#supermodernity

[shores-of-esgalduin]

History is on our heels, following us like our shadows, like death.

Marc Augé. Non-Places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity

[apondoffinlessfishes]

Bali Street Market

Athens Street Market

[apondoffinlessfishes]

"The hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places—spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate earlier places. Instead, these places are listed, classified, promoted to the status of places of memory, and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position." "A world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary, and the ephemeral offers the anthropologist and others a new object."

Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity Marc Augé (1995)

[apondoffinlessfishes]

"The three figures of excess which we have employed to characterize the situation of supermodernity—overabundance of events, spatial overabundance, and the individualization of references—make it possible to grasp the idea of supermodernity without ignoring its complexities and contradictions, but also without treating it as the uncrossable horizon of a lost modernity with which nothing remains to be done except to map its traces, list its isolates, and index its files." "As in the situations anthropology has analyzed under the name of acculturation, the components pile up without destroying one another." Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity Marc Augé (1995)

[canischaos]

“Space, as frequentation of places rather than a place, stems in effect from a double movement: the traveller’s movement, of course, but also a parallel movement of the landscapes which he catches only in partial glimpses, a series of ‘snapshots’ piled hurriedly into his memory and, literally, recomposed in the account he gives of them, the sequencing of slides in the contemporary he imposes on his entourage when he returns. Travel (something the ethnologist mistrusts to the point of ‘hatred’) constructs a fictional relationship between gaze and landscape.” - Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, quoted in Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, 2nd Edition (London, UK: Verso, 2008), 69-70.

[canischaos]

“Moreover, we now see them paying attention to a number of major themes normally considered ‘anthropological’ (the family, private life, ‘places of memory’). These researches meet halfway the public’s interest in obsolete forms, which seem to tell our contemporaries what they are by showing them what they are no longer. Nobody expresses this point of view better than Pierre Nora, in his preface to the first volume of Lieu de mémoire: what we are seeking, he says in substance, through our religious accumulation of personal accounts, documents, images and all the ‘visible signs of what we used to be’, is what is different about us now; and we are hoping to find ‘within the spectacle of this difference the sudden flash of an unfindable identity. No longer a genesis, but the deciphering of what we are in the light of what we are no longer.’”

- Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, 2nd Edition (London, UK: Verso, 2008), 21.

[benghini]

Here is my summer reading list, if I had found them at a neighbor's garage sale. 

Marc Augé — Non-Places

[travelless]

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