Augé, Marc

Bio Sketch

Marc Augé (1935–2023) was a French anthropologist (École des hautes études) best known for Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1992). He argued that "supermodernity" produces non-places — transit spaces (airports, motorways, supermarkets, hotel chains) that are passed through rather than dwelt in, and that individuate rather than relate their users. Against these he posed the "anthropological place" of identity, relation, and history, and stressed the everyday need to reinvest meaning — what he called "excess."

Key Works

Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1992) — the theory of non-places and supermodernity.
In the Metro (1986) — an ethnology of everyday urban movement and its memories.
A Sense for the Other (1994) — the anthropologist's construction of the "other" and of place.

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

Non-Places — the concept page built from the wiki's Augé-drawing sources (Taylor 2018; Jones & Moreno-Carranco 2007; Buchanan & Lambert 2005).
Everyday Life — the everyday as the site where non-place must be reinvested with meaning.
Junkspace — Augé's "non-place" is the anthropological sibling of Koolhaas's junkspace; the junkspace page flags Augé as a required page.
Dwelling — non-place is defined against the possibility of dwelling and "anthropological place."
Atmosphere — the felt, meaningful qualities that non-places strip away.

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Augé matters to Geoffrey's phenomenology of place and spectacle & iconic architecture areas. His non-place is the negative image of everything Norberg-Schulz's genius loci and dwelling name positively: the airport, the mall, the megaproject corridor as spaces without place. Jones and Moreno-Carranco's megaproject study draws on Augé directly — cities becoming "non-places" resembling airports, against the inhabitants' "excess" struggle to reinscribe meaning — and the junkspace page explicitly flags him as a needed page. He thus bridges the phenomenology-of-place cluster and the critique of spectacular, image-driven architecture.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki that draw on Augé:

Megaprojects: Beneath the Pavement, Excess (Jones & Moreno-Carranco 2007) — non-places and "excess" as the analytic for megaproject space and its informal, everyday reinvention.
Shape shifting: Interior architecture and dynamic design (Taylor 2018) — the interior-theoretical transmission: retells the Non-Places prologue (Pierre Dupont from cash dispenser to Espace 2000 business-class seat, "alone at last"), extends it via Graham & Marvin ("sites… wholly constructed and controlled to support the mobility of global commodities") and Fuller (textual injunctions to a "virtual 'average man'"), and argues the supermodern interior "will cease to exist in its current format" — see non-places.
Politicizing the interior (Teston 2018) — see above: the political-interior transmission.
Thick Edge (Borden 1996/2006) — the anthropological transmission at the urban gate: Augé's non-place quoted directly — "a version of Augé's 'non-place as a turning back on the self,' checking the contractual relation between the individual and that non-place" — for Broadgate's corporate enclave; the gate as mirror returning "an image of himself"; and the full formula "The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude" (Non-Places, Verso 1995, p. 103) — with the Sartrean extension that the architecture is also looked back upon. See non-places, thick-edge, privatised-public-space.

Note: no dedicated source note is drawn from a primary Augé text; Non-Places itself is not yet ingested. A source note from the book's opening chapters would give the non-place/supermodernity argument primary grounding.

Politicizing the interior (Teston 2018) — the political-interior transmission: Augé's place/space dialectic retold as "a derivative of de Certeau's anthropological spaces" — place "deposits layers of events, histories, and cultures to reinforce the inertia of place," space is "abstract – occupied by people, a physical void, or a time interval" — and the non-place as "a postmodern, generic space occupied by people for a predetermined reason" that "take[s] our collective identity and twist[s] it into a heterotopic, transactional experience." Teston's counter-question: "what is the phenomenology of the non-place?" and the search for "the authenticity and the capacity of 'placeness' in the most ordinary of non-places." See non-places, politicizing-the-interior, practiced-place.