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:

• 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.

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.