The French anthropologist Marc Augé died yesterday at the age of 87, as reported by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. Augé was well known for his studies in ethnography, ethnology and sociology. In addition, he introduced the concept of non-place to refer to those places of transit that do not leave a mark on people, such as an airport, a motel room or a supermarket.
Augé died in Poitiers, the city of his birth, although he lived in Paris. Doctor in Letters and Human Sciences, he contributed to the development of Africanist disciplines and elaborated an anthropology of contemporary worlds focusing his gaze on the dimension of everyday life and modernity.
Specialized in ethnology, he leaves behind a wide body of work that has reached the general public thanks to titles such as Les petites alegries or El tiempo sin edad. Despite having studied the human being in depth, Augé did not manage to find the secret of happiness, although he came quite close and considered that being happy lies "in those little joys that make us feel that we exist as a person".
"Joy is always somewhat personal and when I worked in Africa I realized that it has to do with the pleasure of reunion. I returned to Togo and my acquaintances came to meet me playing drums. I began to dance. An indelible moment", he explained in an interview granted to La Vanguardia in 2019.
This knowledge of the human being also allowed Augé to reflect on modern society, consumption or individualism: "We are in a consumer society that defines new modes of individuality. The idea of the entrepreneurial individual is less associated with the idea of capitalism, despite the fact that this image still exists. At the level of the great masses, doing good is consuming a lot. The consumption index is the health index of a country. Consumption is aimed at a kind of individuals, who are the image of consumers. We have fictitious interlocutors on television, but they fulfill an important role for the consumer. There are people who could not bear to live without their daily appointment with the news or the Saturday report. This relationship structures time", he said in an interview with La Nación.
But the most important concept in Augé's philosophy is this idea of non-place, which caused him some bitterness after spreading around the world: "The truth is that I have a problem with this concept, insofar as I have used it in a relative sense, not in an absolute sense. Because in an absolute sense, there are no places and no places. Both are developed in spaces of consumption, communication and circulation. But what can be a place for someone, can be a non-place for another, and vice versa. But in today's world these traffic spaces or non-places are generated. Because what we call globalization is also a process of urbanization. Today, cities are changing their shape", he explained to Metropolis.
And he used Barcelona as an example, where "there are many non-empirical places, because it is a city where you come from outside: where there are many tourists, many immigrants, many visitors, business people. It is a city where you can see witnesses of the past somewhat theatricalized and next to them new architecture".
Augé was also the author of Confiar en uno mismo, confiar en el otro, confiar en el futuro; The power of images; Otro mundo is possible; So, who is the other one? , or Sharing the human condition. A manual for our present. The French intellectual was separated, he was the father of two daughters and he had three grandchildren. He confessed himself an atheist and was a great defender of the need to "become aware of the fact that we are a whole, a planetary humanity".
