ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests the concept of an Everyday Life (EDL) is not only a critique of a technical concept such as "culture," but also has deeper roots in the critique of certain traditional features of ordinary, everyday, Western culture. The EDL makes references to certain patterns or routines of social existence as a constructed order, as the outcome and product of human work. From a historical standpoint, one of the first concerns EDL is to be found in Plato's criticism of the "upside-down existence." The subsequent history of the EDL in the West is importantly shaped by Christianity, at least until the Enlightenment. In one part, Christianity demeaned EDL as the sphere of the worldly, the fleshly, and the appetites. Implicit in the notion of EDL is certain model of social change, a model in which change does not come about primarily through the initiatives of elites and heroes but by massive movement in the collective minutiae of existence.
