De Certeau's Work Research Articles

From Seriality to Transmediality: A Socio-Narrative Approach of a Skilful and Literate Audience

From Seriality to Transmediality: A Socio-Narrative Approach of a Skilful and Literate Audience

Strategy and Tactics: Chinese Immigrants and Diasporic Spaces in Johannesburg, South Africa

Migration studies in South Africa have partially taken the spatial turn, giving some attention to questions of territoriality and spatial relationships. Recent literature has drawn on de Certeau's distinction between the strategies of the powerful and the tactics of the subordinate, revealing for example how migrants occupy hidden spaces to evade control and social hostility. Within the broad aegis of de Certeau's work, we engage the historical and contemporary spaces of the Chinese diaspora in Johannesburg. We describe a highly differentiated grouping of migrants that has deployed, and continues to deploy, varying tactics over time and across space. There are, for example, processes of clustering and processes of dispersal. There is also the use of visibility and cultural marking as a spatial tactic, as well as of invisibility and hidden spaces. We also reveal that the spatial practices of the Chinese migrants do not only relate to the strategies of the powerful but are also a response to the competition and threats posed by other subordinate individuals and groupings in society, including other Chinese migrants.

The Weakness of Believing: A Dialogue with de Certeau

What this essay attempts to examine, through a negotiation with the work of de Certeau on the nature of ‘weak believing’ in a post-Cartesian world, are the cultural transformations in the production of belief. It begins with a glimpse at our contemporary ‘mediated’ society and then explores de Certeau's work (from the late 1960s to the 1980s) on the dissemination of the event of Christ and the varieties of believing it generated. It raises the question of what does it mean to say ‘Credo’ today when the ecclesial is displaced as the dominant site for the production of belief by civil society, the secular state, and the diversification of institutionalised expertise. In conversation with de Certeau's work, it attempts to answer that question.

Knit one, stitch two, protest three! Examining the historical and contemporary politics of crafting

Crafts are often understood as conservative and solitary pursuits of the elderly but crafts have long been used for mutual aid and political expression. This project examines two cases where crafts are used as instruments of political resistance. Started in 1987, the AIDS quilt was to remember those lost to the pandemic but its purpose was not limited to honouring the dead but was also a powerful tool for prevention, awareness and to highlight governmental inaction; The second case examines contemporary “craftivists,” activists that use crafts in subversive, political ways. This project is informed by de Certeau's work on the tactical nature of everyday life, where people subvert the structure of “culture” in order to make it their own. These two cases explore where craft (as art) and crafty (cunning) intersect and become a meaningful tool for political action.

A fourth critic of the Enlightenment: Michel de Certeau and the ethnography of subjectivity*

This paper examines the potential contribution of the work of Michel de Certeau (1925-1986) to anthropological theories of agency, resistance and subjectivity. It argues that de Certeau's work shares with contemporary anthropological theory a legacy of the counter-Enlightenment that combines a profound pessimism about modern society with an emphasis on the redemptive possibility of populism, expressivism and pluralism. Whilst in anthropology these developed into a complex theorisation of agency, resistance and subjectivity as embedded in socio-cultural context, de Certeau appears to systematically avoid a coherent theory. Rather, he offers a theology of agency, resistance and subjectivity that sees resistance through 'tactics' as the manifestation of an enduring counter-modern human spirit, and as inherently morally good. The paper closes with a caution against anthropologists adopting a similar 'theological' stance towards resistance.

Place contra space in a morally just landscape

Michel de Certeau's work provides a provocative means of distinguishing the concepts of space and place in relation to that of the just landscape, while at the same time challenging the common tendency to identify landscape with the rural rather than the urban. de Certeau's landscape analysis takes its point of departure in the contrast between the map-like view of Manhattan from the World Trade Center and the place-creating practices of the pedestrians below. Since that time, the World Trade Center has become ‘Ground Zero’ and it is theoretically challenging to look at what this transformation of a monumental mark in the landscape to an equally monumental zero means for de Certeau's analysis, particularly in relation to the epistemology of nothingness. The larger significance of de Certeau's decidedly urban approach to landscape emerges in the work of the anthropologist John Gray who has made novel use of de Certeau's theory to interpret the place identity of borderland Scottish sheepherders. Gray's analysis can be applied to other rural landscapes, such as the sæter landscapes of Norway. The depth of de Certeau's argument, however, can easily be missed due to terminological confusion in translating his French into English.

DREAM BODIES AND PERIPATETIC PRAYER: READING BONAVENTURE's ITINERARIUM WITH CERTEAU

The erstwhile sedentary Parisian theologian, Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, traveled extensively throughout Europe after his election as Minister General of the Minorite Order in 1257. In the fall of 1259 he arrived on Mount La Verna in Tuscany. As he ruminated on the stigmatized flesh of Francis of Assisi, Bonaventure composed the classical mystical text, Itinerarium mentis in Deum. Utilizing Michel de Certeau's work on prayer, travel narratives and spatial practices, this essay explores how Bonaventure rereads the story of the Poverello in the Itinerarium mentis in Deum as a mystic narrative of peripatetic prayer.

The Emancipation of Thought: On the Work of Michel De Certeau

Today it seems to be an urgent and necessary task to return to the texts by Michel de Certeau (1925-86). Not because Michel Foucault said of him that he was ‘the best, the brightest of [his] generation’, but for reasons to do with our present thinking.Indeed, when we consider the social and political disarray of the moment, we are forced to recognize how hard it is, in periods of crisis, to clarify the changes taking place. That implies the emancipation of thought, a process that consists of an inventive interrogation of knowledge and a rigorous elaboration of understanding. This process is one that would not be subject to the dominant ideological models. In addition, thinking of the way clarification and emancipation are intertwined in the most successful intellectual constructions, some of us remember Certeau's work, whose central aim is to clarify the fundamental but stealthy transformations that abruptly emerge into the light of day and undermine the most tenacious assumptions.

Visuality and Urban Space in Nineteenth-Century England

Visuality and Urban Space in Nineteenth-Century England

Out of the Ordinary: Law, Power, Culture, and the Commonplace

Sometimes a work's intellectual influences reveal both its strengths and its shortcomings. This is certainly the case with Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey's The Common Place of Law: Stories From Everyday Life, and its indebtedness to the thinking of Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau. Taken together, Foucault and de Certeau's work suggests that investigations of law's power are most fruitful not at the level of legal institutions and the state but at the level of lived experience, where we can see how power is exercised, understood, and sometimes, resisted. This is, in essence, the narrative at the heart of The Common Place of Law, where two sociologists of law examine how law or legality (power that is at once institutional and embedded in day-to-day social practices) is recognized, resisted, and recon-

Making space for heterologies: de Certeau's links with post‐colonial criticisms

Abstract This paper explores some central premises of Michel de Certeau's work, in particular Western imperialist historiography—the writing that not only conquers but also results in the scriptural occultation of its other. It traces de Certeau's discussion of the discursive formation of this writing, but only, like de Certeau, to demonstrate how unstable such a formation is, despite its supposition to the contrary. In other words, the occulted other, dominated but not vanquished, returns in the repressed of such writing. Finally, through a discussion of de Certeau's notions of ‘place’ /'space’, and ‘strategy’ /'tactics’, I hope to make some connections between de Certeau's work and post‐colonial criticisms.