Unsettling, elegantly written and illuminating: essential reading for anyone seeking to understand our supermodern condition.
- PD Smith, Guardian
Shopping malls, motorways, airport lounges-we are all familiar with these curious spaces which are both everywhere and nowhere. But only now do we have a coherent analysis of their far-reaching effects on public and private experience. Marc Augé has become their anthropologist, and has written a timely and original book.
- Patrick Wright,
It is indeed very seldom that one finds it difficult to put down a book because of the intellectual excitement it generates. Augé's <i>Non-Places</i> is such a book-a powerful message, modestly delivered, which stands out as a unique and refreshing anthropological voice.
Current Anthropology
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.
Prologue
The Near and the Elsewhere
Anthropological Place
From Places to Non-Places
Epilogue
A Brief Bibliography