Marc Augé

An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computer and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Auge calls non-space results in a profound alteration of awareness- something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Auge uses the concept of supermodernity to describe the logic of these late-capitalist phenomena a logic of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating and lucid essay he seeks to establish and intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity. Starting with an attempt to disentangle anthropology from history, Auge goes on to map the distinction between place, encrusted with historical monuments and creative social life, and non-place, to which individuals are connected in a uniform manner and where no organic social life is possible. Unlike Baudelairean modernity, where old and new are interwoven, supermodernity is self-contained- from the motorway or aircraft, local or exotic particularities are presented two-dimensionally as a sort of theme-park spectacle. Auge does not suggest that supermodernity is all-encompassing- place still exist outside non-place and tend to reconstitute themselves inside it. But he argues powerfully that we are in transit through non-place for more and more of our time, as if between immense parentheses, and concludes that this new form of solitude should become the subject of an anthropology of its own.

Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity

Non-places

Tourists climb the Eiffel Tower to see Paris. Parisians know that to really see the city you must descend into the metro. In this revelatory book, Marc Auge takes readers below Paris in a work that is both an ethnography of the city and a personal narrative. Guiding us through history, memory, and physical space, Auge juxtaposes the romance of the metro with the reality of multiethnic urban France. His work is part autobiography, with impressions from a lifetime riding the trains; part meditation on self and memory reflected in the people and places underneath Paris; part analysis of a place where the third world and the first world meet, where remnants of cultures move and press together; and part a reflection on anthropology in an era of globalization and urban development. Although he is a pillar of French thought, In the Metro is Auge's first major critical and creative work translated into English. It shows him to be firmly rooted in a tradition of literary ethnography that reaches back to Claude Levi-Strauss and Michel de Certeau, but also engaged in current theoretical debates in literary and cultural studies. In Auge's idiosyncratic and innovative approach, the act of observing the quotidian is elevated to an art. The writer and his history become part of the field he observes, and anthropology interacts with a site -- urban life -- usually reserved for sociology and cultural studies. Throughout, Auge reveals a passion for his milieu, seeing the metro as a place rich with history and literature -- an eclectic egalitarian society.

In the Metro

Disneyland e altri nonluoghi

Under what conditions is anthropology possible today, when a crisis of social meaning—a crisis that makes it more difficult to conceive and manage our relation to the other—makes the need for anthropology appear more clearly than ever before? This book sets forth at least the beginning of an answer to this question. The volume’s title combines a singular noun, anthropology, with a plural one, contemporaneous worlds. It aims to register the double movement of universalization and particularization that is simultaneously affecting the entire planet. Social anthropology has always taken into account the context of the groups and phenomena it studied. Today, while multiplicity is being maintained or, more precisely, renewed, that context has become, in all cases, planetary. Positioned in opposition not only to political theories of universalization and uniformization more or less tied to the theme of “the end of history,” but also to “postmodernist” versions of anthropological theories of multiplicity and relativism, the author argues that social anthropology, through its self-critical tradition, is fully capable of adapting to the accelerated change that is continuously recomposing relations between universalism and particularisms. It is for social anthropology to select, analyze, and understand the new modes of sociality and the new spaces in which (not without calamities and contradictions) these utterly new recompositions, a major aspect of our contemporary world, manifest themselves.

