El viajero subterráneo. Un etnólogo en el metro

Although he is a pillar of French thought, In the Metro is Augé'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 Lévi-Strauss and Michel de Certeau, but also engaged in current theoretical debates in literary and cultural studies. In Augé'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, Augé reveals a passion for his milieu, seeing the metro as a place rich with history and literature-an eclectic egalitarian society.

Marc Augé is the former director of École des Haute Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and is the author of numerous books, including The War of Dreams (1999), Non-Places: Introduction 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 University and the author of The Self-Made Map (Minnesota, 1996).