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    The Irish Journal of frenche studies

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    The Irish Journal of frenche studies

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    8 views22 pages

    Merriman Marc Auge On Space

    Uploaded by

    Candela Hernandez
    The Irish Journal of frenche studies

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
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    THE IRISH JOURNAL OF FRENCH STUDIES Special Issue No. 9 — 2009 Exploring Supermodernity: Marc Augé in Context(s) Guest Editor Douglas Smith arc Augé on Space, Place and Non-Places Peter Merriman At what point in his ceuvre should we open a discussion of Marc Augé’s articulations of space, place and non-place? His studies of contemporary France: his ‘anthropologies of the near’?! His theoretical discussions of space, individuality and place in his most widely acclaimed book, Non-lieux, translated as Non-Places?” Or, his anthropological studies of the West African former French colonies of Céte d'Ivoire and Togo, which he conducted between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s? In a number of interviews and articles, including an essay published in Ethnos, Augé suggested the latter. His early African ethnologies were, he said, crucial for understanding his later studies of spatial practices.’ In this article I map out elements of Augé’s spatial imagination, opening, in section two, with a brief description of his studies of the spatial organization of Alladian, Avikam and Ebrié lagoon socicties, before exploring how he then came to develop his ‘proximate ethnographies’* of contemporary France. In section three, I introduce the principal arguments of what is undoubtedly his most widely read and acclaimed book, Non- lieux/Non-Places. 1 outline Augé’s approach to the contemporary world of supermodernity, exploring his conceptualization of 1. Mare Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995), p. 7. 2. Mare Augé, Non-lieux: introduction 4 une anthropologie de la surmodernité (Paris: Seuil, 1992); Augé, Non-Places. 3. Mare Augé, ‘An Itinerary’, Ethnos, 69 (2004), 534-51. 4. Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 293. LJFrS.9 (2009) 10 MERRIMAN ‘anthropological place’ and ‘non-place’, before tracing how his thinking can be linked to earlier writings on placelessness and non- lieu in both Anglophone and Francophone thought. In section four I suggest why few Anglophone commentators have provided sustained and detailed engagements with Augé’s arguments, either choosing to affirm his observations about the proliferation of non-places in the West or criticizing him for neglecting to explore how people actually experience such spaces as places. This failure is, I suggest, partially a result of a broader ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, which has led some critics rather simplistically to appropriate concepts such as ‘non-place’; but it is also a result of Augé’s writing style in Non-Places, which is frequently read as a theoretical treatise on non-place rather than as a semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional ethnology resulting from one man’s travels in supermodernity. In section five, I examine the arguments of Anglo-American scholars writing about globalization, consumption and place who are increasingly suggesting a rather different spatial patterning of social and cultural life to that outlined by Augé. I suggest that rather than coin a new species of space/place — i.e. non-place — we need to rethink ‘place’ as open, dynamic, inclusive, relational and in process, rather than as closed off, organic, static and localized. Anthropological Space: From Céte d'Ivoire to the Jardins du Luxembourg Africa helps us think space.* Augé began his studies of anthropology and ethnology at the Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre-Mer (now L’Institut de Recherche pour le Développement), where he worked from 1962 until 1970, after graduating in literature from the Ecole Normale Supérieure 5. Mare Augé, ‘Home Made Strange’ (Mare Augé interviewed by Jean-Pierre Criqui), Artforum, 32.10 (1994), 84-88, 114, 117 (p. 86). SPACE, PLACE AND NON-PLACES i 1961) and undertaking a year of military service in Algeria.® wing upon the Marxist and structuralist sociological and thropological theories of the likes of Louis Althusser, Cornelius oriadis, Emile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marcel Mauss, Augé spent eighteen months studying the Alladian peoples of the Jagoon region in Céte d'Ivoire, west of Abidjan. This first visit resulted in his doctorat de troisiéme cycle (1967) and his first book Le Rivage Alladian (1969), in which he traced the spatial organization of Alladian village life, the history of the region, local spirituality, and ‘Alladian translations of white Western cultural practices.” Further visits culminated in his these d'état (1973) undertaken at the Sorbonne (University of Paris V) under the supervision of Georges Balandier, the influential Africanist sociologist and founder of the Centre *Btudes Africaines.