Status Updates From Non-Places: Introduction to...

"Louis Marin, for his part, borrows Furetière’s Aristotelian definition of place (‘Primary and immobile surface of a body which surrounds another body or, to speak more clearly, the space in which a body is placed’) and quotes his example: ‘Every body occupies its place.’ "

The ability to define a space boundaries, especially in relation to other bodies of spaces, is diffcult owing to the fact that different spaces can exist inside or overlap with each other.

An anthropological space is a concrete and symbolic space that "could not itself allow for the vicissitudes and contradictions of social life, but serves as a reference for all those assigned to a postion, however humble or modest."

What does it mean to have a space in a social sense?

To have an existence or identity that is discernable for other things in the world.

Anthropologists and locals alike grapple with this tension—the temptation to see a people and their land as a complete, unchanging whole. But history’s flux—migration, shifting borders, erased landmarks—proves this “totality” fragile. Modern pressures, from bulldozers to urbanization, don’t just reshape land; they erase identity itself. The myth endures, but the world keeps moving.

A founded place is part myth, part reality. It *works*—land is cultivated, generations endure, and threats are resisted. Yet it’s also a fragile illusion: a myth inscribed on the soil, always adjusting to change. The image of a closed, self-sufficient world is a necessary story, one that frames the latest migration as the "first foundation."

The retention of meaning and identity requires spatial outlining of what a thing is and isnt (whether it be in mental, social or physical). For every group to maitain this spatiality their social life depends on requires them to reinforce and uphold what remains internal to them and to exclude (in some cases fight against) what is external.

One concept that the ethnologist and anthropologist study among many things is social spaces. Social spaces dictate a whole range of things whether it be our identities, our origins and the conditions which shape us. Every society is forced to give meaning to these, and this becomes the garden of thought for the anthropologist.

The question of the anthropologist of the 21st century is "What sort of analysis and framework can take into account the new imperatives of today (i.e., renewed focus on individuality, overabundance of spatiality and overabundance of meaning)?"

Augé argues that framework of supermodernity he introduces is capable of meeting this task, especially as am alternative to the framework of postmodernity.

Augé’s third aspect of supermodernity is the focus on the individual. As collective identities (class, religion, nation) destabilize in the late 20th to early 21st century, ethnographers—especially in the West—shift toward studying individual culture and meaning production. This reflects broader societal changes where personal narratives and self-identity take precedence over traditional collective frameworks.

What appears to be the third aspect of supermodernity, as outlined by Augé, is the newly refound focus on the individual. As collective identities during the last 20th to early 21st century become unstable, the focus on individual production of culture and meaning becomes the new interest on many ethnographers/anthropologist, especially those of and within the Western tradition.

The homogenization of spaces—driven by the excess of contemporary spatial forms and flows—helps make possible “non-places,” liminoid spaces of transit and consumption. In these spaces, established meanings and stable forms of belonging are weakened, so users are less co-present as participants and more positioned to pass through, which limits the possibility of active, transformative co-presence in social life.

The new scales and systems through which we measure and experience space create their own challenges and rewards. They tend to standardize everyday environments, so there is less sense of a space as uniquely “given” to particular places and histories. As a result, people can more easily treat spaces—and the meanings they carry—as something they can rearrange, which expands how we can study and create them.

Supermodernity is also marked by a stronger focus on spatiality. Augé links this to technologies and media (such as space exploration, photography, and television) that make distance more immediate, compressing how people experience the world beyond their locality. This intensifies the need to make sense of “elsewhere” and to orient oneself existentially and socially.

From I can gather, Augé argues the Supermodernity perspective argues that the contemporary period (late 20th to early 21st century) is marked by excess of meaning through which human life must struggle consistently to keep up with versus postmoderity which is characterized by errosion of meaning brought on by the destructive fallout of the mid 20th century events.

Supermodernity — A period during late 20th to early 21st century that is marked by an accelerated overabundance of meaning and the exhausting scramble to applying meaning to events which out pace us.

Augé uses it as an alternative to postmodernity. While I prefer other terms, I find this term better than postmodernity in describing postwar phenomena.

Augé frames anthropology through the relationship between “we” and “the other.” “The other” isn’t just an external object; it’s defined in relation to a “we” that positions the one doing the study.

Individual experience is inseparable from the collective, yet the individual is still a necessary starting point for understanding collective life.

Augé begins to define and outline anthropological research in a positive sense.

Among these are:

- Anthropology is the study of the other — Intellectual object of study.

- An 'other' implies a 'we' that juxtaposes the other and is the one studying the it. The we is the other of others.

- The individual is inseparable from the collective yet is essential starting point of understanding a collective.

Augé distinguishes between the spatial/lived reality we directly encounter (the empirical side) and the analytical framework or concept we produce by studying it (the intellectual side).

Augé makes an distinction between an empirical object and an intellectual object. An empirical object is the thing-in-itself and the intellecutal object is concept that arises from study of the empirical object.

The important distinction to make is between the object of study and the object the arises from the study of the object.

Tension in anthropology: researchers who work near the groups they study and those who work elsewhere. This near/elsewhere framing has been shaped, in part, by modernist forces such as colonialism.

Augé questions whether an adequate anthropology can be done at a distance from the groups studied—suggesting it is possible but problematic. He also puts forward the need to study this relation of distance itself.