Marc Augé, French anthropologist and ethnographer known for popularizing the concept of hypermodernity and, above all, that of non-place, has died at the age of 87 in Potiers, the city where he was born. His work, like his two great ideas, remains a portrait of the society of abundance of contemporary capitalism in which representations of reality weigh more than the original reality.
Augé reached that point through an unusual intellectual journey. His origin was in African studies, which he developed into the classical practice expected of an anthropologist. Augé analyzed in the 70s how they lived in community and how they represented the ideas that gave them cohesion the inhabitants of the Atlantic coast of Africa. Starting in 1985, and after also working in Latin America, Augé settled in Paris as director of the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences of Paris (EHESS) and began to apply similar approaches to Europe.
That intellectual pun, that turning the white man’s gaze on himself, had to do with the philosophical spirit of the time, still steeped in the irony of 1968 and the disenchantment of the 1970s. However, Augé gave with an essentially human tone that allowed him to differentiate himself from his peers and connect with readers beyond his academic field. The French anthropologist realized that loneliness and tedium had become one of the great taboos in his world and he began to investigate them. And loneliness and boredom are issues that touch us all.
His way of writing also had something different: confessional, friendly, joking… In the subway, for example (1986), started from an idea that today seems obvious but at that time was new: there is more information and more truth in a trip by metro through Paris than a morning between the queues and the heights of the Eiffel Tower. From there, Augé explained the relationship of any Parisian with his suburban with a language that was half academic and half novel, in the style of his almost contemporary George Perec.
No places, spaces of anonymity: Introduction to the anthropology of modernity, his great book seems the logical consequence of that essay on the subway. In his pages, Augé realizes that civic life occurs more and more in settings more or less manipulated for commercial or political purposes and maintains that this slightly irritating landscape of false exotic restaurants, false popular festivals and false historical architecture leads its inhabitants to melancholy and alienation. facing the idea baudeleriana of modernity, in tension with the old, Augé discovered that hypermodernity took over the old and used it for the benefit of its agents.