® This was published as Théorie des pouvoirs et idéologie in 1975, providing a structural-Marxist analysis of the ideologies and networks of power in Alladian, Avikam and Ebrié lagoon societies,’ while a third book, Pouvoirs de vie, pouvoirs de mort (1977), examined the meanings of life, death and spirituality in Bregbo, the village of the renowned Ebrié Christian prophet-healer Albert Atcho.'° These and later studies marked Augé out as one of the ee 6. Jean-Paul Colleyn and Jean-Pierre Dozon, ‘Liewx et non-lieux de Mare Auge’, L'Homme 185-86 (2008), 7-32; Mare Augé, Personal communication with the author, 9 July 2009. 7. Mare Augé, ‘Organisation et évolution des villages alladians’ (Unpublished Noctora’ dé troisiome cycle, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, 1967); Mare Auge, Le Rivage Alladian: organisation et évolution des villages alladians (Paris: Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre-Mer, 1969). 8, Mare Augé, ‘La Vie en double: théorie des pouvoirs et idgologie du pouvoir en Basse Cate d'ivoire’ (Unpublished thése d’état, University of Paris V, 1973). On Georges Balandier’s influence on African anthropology and sociology in France, see Sally Falk Moore, Anthropology and Africa: Changing: Perspectives aris Changing Scene (London: The University Press of Virginia, 1994), pp. 9— 104. 9, Mare Augé, Théorie des pouvoirs et idéologie: éude de cas en Céte d'Ivoire (Paris: Hermann, 1975). 10. Mare Augé, Pouvoirs de vie, pouvoirs de mort introduction dune anthropologie de la répression (Paris: Flammarion, 1977). 12 MERRIMAN leading Africanist anthropologists of the day, and as an eminent anthropologist of health and spirituality," but they were also crucial to the development of his thoughts on everyday spatial practices. Augé traced the spatial organization and imaginative geographies of Alladian society, following the ‘therapeutic itineraries’ undertaken by the sick, revealing how the spaces of village life and local ‘rules of residence’ reflected a social order, and examining how ‘the prophet- medicine man organizes a space which is specific to him’, a ‘place apart’! Indeed, in 2004 he asserted that: ‘Africa taught me several lessons which took the form of genuine theories: a theory of space, a theory of the person, a theory of the event and a theory of mediation’.' As an ‘anthropologist of the far’, Augé utilized fairly standard ethnographic techniques, spending extended periods of time living alongside villagers to gain an understanding of their social, cultural, religious and political organization, and yet inevitably experiencing everyday practices and events as a partial outsider, for whom African everyday practices and spaces assumed a rather exotic appearance. Exotic and foreign everyday socio-spatial practices had long been the focus for European anthropologists, and so it is not surprising that Augé contributed to the interdisciplinary journal Traverses in the mid- 1970s, which published work focusing on everyday spatial practices and had an editorial board that included Jean Baudrillard, Michel de Certeau and Paul Virilio.'* At this time, Augé was still very much 11, Augé’s other significant writings from this phase of his research include: Symbole, fonction, histoire (Paris: Hachette, 1979), translated as The “Anthropological Circle: Symbol, Function, History, trans. Martin Thom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Le Sens du mal: anthropologie, histoire, sociologie de la maladie, ed. Mare Augé and Claudine Herzlich (Paris: Editions des Archives Contemporaines, 1983), translated as The Meaning of Illness: Anthropology, History and Sociology, ed. Mare Augé and Claudine Herzlich (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995). 12, Augé, ‘An Itinerary’, pp. 539-40. 13. Augé, ‘An Itinerary’, p. 537. 14. Verena Andermatt Conley, ‘Processual Practices’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 100.2 (2001), 483-500. Conley provides an extended discussion of the role of SPACE, PLACE AND NON-PLACES 13 focusing on everyday life in Africa, but in the early 1980s he started to pay increasing attention to social and cultural life in the contemporary West, and the result was a series of ‘self-ethnologies’ in which his spatial imagination and attention to spatial practices are clearly refracted. The switch from Africa to Europe is not that surprising. When he returned ‘home’ to Paris from his ethnographic excursions, Augé took time to adjust: he felt temporarily detached from this place and he noticed changes in the urban landscape. As he