Table Of ContentIn the Metro
University of Minnesota Press
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In the Metro
MarcAuge
Translated
and with an
Introduction
and
Afterword
by
Tom Conley
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges financial
assistance for the translation of this book provided by the French
Ministry of Culture-Centre national du livre.
The University of Minnesota Press appreciates the expert work of
David Thorstad on the translation of this book.
The map of the Paris metro has been reproduced here courtesy of the
R.A.T.P.
Copyright 2002 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
Photographs copyright 2002 Mark Neumann
Originally published as Un ethnologue dans le metro, copyright
Hachette, 1986.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other
wise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress. umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Auge,Marc.
[Ethnologue dans le metro. English]
In the metro I Marc Auge ; translated and with an introduction
and afterword by Tom Conley.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8166-3436-1 (he.)-ISBN 978-0-8166-3437-8 (pbk.)
1. Ethnology-Philosophy. I. Title.
GN345 .A9213 2002
2002002330
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and
employer.
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
Contents
Introduction: Marc Auge, "A Little History"
Tom Conley
vii
In the Metro
Memories
3
Solitudes
27
Correspondences
53
Conclusions
69
Afterword: Riding the Subway with Marc Auge
Tom Conley
73
Notes
115
Introduction: Marc Auge, "A Little History"
Tom Conley
for
years the tall and slender Michelin Green Guide, a treasure
trove of information and savvy for every tourist, has offered
words about the background of notable monuments and places
under a rubric titled "Un peu d'histoire." A little history might
be useful in helping us to situate and to discern how Marc Auge,
a veteran anthropologist of cultures in the southern regions of
the Ivory Coast, came to write In the Metro, a book that defies
classification as a work either of ethnography or of literature.
The Proustian tenor of an account of an anthropologist's de
scent into the tunnels of rapid transit has few models for com
parison.1 The contours of the reflective travelogue stand to gain
sharper lines when they are set in contrast to Auge's professional
work. ''A little history" can also serve as an emblem of a shift in
vii
viii :: Introduction
the mode of inquiry that Auge heralded when he wrote his stud
ies of Mrican culture with the aim of bringing together the
virtues of structural method and the colonial history of Africa.
His departure from the anthropological canon may also be a re
turn to and a revision of some of its guiding principles.
In the context of the paragraphs that follow, "a little history"
cannot risk being so dangerous as "a little knowledge:' The lines
of the writer's background tie the recent studies of the ethnog
rapher as tourist to the khaki-clad ethnologist living in the
midst of traditional cultures, but also, as we shall discover, to
the ethnologist as an engaged theorist of political science.2 It
might also-and such is the aim of this Introduction-serve to
locate some parallels between the early and later writings of an
ethnographer who has emerged over the past decade less as an
accomplished student of traditional societies than as a French
writer of the first order. That Auge inspires his public through a
style of inquiry is an attested fact; that his work invites us to
broaden the field of his investigations and to follow similar lines
of reflection on our own shall be the topic taken up in the
Afterword appended to this translation.
Marc Auge belongs, he avows, to a generation of ethnologists
trained in the 1960s. The moment was felicitous. The impact of a
tradition of indelibly French signature, known through the kin
ship of Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, had been recently
confirmed in the model work and inspired teaching of Claude
Levi-Strauss. The successive publication of his Structures ele
mentaires de la parente (1949), Tristes Tropiques (1955), Anthro
pologie structurale (1958), and La Pensee sauvage (1962), prior to
Le Cru et le cuit (1964), the first volume of his Homeric Mytholo
giques (final volume appearing in 1971), bore witness to the as
cendancy of structuralism. By virtue of its principles, notes Auge
in one of the many elusive autobiographical flickers in his own
copious oeuvre, the new mode of thought was summoning a
functionalist vision of culture. 3 Questioned at the time was the
belief, first, in final causes adhering to the view that cultures have
discernible and cohering traits that might be called ''philoso-
Introduction :: ix
phies" or "beliefs.'' Interrogated second was the mechanistic
aspect of Marxian claims to the effect that the sum of values
defining a given culture can be attributed to an economic infra
structure. 4 In place of these views and heralded in the work of
Levi-Strauss, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Louis Althusser was a
new relation with the other. After seeing how these ethnogra
phers were equating the latter w!th the unknown, the bedrock of
life itself, Auge noted that the same pioneers were running the
risk of reducing the social "actualization of the self's relations
to others" to a religion of mystery and unfounded exoticism.
Without going so far as Jacques Derrida, who had recently called
Levi-Strauss the proponent of an inverted ethnocentrism, Auge
claimed that the relation with the unknown was liable to being
reified or idolized at a time when globalization was extinguish
ing the allure of remote peoples and places. 5 Evidence was clear.
Shortly after 1968, oceanic passage by boat was curtailed: two
luxury liners, the France and the United States, were packed in
mothballs; transoceanic air travel became a mean; use of satel
lites for electronic communication caused the world to shrink at
a logarithmic progression; in the population explosion all over
the world, the other was all of a sudden not only accessible and
omnipresent but also pullulating.
In this context that marked the mid-196os, at the age of
twenty-five, Auge put his splendid scholarly training to work by
making the first of many trips to and from the Alladian cultures
situated along a lagoon stretching to the west of Abidjan on the
southern shore of the Ivory Coast. Traveling by air, then by
dugout canoe, and at times with a Land Rover, he reached his
destinations. There resulted from a sojourn between November
1965 and May 1967 a brilliant monograph, Le Rivage alladian:
Organisation et evolution des villages alladian. 6 The introduc
tion begins with what he calls "the impressions of a tourist"
before giving way to more delicate issues concerning method
and style of observation. Contrary to classical studies that had
sought to typify the defining traits of a culture without history
or writing, he built the research on three bases. The first was in
x :: Introduction
fact the history of the Alladian country before and in the midst
of its colonization under white rule, especially since 1840; the
second entailed study of familial and matrimonial structures in
terms of physical space, along with economic factors (influx of
captives bought and sold, trade of ivory, gold, rubber, wood,
and ultimately palm oil); the third, which becomes an enduring
theme in Auge's work in general, was devoted to spiritual power,
to awa, an ambiguous force belonging to witches and sorcerers.
The latter, he argued, is crucial to the culture and its vicissi
tudes. The awabo, those who embody the malefic power, seemed
to him to "constitute a society that seems at once to be the in
verse and the double of the 'normal' society" (14). Awa and its
users were involved in negotiations of the lagoon society with
Christian and colonial influences. In examining how the Alladi
ans were mediating the impact of white societies, Auge was fol
lowing the lead of one of his teachers, Georges Balandier, an
Africanist who had been among the first generation of political
anthropologists to study the effect of colonization (and that of
ethnologists) on the myriad cultures of black Africa.
As a result, the texture of the picture he paints of the Al
ladian cultures is moving and almost cinematographic. It takes
up geography and its relation to economy, but also economy in
both material and spiritual manifestations. Auge is impelled to
call social formation a series of moving variables that includes
kinship, economy, politics, and religion. In these "different
rhythms of evolution" that run through "the permanence of a
language that outlives changes in structure and the diverse so
licitations of history" (245) are found "correspondences" (a
word to which we shall return) that define Alladian identity
through ties of family, locale, and a sense of enterprise. Power,
related to prestige, is also defined by the fears it carries for both
its bearers and those on whom it is exerted.
The reader of Le Rivage alladian senses that Auge appeals to
the codes of the anthropological monograph (a theme he will
take up in In the Metro) when pondering whether an urban
ethnography can still be written in the style that students of the
