In the Metro, ethnologist Marc describes specific rituals of a metro ride through the time and space of everyday life in Paris. Despite being an integral part of the lives of countless millions of commuters and tourists, the city metro system is an ambiguous space. It is both familiar and threatening, reliable and unpredictable, crowded yet isolating, purposefully underground yet anchored to the geography of the city's surface. Many city metros give shelter to the homeless, are useful obscurity to drug dealers and semi-captive markets to beggars and buskers. Riding the metro is a journey taken in accompanied solitude, a voyage through space and through a kind of geographically mapped collective unconscious. The grid of the metro underpins the city, offering an experience of a Paris somehow more genuine than any other.