::Marc Augé, you are the representative of a species that is said to be endangered – the ethnologist -, on the other hand you claim that the 21st century will be the century of anthropology…

The expression is a little grandiose (laughs), but as it happens, I think that “ethnology” in the traditional sense of the term is endangered insofar as it is defined as a science studying societies that are themselves endangered. Primitive societies as they were conceived in the 19th century have been transformed or disappeared. Even my field of study during the years 1965-70 no longer exists in the same form because what was at that time a remote village in the Ivory Coast is now on the outskirts of Abidjan. That which constituted the principal object of study – the analysis of relationships, family relationships, of power, etc. – has probably lost relevance. Nevertheless, the method remains relevant: how to account for the relationship to the other among the others? This question of method is at the heart of all anthropology.

::The term “anthropology” is contested, particularly because it seems to presume anthropological constants that are independent of space and time. Does the ethnologist’s experience in the field put him or her on guard against such temptations?

For me, the years spent in Africa were formative. For a young researcher from far away, it is a matter of being attentive, patient; one must not be too hurried. In a word, passivity is necessary. The practice of the ethnologist would more closely resemble the strategies of Commissaire Maigret than those of Hercule Poirot, more like Simenon than Agatha Christie (laughs). Above all one must allow oneself to absorb things. “Participant observation” is an equivocal expression because it is far less a question of participation than of observation. Everyone has this experience: when one is thrown into an unknown context, one must first of all be quiet and listen in order to understand what is at stake.

::This sensitivity to otherness that the ethnologist learns “among the others”, as you say, you have risked applying to otherness at home, founding at the same time “the ethnology of the proximate” with which your name has come to be associated. In what way does your approach distinguish itself from “reverse ethnology”?

Reverse ethnology seems to presume that it is sufficient to reverse the roles such that the “ethnologized” becomes the ethnologist of the one who had previously ethnologized him or her. The observations that an African ethnologist is able to make upon coming to Europe could certainly be interesting, but I do not think that they would be fundamentally different from the observations of his or her European colleagues. On the contrary, I am afraid that this reverse ethnology only reiterates divisions and established roles. I do not believe in absolute foreignness, but I do believe in the merits of a distanced gaze.

::This distanced gaze trained on the everyday that you have practiced in works such as La traversée du Luxembourg (The Crossing of the Luxembourg) or Un ethnologue dans le métro (An Ethnologist in the Métro) goes hand in hand for you with a reflection on history. After all of the post-, trans- and other epimodernisms, what does the term “supermodernity” that you propose give us?

There are many words that one uses because one is not sure of the concepts, and I do not claim to be exempt from this particular danger (laughs). What I disliked about the word “postmodern” was the sense of decadence, of a rupture with a lost ideality. If I spoke of supermodernity [surmodernité], it was in order to indicate that it is a question not only of disjunction, but also of continuity. I was thinking above all about the term “overdetermination” in Freud and in Althusser that describes a situation that is too complex to allow for only one interpretation. The principal factors of this increasing complexity can be distinguished in three excesses. First of all, there is an excess of temporality that translates into an overabundance of events: the acceleration of historical stages is amplified by the increase in the average life expectancy. Next there is an excess of individuality. If modernity had already celebrated the individual as the coming of the enterprising subject, master of oneself, this tendency intensifies in supermodernity. Individuality becomes the reference par excellence or, to put it another way, references themselves acquire identities of their own. The consumer society that dominates this supermodernity appeals directly to the individual and to his or her apparent freedom of choice. Thirdly, one can speak of an excess of spatiality. The territory trampled by men’s feet expands and, paradoxically, this produces a contraction of space. If an extraterrestrial saw us from a distance, he would see a mad restlessness around this little planet: satellites ceaselessly circulating around the earth, planes (a city of 700,000 inhabitants flies each day over American soil), a constant feverishness...

::Within this sprawling territoriality, a new kind of space appears that you have designated by the expression “non-place”. How would you define this atopic space?

I tried to characterize these new emerging spaces by the term “non-places” which empirically makes note of the extension of these new spaces in our world; spaces of circulation giving us the sense that the earth is small, spaces of communication (possibly virtual spaces), or even of consumption, since a large part of what circulates aims to put products into circulation (and possibly the men who produce them) such that the activity of consumption reproduces society itself. Such spaces of circulation, of communication and consumption, including the technical capabilities that make it possible for them to be visited or concentrated (the airport, the supermarket, the freeway, etc.), are what I have designated by the term “non-place”.

