Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity

Abstract

On the verge of reaching the age of 12, and halfway between a late infancy and an early pre-adolescence, this book by Marc Augé seems to constitute, as its title reveals to us, the faithful reflection of an era, the present one, that some authors have dared to baptize with the name of overmodernity or postmodernity. "Los No Lugares" has been written from the present day and for the present day, from what has been lived and what is close, from a present that is not our own but that sometimes remains great, it is a bet for the rethinking of the object of anthropology not only at the level of generalization but, above all, of comparison, that is, of the capacity for abstraction or, in the words of Augé himself: "The question that arises in the first place with regard to close contemporaneity does not consist in knowing whether and how one can do research in an urban conglomerate, in a company or in a holiday club (good or bad will be achieved) but in knowing whether there are aspects of contemporary social life that can depend today on anthropological research, in the same way as the questions of kinship, alliance, gift and exchange, etc. were first imposed to the attention (as empirical objects) and then to the reflection (as intellectual objects) of the anthropologists of the outside" (1993: 23).