Tourists climb the Eiffel Tower to see Paris. Parisians know that to really see the city you must descend into the metro. In this revelatory book, Marc Auge 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.Although he is a pillar of French thought, In the Metro is Auge's first major critical and creative work translated into English. It shows him to be firmly rooted in a tradition of literary ethnography that reaches back to Claude Levi-Strauss and Michel de Certeau, but also engaged in current theoretical debates in literary and cultural studies. In Auge's idiosyncratic and innovative approach, the act of observing the quotidian is elevated to an art. The writer and his history become part of the field he observes, and anthropology interacts with a site -- urban life -- usually reserved for sociology and cultural studies. Throughout, Auge reveals a passion for his milieu, seeing the metro as a place rich with history and literature -- an eclectic egalitarian society.

馬克．歐傑　Marc Augé

生於1935年，1992年和多位人類學者於法國高等社會學院成立當代世界人類學研究中心。他曾撰寫諸多以人類學觀點看待當代社會的作品，由此探討今日人類學研究的可能發展，奠定法國當代重要人類學家的地位，其優美的書寫也讓他成為一位傑出的作家。馬克．歐傑屬於1960年代訓練出身的民族誌者，受到李維史陀、涂爾幹和牟斯的影響，其論述討論面向豐富，從經濟、旅行、電影、攝影、社群網站、城市地景等角度切入當代日常生活、全球化社會，以及城市空間與人和歷史的關係。重要著作如《非地方：超現代性人類學導論》（Non-Lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité）、《人類學家與全球化世界》（Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains）、《重返地鐵》（Le métro revisité）、《遺忘的形式》（Les formes de l'oubli）、《不可能的旅行》（L'impossible voyage: Le tourisme et ses images）等。