::The non-place is not only characterized by a loss of identity, it establishes standardized havens in the midst of the supercomplexity, in which all users are put on an equal footing. Abroad, the non-place is often the first place where the traveler who has lost his or her bearings takes refuge, as Sofia Coppola was able to illustrate in her film “Lost in Translation” about westerners confined to their grand hotel in Tokyo.

That’s it exactly. An anecdote: the first time I arrived in Japan, my suitcase was lost and there I was in Tokyo where, at the time, there wasn’t any written English at all. I experienced a certain sensation of foreignness. Because I needed some underwear I went into a supermarket. What a relief! Finally I felt at home, nearly (laughs)! And these large hotel chains that you’re talking about are truly alike no matter where you go. They are places for people without a place. You can see there a perfect illustration of the system. One speaks elsewhere of hotel “chains”, of television channels; witness all the cables that enchain the planet. This is neither good nor bad, but just how it is.

::Your ethnology of the non-place seems to be opposed in every sense to the classical ethnological notion of space as theorized by Marcel Mauss.

This Maussian idea of place that still survives in the imagination of anthropologists is linked to the belief that in deciphering this space, overloaded with meaning, one arrives at society. The description of the organization of space in a village, the analysis of the rules of residence, the rules of occupation and of sharing space in order to account for kinship relations, power relations, etc., is possible in a society in which the representation of space is itself overloaded with meaning. This place invested with meaning is in conflict with a new form of space emerging in supermodernity. If I conceive of a space in which one cannot discern individual identity, social relationships, or the shared past, I fall into a non-place that is a space of absolute freedom. A freedom that remains very particular. Let’s imagine a Kafkaesque individual lost in a space in which he or she does not understand the codes and which does not signify anything to him or her. In the same way that one had in the classical place a society full of meaning that knew no freedom, there would be in these non-places a fullness of freedom suppressing the idea of meaning. Of course, in reality things are more complex: there are ways out, there are rebels, exceptions. As neither of these two extremes has ever been realized, the pair place/non-place seems to me to be rather a conceptual pairing that would permit the social nature of a space to be discerned.

::Having long examined questions of space, one senses in your latest works a shift toward the question of time. What are the reasons for this?

What we suffer from today is the quasi-monopoly of the language of space that supplants the language of time. On the one hand we are told that there are no more grand narratives, that all ideology of the future would recover from naïveté. Exit the future, then. The past is made into a film, it is a spectacle for the present, sound and light; in short, the past is no longer an effective point of reference. As a result, the category of the present is also devalued, since the present that runs like water through one’s fingers cannot be defined other than as a passage from the past to the future. No doubt it is these difficulties that cause the domination of spatial language in the analyses of those who are really the ideologues of the contemporary situation. For one must realize that one is caught in the ideology of the present situation and that the peculiarity of all ideology is that when one is caught within it, one does not think of it as ideology. Even those who critique it are imprisoned within it! But the smallest social relation cannot be defined other than in reference to time. It is time that creates the spice and the tragedy of existence, as much at the individual as at the collective level.

::Your book Le Temps en ruines (Time in Ruins) closes with an evocation of the non-place in utopian terms. Being no longer a nostalgic place of lost meaning like ruins, for example, meaning would remain to be made there. Isn’t it incongruous to speak of utopia in relation to a supermarket or an airport?

Despite appearances, the everyday world already knows some utopias. Tourism is one of these. The tourist is the one who is able to imagine the whole of the planet as places of transition. This utopia can be judged in two different ways. Either one considers that this is the final stage of the consumer society, you are sold movement, displacement, with some sun or sand to boot. Individuals buy their capacity to move and one is therefore at the limit of the system. According to the utopian perspective, the individual who moves around, who is unattached or, more precisely, who plays with attachments, free to choose these bonds, seems to me to have a highly commendable value. Quite the opposite of solitude then, a freedom of choice that no longer roots itself in identity, a given culture. At the moment, there is one part of the world that travels and another that accommodates, the world can be divided into countries of tourists and countries of migrants. To push utopia to its fulfillment: tourism will become a highly commendable thing, perfectly splendid and metaphysical when there is nothing left but tourists. Six billion tourists! Is this unrealistic? No more than many other utopias...

Interview: Emmanuel Alloa

photography: Marc Roller

translation: Ashley Byock