French anthropologist Marc Augé has died today at the age of 87, according to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. Augé was well known for his studies in ethnography, ethnology, and sociology. In addition, he introduced the concept of “no place” to refer to those places of transit that do not leave a mark on people, such as an airport, a motel room or a supermarket.
Augé died in Poitiers, his birth city, although he lived in Paris. Doctor of Letters and Human Sciences, he contributed to the development of the Africanist disciplines and elaborated an anthropology of contemporary worlds, focusing his gaze on the dimension of daily life and modernity.
Specialized in ethnology, he leaves a wide body of work behind him that has reached the general public thanks to titles such as Las pequeñas alegrías or Time without age. Old age does not exist. Despite having studied the human being in depth, Augé was unable to find the secret of happiness, although he came quite close and considered that being happy lies “in those small joys that make us feel that we exist as a person”.
“Joy is always something personal and in my work in Africa I realized that it has to do with the pleasure of reunion. I returned to Togo and my acquaintances came to receive me playing the drums. I began to dance. An unforgettable moment,” he explained in an interview with La Vanguardia in 2019.
His knowledge of the human being also allowed Augé to reflect on modern society, consumption or individualism: “We are in a consumer society, which defines new modes of individuality. The idea of ??capitalism is less associated with that of the entrepreneurial individual, despite the fact that this image still exists. At the level of the great masses, behaving well means consuming a lot. The consumption index is the health index of a country. Consumption is directed at typical individuals, who are the image of consumers. We have fictitious interlocutors on television, but that play an important role for the consumer. There are people who would not bear to live without having their daily appointment with the news or with the report on Saturday. This relationship structures time,” he pointed out in an interview with La Nación.
Augé was also the author of Trust in oneself, trust in the other, trust in the future, The power of images, Another world is possible, So, who is the other? o Sharing the human condition. A manual for our present. The French intellectual was separated, he was the father of two daughters and had three grandchildren. He confessed himself an atheist and was a great defender of the need to “become aware that we are a whole, a planetary humanity.”
