"In the present book, a repository of more than twenty-five years of dedication to the study and practice o«When I was a child, I used to go often to Luxembourg. I could recapitulate my existence by speaking only of this garden and the images it awakens in me. Winters of war... the mornings when it was getting late and I was running to the Lycée Montaigne... Fixed moment: the same eternal old man in the worn-out suit throwing bread to the pigeons. An elegant young woman watches out of the corner of her eye as her son washes his hands in the dirt...». Can an ethnologist observe the customs of his own tribe? Can he visit our societies and discern the subtle interplay of modern daily rituals, whether in visits to the doctor, in reading the press, in the bombardment of images and in the forms of sociability of the big cities? Marc Augé uses his experience as an ethnologist and urban inhabitant to decipher the weaving of customs on any given day in Paris. He thus discovers how places organize memories, how everyday practices are interwoven in a symbolic universe where the ethnologist can move between political news and sports, between dreams and days, between Durkheim and Sèvres-Babylone."