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First published in 1992 and reissued with a new introduction, anthropologist Marc Aug's book is

a haunting analysis of modern life and in particular those homogenised "non-places" where we

spend so much of our time: airports, railway stations, superstores, motorways and international

hotel chains. Unlike conventional "anthropological places" (the symbolic site of an altar), these

"spaces of circulation, consumption and communication" exist beyond history, relations and the

game of identity. Yet, as Aug shows, the anodyne and anonymous solitude of these non-placesoffers the transitory occupant the illusion of being part of some grand global scheme: a fugitive

glimpse of a utopian city-world. The forces of globalisation and urbanisation are creating ever

more of these Ballardian non-places, symptoms of a Muzak-filled supermodernity in which

"people are always, and never, at home". Unsettling, elegantly written and illuminating: essential

reading for anyone seeking to understand our supermodern condition. The guardian review.

Review

"Shopping malls, motorways, airport lounges - we are all familiar withthese curious spaces which are both everywhere and nowhere. But onlynow do we have coherent analysis of their far-reaching effects on publicand private experience. Marc Auge has become their anthropologist, andhas written a timely and original book." - Patrick Wright, author of TheVillage That Died for England

Product Description

An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets,airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computer and cashmachines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Auge calls 'non-space'results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, butonly 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 fascinatingand lucid essay he seeks to establish and intellectual armature for ananthropology of supermodernity. Starting with an attempt to disentangleanthropology from history, Auge goes on to map the distinction betweenplace, encrusted with historical monuments and creative social life, andnon-place, to which individuals are connected in a uniform manner andwhere 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 presentedtwo-dimensionally as a sort of theme-park spectacle. Auge does notsuggest that supermodernity is all-encompassing: place still exist outsidenon-place and tend to reconstitute themselves inside it. But he arguespowerfully that we are in transit through non-place for more and more ofour time, as if between immense parentheses, and concludes that thisnew form of solitude should become the subject of an anthropology of itsown.

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Q. The popularity of the term "non-place," in contrast with "place," has resulted, among other

things, in misuses of concepts that you have described as anthropological hypotheses. The

excessive attention and amplification has not always been helpful in terms of the clarity of

your message. There have been oversimplifications, and such misuses as considering "places"

as good and "non-places" as bad. Perhaps this would be an opportune time, fifteen years afteryour book was first published in France by the publisher Seuil, to update the definition, to

prevent further misuse of the term. ...

A. I have done my best to provide a description of places that can put us in contact with a

social structure, because there is a very close, consubstantial link between space and social

organization. At the same time, because I noticed the proliferation, in the contemporaryworld, of spaces in which no lasting social relations are established (transit spaces, spaces

people pass through), I suggested calling those spaces non-places to suggest that in those

contexts there were a total absence of symbolic ties, and evident social deficits.

Q. It's quite a leap to shift focus from anthropological research into so-called primitive nations

such as the Ivory Coast, Togo, and Algeria, to an anthropology of advanced societies. One

problem is that in the anthropology of phenomena that are, so to speak, "at our front

doorstep," anybody feels they have the right to state his own opinion, and therefore to twist

and deform the content of the analyses that you have produced on places and non-places in

years of study and research.

A. I never considered my transition to studying our big cities as a break with the earlier work I

did; rather, I saw it as a natural progression. The analysis of places and non-places constituted

a major point of reference in an attempt to analyze spaces that are characteristic of the

contemporary world. With other colleagues, I undertook a sort of "return trip" from Africa toEurope, because even though we continued our work in Africa and Latin America, at the

beginning of the Nineties we began to become aware, as ethnologists, of the processes that are

now referred to as globalization. I was a member of a generation that lived through this

transition, and I believe that if the term non-place found an audience, it was largely because it

corresponded to something that had been in the air for some time, but which had not yet found

a proper name or, if it had been named by some authors, had failed to stir the attention or

understanding that we managed to obtain. A certain number of people found inspiration in the

notion, because it communicated things that were significant for them. It was clear and

evident for architects, painters, musicians, and for painters for instance, expeciallyexperimental ones. The other side of the coin is that when this word began to spread, a

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number of people began to confer upon our hypotheses the meanings they wanted to give to it.