began to reflect upon his African fieldwork from a distance he observed parallels with processes (such as globalization) which were affecting spaces, identities, events and social relations ‘at home’ in France." It was from this position that he started to explore Paris by ‘asking myself questions I had previously been asking others, mainly in Africa; I was testing those questions, to see whether they really made sense for the only native at hand (myself, as it happened) and for others who shared the same environment’. In Génie du paganisme (1982), Augé examined the pagan spiritualities practised in both European and Ivorian cultures,'” but it was in La Traversée du Luxembourg (1985) that he first adopted the part-fictional, part-autobiographical, essayistic approach, ‘focused on my walks through Paris’,'® that was to serve as a template for subsequent studies of the cultural practices and everyday spaces of the Traverses in presenting analyses of everyday spatial practices and she associates ‘Augé with a second generation of what she calls traversistes. 15. In his writings on contemporary France, Augé suggests that ‘our particular present is characterised by the death of exoticism’: Mare Augé, 4 Sense for the Diher, trans. Amy Jacobs (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), P- xvi Ia contrast, I would suggest that exoticism is a particular perspective on things, and that in his later writings Augé frequently exoticizes everyday practices and occurrences. 16, Mare Augé, ‘Paris and the Ethnography of the Contemporary World’, in Parisian Fields, ed, Michael Sheringham (London: Reaktion, 1996), pp. 175-81 (p. 175). 17. Mare Augé, Génie du paganisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1982). 18, Augé, ‘Paris and the Ethnography of the Contemporary World’, p. 175. 14 MERRIMAN contemporary Western world — particularly France and Paris."? In La Traversée du Luxembourg, subtitled ‘ethno-roman d’une journée frangaise’ (an ‘ethno-novel of a French day’), Augé provides what Tom Conley has called a ‘critical autobiography’ ° of his travels through Paris on 20 July 1984; from waking up to the radio and his walk across the Jardins du Luxembourg to his doctor’s surgery, to thoughts about a talk he must give in Palermo and his speculations on the anthropology of life in the Paris métro.”' Augé later reflected that, to his surprise, he always seemed to address anthropological and sociological questions ‘in “spatial terms”’, and this is apparent from many of his later books and collaborations.” In Un ethnologue dans le métro (1986) he examined the embodied practices, techniques, rituals and itineraries of the Paris métro traveller, while in Domaines et chateaux (1989) he examined how upmarket glossy magazines present images of country properties and rural living to wealthy urbanites.”* In the 1990s, Augé undertook a number of studies and collaborative projects which again reflected his incisive spatial imagination, including four books on the spaces and landscapes of Paris: Paris. années 30: Roger-Viollet (1996), Paris jardins (2008) with Claire de Virieu, and Paris retraversé (1992) and Paris ouvert (1995) with acclaimed photographer Jean Mounicq.” 19. Mare Augé, La Traversée du Luxembourg, Paris, 20 Juillet 1984: ethno-roman dune journée francaise considérée sous l'angle des murs, de la théorie, et du bonheur (Paris: Hachette, 1985). 20. Tom Conley, ‘Afterword: Riding the Subway with Marc Auge’, in Mare Augé, In the Metro, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 73-113 (p. 74). 21. Augé, La Traversée du Luxembourg. 22. Augé, ‘Paris and the Ethnography of the Contemporary World’, p. 175. 23. Mare Augé, Un ethnologue dans le méiro (Paris: Hachette, 1986), translated as Mare Augé, In the Metro, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Mare Augé, Domaines et chateaux (Paris: Seuil, 1989). 24, Mare Augé, Paris: années 30: Roger-Viollet (Paris: Hazan, 1996); Mare Augé and Claire de Virieu, Paris jardins (Arles: Actes Sud, 2008); Jean Mounieq and Mare Augé, Paris retraversé (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1992); Marc Augé and Jean Mounicg, Paris ouvert (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1995). SPACE, PLACE AND NON-PLACES 15: Non-Lieux/Non-Places Augé most famously and fully articulated his conceptual and theoretical approach to space and place in what is undoubtedly his most widely read and acclaimed book, Non-lieux (1992), translated as Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Here, Augé examines the changing characteristics of space, place and individuality in an overly or excessively modern world ‘characterised by the acceleration or enhancement of the determining constituents of modemity’.”> This is a world of surmodernité — translated as “supermodernity’ or

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