Jackie Roving’s Reviews > Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity > Status Update

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.