Biography of Marc Augé

The sense of non-places

September 2, 1935 Marc Augé was born in Poitiers (France) on September 2, 1935. Ethnologist and anthropologist, States along his academic career and study as one of the most famous scholars of social sciences and anthropology. In particular, Augé is known for coining the concept of "non-places" (non-lieux), with whom the scholar defines certain spaces in opposition to the classical notion of anthropological sites. The "non-places" are, in fact, those places of transit often lived in daily life without giving them meaning and poignancy of "real places". Examples are, the subway, the supermarket, a hotel room. They tend not to assign identities to individuals passing through, not to be relational (millions of people cross each day in Metro tunnels without entering into a relationship) and to have no historical character. The introduction of the concept of "non-place" takes place in a mature stage of study of French Ethnologist, when public in 1992 on his book "non-places. Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity "which deals with the analysis of the present societies through the paradigm of supermodernity: namely a stage of aggravation of modern features where companies are unable to integrate the differences, but the borders and enclose within spaces without contamination (as the racks of a big supermarket) and where, at the same time, continuous movements favoured by technologies increase the differences. The non-places, within this perspective, are essentially the most important daily supermodernity: insecure places passage and lived by infuriating individuality outside, but leave streams as global communication circuits, which cross each other without meeting. They are, in other words, the symbolic expression of contemporary citizen experienced paradox, who lives a solitaudine intensifying into places consecrated to thousands of people. If the discussions on relatively recent period of supermodernity represent Augé (continue with trying to return the term globalisation as well as experienced by people), his early works are principally concerned with research conducted during his travels to different parts of the world. Especially along all the years ' 70, Augé is concentrated mainly in the study of Alladian population of Côte d'Ivoire. Later, in the years ' 80, Marc Augé returns to Europe to apply ethnographic gaze and the narration of the novel to the study of European societies: famous during this period his short book "An Ethnologist in the Metro", where laying the foundations of the concept of non-place (the underground lived as transit place that doesn't belong to us), analyzes the characteristics of Parisian society. In particular, this is where it starts to point out the paradoxical solitude lived always more intensely by the people in an era of increasingly powerful communication technologies and able to connect to each other in time and space. It will be from these studies, and by comparison with research done years before in Africa and other areas of the world, which will then the premises for subsequent reflections on supermodernity and non-places.
Article contributed by the team of collaborators.