An Anthropology for Contemporaneous Worlds

Nicht-Orte

Ezio Manzini

Manuel Gausa

Daniel Giralt-Miracle

Roberto Montanari

Juli Capella

Santiago Miranda

Ramón Benedito

Carmelo di Bartolo

Aldo Colonetti

Alan Neumarkt

Pocas épocas como la nuestra se han visto sometidas a procesos de transformación que recorren por igual sus estructuras económicas, políticas, sociales y culturales. Estos procesos, que han venido a interpretarse bajo los conceptos de globalización y mundialización, son la causa de una nueva situación planetaria marcada por una creciente complejidad e interdependencia. Por ello, debemos identificar el pliegue, el momento en que el proceso condensa su complejidad, y replantear el destino de la cultura, recuperando no solo otros espacios de la experiencia, sino también la construcción de nuevos mapas para representar un orden de las cosas, más complejo y dramático del que estamos acostumbrados a pensar. Esta misma tensión recorre la cultura del proyecto entendida en su dimensión más amplia. La arquitectura y el diseño deben intervenir en la decisión sobre nuevas condiciones civilizatorias, construyendo nuevos lenguajes, dinámicas y sistemas a la altura de los tiempos. AUTORES: Francisco Jarauta (ed.), Santiago Miranda, Ramón Benedito, Juli Capella, Carmelo Di Bartolo, Roberto Montanari, Aldo Colonetti, Marc Augé, Ezio Manzini, Daniel Giralt-Miracle, Manuel Gausa y Alan Neumarkt.

Cuadernos de Diseño 1: Pensar - proyectar el futuro

Analizando las actitudes de los visitantes de algunas playas, paisajes, monumentos o plazas emblemáticos del turismo, Marc Augé muestra no solo que la mayoría de los lugares míticos y románticos nos hacen vibrar porque fueron escenarios de grandes películas. También en esos lugares mismos se hace lo posible para revestirlos con los símbolos e insignias buscadas por los turistas. De esga manera se redobla la ficción desde el observador y lo observado, de modo que la realidad está en peligro de quedar del todo inaccesible.

El turismo y sus imágenes 

El viaje imposible 

Bisiklet mucizesi

Ce livre, qui se présente comme un petit traité de l'emploi du temps, met l'accent sur la nécessité de l'oubli. L'oubli est nécessaire à la société comme à l'individu. Il faut savoir oublier pour goûter la saveur du présent, de l'instant et de l'attente, mais la mémoire elle-même a besoin de l'oubli. Mêlant les références ethnologiques et littéraires, Marc Augé identifie trois formes de l'oubli qui sont autant de manières de vivre le présent.

Les formes de l'oubli

introdução a uma antropologia da supermodernidade

Não-lugares

Non-places did not exist in the past. They are properly contemporary spaces of anonymous confluence, where people in transit must settle down for some waiting time, whether at the exit of the plane, the train or the subway that is about to arrive. They barely allow a furtive exchange of glances between people who will never meet again. Non-places turn citizens into mere elements of assemblages that are formed and unformed at random and are symbolic of the current human condition and even more so of the future. The user maintains with these non-places a contractual relationship established by the train or plane ticket and has no other personality in them than the one documented in his identity card. Attentive to the use of words, re-reading the places described by Chateaubriand, Baudelaire and Benjamin, Marc Augé opens new perspectives to conceptualize an anthropology of overmodernity, which could also be an ethnology of the solitude of the contemporary human condition.

Los No Lugares

La pregunta de por qué vivimos sólo la planteamos nosotros, los occidentales, porque en nuestras sociedades, después del final de las ideologías, se ha extendido un sentimiento de vacío y la necesidad de dar un sentido a la propia vida. Esta crisis de sentido comenzó en la década de 1970, y precisamente fueron los etnólogos quienes tuvieron ocasión de diagnosticar sus síntomas. Por eso, la etnología y la antropología saben más que otras disciplinas sobre nuestras ambivalencias actuales. Buscamos comodidades, pero las pagamos a un precio demasiado alto, dejándonos esclavizar por proyectos de vida que nos impiden ver otras vías y metas posibles. Marc Augé nos advierte sobre el peligro de la globalización y sus falsas promesas. No obstante, nunca hemos estado tan cerca de poder ver nuestros fines tal como son en realidad; la práctica de la fraternidad y la solidaridad, el ejercicio del pensamiento y la búsqueda del conocimiento.

por una antropología de los fines

¿Por qué vivimos?

