Metropolitan Intimacies

Francisco Cruces is professor of anthropology at Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia (UNED).

Francisco Cruces captures the authentic yearning beneath consumer society's commodification of coziness. Intimacy emerges as a positive value from the dislocations of contemporary urban life. This book shows that in practice it is an ephemeral achievement, reinforced by the small stories that make it portable. Complementing the public sphere and public space associated with the modern city, these micro-spaces of secure subjectivity are now under siege from the competitive self-making urged by neoliberalism and enabled by social media. --Dorothy Noyes, The Ohio State University; President of American Folklore Society Francisco Cruces takes us on a fascinating journey through urban life, in which new forms of intimacy develop, breaking down the traditional polarization of private and public. The rich ethnography--an innovative poetic of daily life--explores the entanglements of seemingly trivial details: body movements, surfacing memories, passing moods, cherished routines. Cruces asks: how is intimacy produced and narrated, as an ambivalent theme in city life? This is a ground-breaking book for understanding the mysteries of everyday life and as well as the role of intimacy in the new regime of urbanity. --Orvar Loefgren, Lund University In his stunning new book Francisco Cruces shows us where we live. Not the apartments and palaces, but the gestures, stories, practices, and negotiations that make up our metropolitan intimacies. He has written a poetics of our modern art of dwelling and done so through vivid vignettes and reflexive insight. Cruces shows us the modest miracle of how we make the world inhabitable. We are in his debt. --Ben Highmore, University of Sussex The thesis is original, the argument rigorous, the writing elegant--we are delighted to discover that poetry is not reserved for poets. It emerges with force from the most ordinary moments of everyday life to make our personal world more beautiful. Francisco Cruces succeeds brilliantly in combining the critical function of the social sciences with a vision that helps us live better. --Jean-Claude Kaufmann, honorary research director, The French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)