Matt Mark Augie, philosopher and author of an influential theory of “nowhere”

There was in his vision – somewhat fatalistic – a hint of optimism, a hopeful character in the face of the evidence of a reality that was becoming, day by day, more uncertain. He noted that in some cases traces of life are visible even on the ruins French anthropologist Marc Augé in his book Time is in ruins.

“The history to come will no longer produce ruins. You do not have time to do so. On the rubble that has resulted from confrontations that will not cease to stir, despite everything construction works will appear, and with them, who knows, an opportunity to build something different, to recover the sense of time, to move forward a little, perhaps, awareness of history “, an encouraging interpretation of the next day.

This Monday, July 25th Most urban anthropologists have died at the time Which united two centuries and coexisted in different eras. These contradictions and classifications motivated a significant part of his articles, which are widely read in our country.

Mark Augie He was a pioneer, a vigil guard ready to warn, for example, that the working life of an anthropologist had changed at the end of the twentieth century. Challenging – in the country of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ structural anthropology – he asked that the field of research and work especially understand the challenges in the city traversed by social intrigues, those that come into conflict.

bubble He died in Poitiers, where he was born, in 1935, although he also lived in Paris. PhD in Arts and Humanities, he developed an anthropology of contemporary worlds with a focus on the dimensions of everyday life and modernity. And specifically he was obsessed with being able to “name” this time.

The definition of postmodernism was not enough for him: he preferred to talk about ultramodernism, neomodernism to understand this time which was already entering into a cycle of non-stop transformation.

It was in 1992 when his first and last names became startlingly popular (because he was an academic) with the launch of a book that brought a concept as surprising as it was friendly: Between Our Homes and Known places were “nowhere”, Those where we have traveled anonymously and where our silent identity has entered and left, those everyday places we have not previously categorized.

Nowhere is a highway, a hotel room, an airport, a supermarket… “It lacks the composition of spaces, it is instead situational, determined almost exclusively by the passing of individuals. It does not personalize identity or contribute to its formation because it is not easy to assimilate its aspects or components. In them the relationship or connection is more artificial. A train ticket, an identity card, a credit card defines us,” he defined us years later in Buenos Aires.

He toured Paris by subway, and from that ethnographic experience, his famous book, The Underground Traveler, was born. An ethnologist of the metro, published in 1982. In 2010, he retrace its course and write El metro revisited. Underground Traveler twenty years later. The title of the introduction is more than eloquent: “I never stopped taking the subway.”

The idea of ​​”nowhere” was spread by the power of the emerging globalization, which needed these definitions that were born in a world that accelerated rates of translation and rotation. However, he also faced criticism against his arguments.

“Ultra-modernity is a product of nowhere, that is, of spaces which are not archaic places in themselves: these, cataloged and classified and promoted to the category of ‘places of memory’, occupy a definite and definite place there.

It is a world in which one is born in the clinic and dies in the hospital, where transit points and temporary occupations (hotel chains, illegally occupied rooms, holiday clubs, refugee camps) proliferate in luxurious or inhumane ways.”

From the sociology of culture, they warn him that the concept of nowhere is “functional of the ideology of the ruling class, which legitimizes the exclusion of certain actors from the economic system.” However, the idea that a globalized humanity shares common spaces and brings people close, at least for a few minutes, has taken root and has taken root very deeply. Today people continue to talk about airports and highways as “not places”.

bubble She also revolutionized by saying (almost touching on the politically incorrect) that indigenous lands, forgotten and lost, gave ground to the city’s challenges as classic objects of study. There are new features and rethinking.

bubble He was synonymous with an anthropology that explored why the “ultra-modern” existed in everyday life, in the aggravation of urban life, in the forms generously offered by the cosmopolitan city, as he will recall in his In Praise of the Bicycle, a kind of everyday philosophy that was turning him into a constant sales phenomenon.

In 2004, he was in Buenos Aires presenting his book Why do we livea text in which he offered – his wretched vision of a world “in which men are increasingly unequal in the face of disease, poverty, and death, and also in the face of loneliness, since the poorest of the poor tend to seek salvation in flight, fighting, and the often solitary flight toward the burning and dying lights of the developed world.”

In 2014 he returned to the present Anthropologist and world scientistThen he affirmed: “This is a book by an anthropologist who asks himself about his specialty and the world in which he lives. He proposes, here, a reading of the global world, hoping to attract the attention of those who care about this world and who are interested in anthropology.”

As detailed by Ñ, how the world has been modernized where “media, new technologies, relationships change. But: are they really the same relationships when talking about communication? I don’t think relationships through media are like that. The problem is that they can give the illusion that they are in a world by itself, as a universal empirical reality, that’s a problem.”

In June 2016 he was in Buenos Aires at Philosophy Night At his conference, he re-introduced the urban anthropologist he was and who had left a deep mark in his discipline, but also in the broad field of social sciences and philosophy.

His books flooded libraries in the midst of hypermodernism, at which time he tried to define and capture it with obsession and patience. He was indeed a thinker without spatial or temporal boundaries, and the world was his “place”, his sphere of action.

basic ogy

• Born in Poitiers in 1935.

• A famous French anthropologist, he coined the term “no place” to refer to transient, interchangeable spaces where the human being is anonymous, such as transportation, large hotel chains, supermarkets, and even refugee camps.

• He was Professor and Director of Studies at the École Graduate School of Society Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, of which he was Rector from 1985 to 1995.

• Gedisa has published most of his books, among which are: Change places, why do we live? Time in ruins, Anthropology trade, Dream war And The future of earthlings.

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