, or "consumers", who consequently enact "tactics" in order to unsettle or diverge from the prescribed conventions of such environments.