First published in 1992 and reissued with a new introduction, anthropologist Marc Aug's book is a haunting analysis of modern

life and in particular those homogenised "non-places" where we spend so much of our time: airports, railway stations, superstores, motorways and international hotel chains. Unlike conventional "anthropological places" (the symbolic site of an altar), these "spaces of circulation, consumption and communication" exist beyond history, relations and the game of identity. Yet, as Aug shows, the anodyne and anonymous solitude of these non-places offers the transitory occupant the illusion of being part of some grand global scheme: a fugitive glimpse of a utopian city-world. The forces of globalisation and urbanisation are creating ever more of these Ballardian non-places, symptoms of a Muzak-filled supermodernity in which "people are always, and never, at home". Unsettling, elegantly written and illuminating: essential reading for anyone seeking to understand our supermodern condition. The guardian review.

Review
"Shopping malls, motorways, airport lounges - we are all familiar with these curious spaces which are both everywhere and nowhere. But only now do we have coherent analysis of their far-reaching effects on public and private experience. Marc Auge has become their anthropologist, and has written a timely and original book." - Patrick Wright, author of The Village That Died for England

Product Description
An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computer and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Auge calls 'non-space' results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Auge uses the concept of 'supermodernity' to describe the logic of these late-capitalist phenomena a logic of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating and lucid essay he seeks to establish and intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity. Starting with an attempt to disentangle anthropology from history, Auge goes on to map the distinction between place, encrusted with historical monuments and creative social life, and non-place, to which individuals are connected in a uniform manner and where no organic social life is possible. Unlike Baudelairean modernity, where old and new are interwoven, supermodernity is self-contained: from the motorway or aircraft, local or exotic particularities are presented two-dimensionally as a sort of theme-park spectacle. Auge does not suggest that supermodernity is all-encompassing: place still exist outside non-place and tend to reconstitute themselves inside it. But he argues powerfully that we are in transit through non-place for more and more of our time, as if between immense parentheses, and concludes that this new form of solitude should become the subject of an anthropology of its own.

Q. The popularity of the term "non-place," in contrast with "place," has resulted, among other things, in misuses of concepts that you have described as anthropological hypotheses. The excessive attention and amplification has not always been helpful in terms of the clarity of your message. There have been oversimplifications, and such misuses as considering "places" as good and "non-places" as bad. Perhaps this would be an opportune time, fifteen years after your book was first published in France by the publisher Seuil, to update the definition, to prevent further misuse of the term. ...

A. I have done my best to provide a description of places that can put us in contact with a social structure, because there is a very close, consubstantial link between space and social organization. At the same time, because I noticed the proliferation, in the contemporary world, of spaces in which no lasting social relations are established (transit spaces, spaces people pass through), I suggested calling those spaces non-places to suggest that in those contexts there were a total absence of symbolic ties, and evident social deficits.

Q. It's quite a leap to shift focus from anthropological research into so-called primitive nations such as the Ivory Coast, Togo, and Algeria, to an anthropology of advanced societies. One problem is that in the anthropology of phenomena that are, so to speak, "at our front doorstep," anybody feels they have the right to state his own opinion, and therefore to twist and deform the content of the analyses that you have produced on places and non-places in years of study and research.

A. I never considered my transition to studying our big cities as a break with the earlier work I did; rather, I saw it as a natural progression. The analysis of places and non-places constituted a major point of reference in an attempt to analyze spaces that are characteristic of the contemporary world. With other colleagues, I undertook a sort of "return trip" from Africa to Europe, because even though we continued our work in Africa and Latin America, at the beginning of the Nineties we began to become aware, as ethnologists, of the processes that are now referred to as globalization. I was a member of a generation that lived through this transition, and I believe that if the term non-place found an audience, it was largely because it corresponded to something that had been in the air for some time, but which had not yet found a proper name or, if it had been named by some authors, had failed to stir the attention or understanding that we managed to obtain. A certain number of people found inspiration in the notion, because it communicated things that were significant for them. It was clear and evident for architects, painters, musicians, and for painters for instance, expecially experimental ones. The other side of the coin is that when this word began to spread, a

number of people began to confer upon our hypotheses the meanings they wanted to give to it. I believe that already in the little book, Non-Places (original French title, Non-Lieux, 1992; English edition, Verso, 1995, trans. By John Howe), I attempted to specify and nuance matters, and I was repeatedly drawn back to certain concepts. There are two points that I would like to hammer down. For me, place has never been an empirical notion. Anything can become a place, every space can be one, if in one manner or another encounters take place there that create social ties. A space can be either a place or a non-place, or a place for some and not for others. One classic case is the airport, which is a very different case for someone who works there regularly, with colleagues and relationships, and someone who passes through once only, or by chance. The second point is that in the sometime nostalgic visions that we have of the past, we tend to consider the new as something that twists the nature of what existed before. And so place is good because we meet people and we establish relationships there, while the non-place is bad because there everyone is a stranger to everyone else. That was not and is not my intention. It is necessary to attempt to characterize whatever is new in the contemporary world and, in my opinion, what is new is a change of setting, a shift in references, which implies that spaces are no longer perceived in the same way. Non-places could be seen, approaching them from another vantage point, as the heirs to everything that has created discomfort or annoyance in the history of human spaces. However, when reflecting upon the meaning of travel, we should consider that this negative definition of the non-place rules out the possibility of adventure. Encounters often take place in a space that is not yet symbolized, which cannot prescribe social relations; in a nonplace the notion of the unknown, the mysterious appears. Knights errant, the Knights of the Round Table, in the stories handed down to us from the Middle Ages, set off in search of adventure. Fine: setting off in search of adventure means going somewhere where you know no one else. If I come back to the narrow definition that I gave of non-place at the beginning, then we have to say that adventure takes place in a non-place. I could continue with this, and sing the praises of the non-place, but this too would be misleading, because, quite sincerely, I never employed this notion with ny reference to a system of values. [....]
(On The Move, Skira 2008, p. 126 e ss.)

Marc Auge defined place as one concered with Relation, Identity and History. If, according to Aug, non-spaces discourage "settling in", then non-spaces are open to the colonization of the technosocial device on every stage that has been ripped away from its social roots. Every place that has seen its citizenship fall to individual concerns is open to reconnection of the social by means of the cell phone. No one can "settle-in" on a street they do not feel at home in. Airports are non-places because one has no identity once one enters the airport. The airport is a site that is betwixt and between here and there, what Sociologist Bruno Latour would call aliminal space.

The community that one used to engage was the entire world. Now it is subscriptions to certainm parts of the world. Thats not true, but it sounds really nice. A so-called hot place is where a lot of stuff is going on. What emerges from the fading social norms is naked, frightened, aggressive ego in search of love and help. In the search for itself and an affectionate sociality, it easily gets lost in the jungle of the self; someone who is poking around in the fog of his of his or her own self is no longer capable of noticing that this isolation, this 'solitary-confinement of the ego' is a mass sentence [Ulrich Beck, 40 in Bauman 2000:37]. As the world's population enters into a more highly technically concentrated arena, the cultural constructions of space and communication are changing. Cultural constructions of space are are being influenced by new technologies that facilitate communication. The cell phone is one such device that is making cultural constructions of space different. A new system of manners as well as nonverbal and verbal communication is arising to absorb and normalize the existence of this new device. My thesis on Cell Phones and Their Technosocial Sites of Engagement examines those changes and the experience of and negotiation of space before and after the cultural implementation and adoption of the mobile phone as an extension of the individual.