Tourists climb the Eiffel Tower to see Paris. Parisians know that to really seethe city you must descend into the metro. In this revelatory book Marc Augetakes ... » 

Tourists climb the Eiffel Tower to see Paris. Parisians know that to really seethe city you must descend into the metro. In this revelatory book Marc Augetakes readers below Paris in a work that is both an ethnography of the city anda personal narrative. Guiding us through history memory and physical spaceAuge juxtaposes the romance of the metro with the reality of multiethnic urbanFrance. His work is part autobiography with impressions from a lifetime ridingthe trains part meditation on self and memory reflected in the people andplaces underneath Paris part analysis of a place where the third world and thefirst world meet where remnants of cultures move and press together and parta reflection on anthropology in an era of globalization and urban development.Although he is a pillar of French thought In the Metro is Auges first majorcritical and creative work translated into English. It shows him to be firmlyrooted in a tradition of literary ethnography that reaches back to Claude LeviStrauss and Michel de Certeau but also engaged in current theoretical debatesin literary and cultural studies. In Auges idiosyncratic and innovativeapproach the act of observing the quotidian is elevated to an art. The writerand his history become part of the field he observes and anthropologyinteracts with a site urban life usually reserved for sociology andcultural studies. Throughout Auge reveals a passion for his milieu seeing themetro as a place rich with history and literature an eclectic egalitariansociety. «