Un etnologo al bistrot

Il tempo senza età. La vecchiaia non esiste

En nuestras sociedades se ha instaurado un nuevo reparto entre lo real y la ficción que afecta la vida social hasta el punto de hacernos incluso dudar de la realidad. ¿Qué podemos esperar y qué debemos temer de este enorme desorden? A partir de la observación cotidiana del espectáculo del mundo y de sí mismo, Marc Augé analiza, a través de dos ensayos, independientes pero absolutamente complementarios, lo que está constituyendo una verdadera revolución cultural. Ficciones, el primero de ellos, compuesto por un conjunto de pequeñas crónicas cinceladas a partir del Tour de France de 1997, del Mundial de 1998 o de la muerte misma de Diana de Gales, permite al etnólogo captar la parte de ficción que habita en nuestra realidad contemporánea; la ficción de los acontecimientos filtrados por los medios de comunicación y la ficción de las imágenes y de los personajes que les deben su existencia. ¿Qué está ocurriendo? es el diario de tres días del fin del milenio tomados al azar (29 de febrero, 31 de marzo, 30 de abril). Descubriendo las leves modificaciones que, en el espacio de dos meses, pueden alterar el sentido de los acontecimientos, el autor se esfuerza en entender el movimiento a través del cual la ficción se insinúa tanto en su vida privada como en la vida pública.

Ficciones de fin de siglo

Bartomeu Marí

Muntadas

Den spanske multikunstner Antonio Muntadas'(f. 1942) værker har siden 1971 omfattet videokunst, installationskunst og aktioner i det offentlige rum. Mange af hans arbejder beskæftiger sig med "de usynlige mekanismer", som samtidens mediediskurser former, og peger på sprogets og billedernes objektive og subjektive betydning

I Giardini/Stand By/Listening/Warning/La Mesa de Negociacion II/On View/The Interview/The Bookstore/El Aplausao/The Internet Project/The Bank

Muntadas On Translation

'Oblivion' moves with authority and ease among a wide variety of sources - literature, common experience, psychoanalysis, philosophy, ethnography - to illustrate the interplay of memory and forgetting in the stories of life and death told across many cultures and many times.

Oblivion

An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computers and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Augé calls “non-space” results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Augé uses the concept of “supermodernity” to describe a situation of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating essay he seeks to establish an intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity.

An Introduction to Supermodernity

Non-Places

Anthropology is both outside of history and within it. Histories of anthropology tend to summarise particular authors' intellectual differences; but, as Marc Augé argues in this book, first published in English in 1982, these differences may in fact be intrinsically derived from intellectual divisions within anthropology as obvious as they are irreconcilable. Augé identifies, in contemporary debates in French anthropology, the paths that perhaps allow us to transcend these oppositions. On doing so, he explores and clarifies the relationship that anthropology enjoys with history, on the intellectual plane, and with politics, on the historical plane. His argument is stimulating and challenging, and will interest all social anthropologists and sociologists concerned with the theoretical foundations of their disciplines, as well as demonstrating to historians and political scientists what anthropology has to offer them.

Symbol, Function, History

The Anthropological Circle

Radfahrer sind die neuen Flaneure, mit der Nase im Wind erfreuen sie sich am Duft der Kastanienbäume. Unbemerkt gleiten sie in eine poetische Geographie und stellen verwundert fest, dass die Stadt dazu da ist, angeschaut zu werden. Nicht nur in Kopenhagen und Amsterdam, auch in Frankfurt und Paris prägt das Fahrrad wieder das Straßenbild. Fasziniert beobachtet der Ethnologe Marc Augé die Auswirkungen dieser veritablen Fahrradrevolution. Er beschwört das freiheitstrunkene Glück des Kindes, das in die Pedale tretend die Kraft seines Körpers spürt. Wehmütig denkt er zurück an die heroischen Tage der Tour de France, als Radrennen Volkskult war. Und er blickt voller Enthusiasmus auf die Chancen der weltweiten Fahrradbewegung. Feinsinnig preist Augé eine ganz reale Utopie: den Humanismus des Radfahrens.

Marc Augé

Books

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