In the Metro

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by Marc Auge,

Translated by Tom Conley

University of Minnesota Press

Due/Published September 2002, 224 pages, paper

ISBN 0816634378

Tourists climb the Eiffel Tower to see Paris. Parisians know that to really see the city you must descend into the metro. In this book, Marc Augé takes readers below Paris in a work that is both an ethnography of the city and a personal narrative. Guiding us through history, memory, and physical space, Auge juxtaposes the romance of the metro with the reality of multiethnic urban France. His work is part autobiography, with impressions from a lifetime riding the trains; part meditation on self and memory reflected in the people and places underneath Paris; part analysis of a place where the third world and the first world meet, where remnants of cultures move and press together; and part a reflection on anthropology in an era of globalization and urban development.

In the Metro is firmly rooted in a tradition of literary ethnography that reaches back to Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel de Certeau, but also engaged in current theoretical debates in literary and cultural studies. In Auge's approach, the writer and his history become part of the field he observes, and anthropology interacts with a site--urban life. Throughout, Augé reveals a passion for his milieu, seeing the metro as a place rich with history and literature--an eclectic egalitarian society. 

Review

Many of us do it every day; but what, if anything, does it all mean? Does our daily subway commute have any broader personal or social meaning? Marc Augé, former director of the École des Haute Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the author of numerous seminal works of anthropology, turns his critical skills and luminous writing to that very Parisian institution, the metro. Augé reminisces about how different stops and train routes have held special significance for him at different points in his life. Augé writes, “In that way my itineraries resemble those of others with whom I rub shoulders every day in the subway without knowing where they went to school, where they lived and worked, where they are at, and where they are going, while at that very instant our glances meet and turn away after sometimes lingering for just a moment. They too are possibly drafting an inventory or making a summary – who knows? – contemplating a change of life, and by extension, a change of subway lines.” Augé’s mention of the “passing glance” points to his interest in riding the metro as both an act of solitude and an inescapably social experience. Metro riders with heads buried in newspapers or with thoughts consumed by their own concerns are nevertheless sharing space with others. To work through this contradiction, Augé takes his readers on a detour, albeit a helpful one, through some of the theories of Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Augé also explores riding the metro as a space where various ethnicities, classes, and age groups come into contact with one another. In the Metro is a unique and difficult-to-classify text – it offers moving personal memories, careful observations of subway riders, and an incisive anthropological analysis. In the Metro also includes Tom Conley’s superb Introduction and Afterword discussing the work itself and Augé’s career.