I believe that already in the little book, Non-Places (original French title, Non-Lieux, 1992;

English edition, Verso, 1995, trans. By John Howe), I attempted to specify and nuance

matters, and I was repeatedly drawn back to certain concepts. There are two points that I

would like to hammer down. For me, place has never been an empirical notion. Anything canbecome a place, every space can be one, if in one manner or another encounters take place

there that create social ties. A space can be either a place or a non-place, or a place for some

and not for others. One classic case is the airport, which is a very different case for someone

who works there regularly, with colleagues and relationships, and someone who passes

through once only, or by chance. The second point is that in the sometime nostalgic visions

that we have of the past, we tend to consider the new as something that twists the nature of

what existed before. And so place is good because we meet people and we establish

relationships there, while the non-place is bad because there everyone is a stranger to

everyone else. That was not and is not my intention. It is necessary to attempt to characterize

whatever is new in the contemporary world and, in my opinion, what is new is a change of

setting, a shift in references, which implies that spaces are no longer perceived in the same

way. Non-places could be seen, approaching them from another vantage point, as the heirs to

everything that has created discomfort or annoyance in the history of human spaces. However,

when reflecting upon the meaning of travel, we should consider that this negative definition of

the non-place rules out the possibility of adventure. Encounters often take place in a space

that is not yet symbolized, which cannot prescribe social relations; in a nonplace the notion of

the unknown, the mysterious appears. Knights errant, the Knights of the Round Table, in the

stories handed down to us from the Middle Ages, set off in search of adventure. Fine: setting

off in search of adventure means going somewhere where you know no one else. If I come

back to the narrow definition that I gave of non-place at the beginning, then we have to say

that adventure takes place in a non-place. I could continue with this, and sing the praises of

the non-place, but this too would be misleading, because, quite sincerely, I never employed

this notion with ny reference to a system of values. [....]

(On The Move, Skira 2008, p. 126 e ss.)

Marc Auge defined place as one concered with Relation, Identity and History.

If, according to Aug, non-spaces discourage "settling in", then non-spaces are open to the colonization

of the technosocial device on every stage that has been ripped away from its social roots. Every place

that has seen its citizenship fall to individual concerns is open to reconnection of the social by means of

the cell phone. No one can "settle-in" on a street they do not feel at home in. Airports are non-places

because one has no identity once one enters the airport. The airport is a site that is betwixt and between

here and there, what Sociologist Bruno Latour would call aliminal space.

http://cyborganthropology.com/Liminal_Spacehttp://cyborganthropology.com/Liminal_Spacehttp://cyborganthropology.com/Liminal_Spacehttp://cyborganthropology.com/Liminal_Space

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The community that one used to engage was the entire world. Now it is subscriptions to certainm parts

of the world. Thats not true, but it sounds really nice.

A so-called hot place is where a lot of stuff is going on.

What emerges from the fading social norms is naked, frightened, aggressive ego in search of love and

help. In the search for itself and an affectionate sociality, it easily gets lost in the jungle of the self;

someone who is poking around in the fog of his of his or her own self is no longer capable of noticing that

this isolation, this 'solitary-confinement of the ego' is a mass sentence [Ulrich Beck, 40 in Bauman

2000:37].

As the world's population enters into a more highly technically concentrated arena, the cultural

constructions of space and communication are changing.

Cultural constructions of space are are being influenced by new technologies that facilitate

communication. The cell phone is one such device that is making cultural constructions of space

different. A new system of manners as well as nonverbal and verbal communication is arising to absorb

and normalize the existence of this new device.

My thesis onCell Phones and Their Technosocial Sites of Engagementexamines those changes and the

experience of and negotiation of space before and after the cultural implementation and adoption of the

mobile phone as an extension of the individual.

http://cyborganthropology.com/Cell_Phones_and_Their_Technosocial_Sites_of_Engagementhttp://cyborganthropology.com/Cell_Phones_and_Their_Technosocial_Sites_of_Engagementhttp://cyborganthropology.com/Cell_Phones_and_Their_Technosocial_Sites_of_Engagementhttp://cyborganthropology.com/Cell_Phones_and_Their_Technosocial_Sites_of_Engagement