By Marc Auge
ISBN-10: 0816634378
ISBN-13: 9780816634378
Travelers climb the Eiffel Tower to work out Paris. Parisians understand that to actually see town you want to descend into the metro. during this revelatory ebook, Marc Augé takes readers under Paris in a piece that's either an ethnography of town and a private narrative. Guiding us via historical past, reminiscence, and actual area, Augé juxtaposes the romance of the metro with the truth of multiethnic city France. His paintings is an element autobiography, with impressions from an entire life driving the trains; half meditation on self and reminiscence mirrored within the humans and areas beneath Paris; half research of a spot the place the 3rd global and the 1st international meet, the place remnants of cultures circulate and press jointly; and half a mirrored image on anthropology in an period of globalization and concrete improvement.
Although he's a pillar of French inspiration, within the Metro is Augé's first significant severe and artistic paintings translated into English. It indicates him to be firmly rooted in a practice of literary ethnography that reaches again to Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel de Certeau, but additionally engaged in present theoretical debates in literary and cultural experiences. In Augé's idiosyncratic and leading edge technique, the act of gazing the quotidian is increased to an artwork. the author and his historical past develop into a part of the sector he observes, and anthropology interacts with a site-urban life-usually reserved for sociology and cultural stories. all through, Augé unearths a fondness for his milieu, seeing the metro as a spot wealthy with historical past and literature-an eclectic egalitarian society.
Marc Augé is the previous director of École des Haute Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and is the writer of various books, together with The struggle of goals (1999), Non-Places: advent to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995), and Les Formes de l'oubli (forthcoming in English translation from Minnesota).
Tom Conley is professor of Romance languages at Harvard college and the writer of The Self-Made Map (Minnesota, 1996).
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Sample text
The ways of the metro, like those of the Lord, are impenetrable: they are traveled endlessly, but all this agitation acquires meaning only at the end, in the provisionally disillusioned wisdom of a backward glance. To speak of the metro first of all means to speak of reading and of cartography. I seem to recall that in the history atlases of my childhood, pupils were invited to measure the alternating periods of growth and decay in France: France before the Revolution, France under the First Empire, France in 1815, France under the Second Empire, France after 70 ...
But, in all probability, believers have something else in mind. The incomprehension was, apparently, reciprocal. "What? " a cousin asked me one day, but I didn't succeed in making her realize that those who added something (who not only "believed" but believed "in something") needed to make themselves clear, if they believed they were capable of doing so. I would not swear that I did not experience some malicious pleasure in playing the role of a libertine in front of my cousins, but I never had the feeling of either forcing or of artificially fortifying my mind: in my heart I was discovering, without excessive astonishment, that after all was said and done, my education had prepared me for ...
This paradox is solid enough to give pause to the ethnologist because it brings forward yet another; it even, perhaps, in my judgement, provides the same person with a means of resolving or illuminating it. The paradox familiar to the ethnologist is the following: all "cultures" are different, but none is radically foreign or incomprehensible to the others. At least that is how I would formulate the problem. Others would stick to the first part of the proposition and lay stress either on the absolutely irreducible and ineffable character of each sjngular culture (thereby adopting a relativistic point of view), or on the biased, approximate, and vulnerable character of all the descriptions, all the ethnographic translations (hence assigning to ethnological inquiry a long detour through the laborious but rock-solid methods of experimental disciplines such as cognitive psycholo- Memories :: 11 gy).