Jackie Roving’s Reviews > Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity > Status Update
Jackie Roving
is 9% done
The prologue opens with a story about a man named Pierre Dupont and the mundane passivity he is forced to face getting on and off a airplane. It shows how places like airports present a liminal (or perhaps liminoid) feature to them that makes the experience of them never one that compels people to act within them but always to be social and existential bystanders. You never initiate but follow an expected routine.
— Jun 19, 2026 03:33AM
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Jackie’s Previous Updates
Jackie Roving
is 39% done
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.
— 3 hours, 58 min ago
Augé argues that framework of supermodernity he introduces is capable of meeting this task, especially as am alternative to the framework of postmodernity.
Jackie Roving
is 35% done
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.
— 5 hours, 15 min ago
Jackie Roving
is 35% done
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.
— 5 hours, 15 min ago
Jackie Roving
is 33% done
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.
— Jun 26, 2026 05:06AM
Jackie Roving
is 33% done
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.
— Jun 26, 2026 04:53AM
Jackie Roving
is 29% done
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.
— Jun 26, 2026 03:44AM
Jackie Roving
is 29% done
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.
— Jun 26, 2026 03:34AM
Jackie Roving
is 26% done
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.
— Jun 25, 2026 03:40AM
Augé uses it as an alternative to postmodernity. While I prefer other terms, I find this term better than postmodernity in describing postwar phenomena.
