Toward an Ethnology of Solitude: Revisiting Marc Augé’s Non-Places from the Epilogue

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Introduction

Marc Augé ends Non-Places with a gesture that is easy to overlook. After pages devoted to airports, highways, supermarkets, hotels, refugee camps, and images, he concludes by calling for what appears, at first sight, to be a contradiction: “an ethnology of solitude” (Augé, 1995). This formulation does not merely summarize the book’s argument; it displaces it. Whereas the earlier chapters focus on spaces and systems, the epilogue reorients attention toward the form of individual existence produced by them. The question is no longer simply what non-places are, but what kind of human presence they make possible, habitual, and perhaps unavoidable.

This article proposes to take that final suggestion seriously. Rather than updating the description of non-places, it asks how solitude becomes a central anthropological object in conditions of generalized mobility, mediation, and circulation. Reading the epilogue today allows us to see that Augé was already sketching the outlines of an anthropology no longer organized around communities, territories, or shared narratives, but around individuals moving alone through common systems.

Solitude as a Social Condition

In the epilogue, Augé insists that non-places are not marginal environments. They are increasingly where social life happens. From motorways to airplanes, from hotel chains to refugee camps, non-places form the texture of contemporary existence. The striking claim is that within these spaces, the experience of solitude is not accidental. It is structural.

This solitude should not be confused with isolation or withdrawal. It is lived among others, often in physical proximity, yet without durable relation. One sits next to strangers on a flight, queues alongside unknown figures, passes through crowds without encounter. Authority appears not through persons but through instructions, screens, notices, and protocols. As Augé writes, non-places generate “solitary individuality combined with non-human mediation” between the individual and public power (Augé, 1995).

Solitude here is neither pathological nor exceptional. It is normalized, shared, and widely distributed. This is why Augé treats it as an anthropological phenomenon rather than a psychological one. What demands analysis is not loneliness as an emotion, but solitude as a mode of being among others.

Images, Mediation, and the Absent Other

A central element of the epilogue is the role of images. Augé observes that parts of non-places are made of images, and that these images participate directly in the organization of experience. Advertising screens, signage, informational displays, and symbolic representations replace interpersonal exchange. They guide action while eliminating dialogue.

This environment produces a peculiar form of presence. The individual is constantly addressed, yet rarely answered. Messages circulate in one direction. Instructions appear, but no voice responds. Even when information is personalized, it does not imply recognition in any social sense. The subject is positioned as a viewer, a user, a passenger, a client.

The consequence is a thinning of encounter. Others are perceived primarily as obstacles, silhouettes, or competitors for space. What remains dense is the relation to systems and representations. An ethnology of solitude must therefore attend to how individuals relate not only to spaces, but to images that stand in for social bonds.

Mobility and the Individual Trajectory

Another decisive theme of the epilogue is movement. Augé repeatedly emphasizes transit, circulation, and passage. Modern individuals live less in places than between them. Their lives are structured as sequences rather than settlements.

This produces what might be called a trajectory-based identity. One is defined by routes taken, documents presented, access granted, and permissions obtained. Meaning arises from progression rather than belonging. The individual appears as a temporary configuration within a larger flow.

Augé notes that this condition has no true historical precedent. While travel and wandering are ancient practices, their generalization as a normal condition of existence is new. The ethnologist, traditionally concerned with stable groups, is thus confronted with subjects whose defining feature is mobility. Solitude emerges here not as withdrawal, but as accompaniment to constant motion.

Nationalism, Anxiety, and the Figure of the Migrant

The epilogue also addresses political reactions to this condition. Augé suggests that contemporary anxieties surrounding immigration and the “return” of nationalism should not be interpreted solely as defenses of tradition. Rather, they express unease in the face of destabilized certainties.

The migrant troubles settled populations because they reveal the fragility of identities “inscribed in the soil.” What is unsettling is not difference itself, but the reminder that everyone is potentially in transit. The figure of the immigrant mirrors the generalized condition of mobility that non-places make visible.

National identity, in this reading, becomes a form through which rejection of the collective order is articulated. Paradoxically, the image animating this rejection is not communal rootedness, but the fantasy of an unconstrained individual course. Solitude, once again, lies at the heart of collective reaction.

From Ethnology of Place to Ethnology of Solitude

Augé’s final proposal follows logically from these observations. If social existence increasingly unfolds in non-places, and if these spaces produce solitary individuals rather than integrated groups, then anthropology must adjust its object.

An ethnology of solitude does not abandon the social. Instead, it studies how the social is experienced when it no longer takes the form of shared narratives or enduring relations. It examines how individuals inhabit systems, negotiate anonymity, and construct meaning while remaining largely alone.

Such an approach requires attention to movement, mediation, and perception. It also demands that ethnology relinquish its exclusive attachment to bounded communities. The subject of study becomes the solitary traveler, the commuter, the refugee, the guest—figures defined less by where they belong than by where they pass.

Conclusion

The epilogue of Non-Places does more than close a book. It opens a conceptual path that remains largely unexplored. By foregrounding solitude as a collective condition, Augé invites anthropology to rethink its foundations. The challenge is not to lament the loss of place, nor to celebrate mobility, but to understand the forms of existence that arise between them.

Today, when solitude is experienced across continents, screens, and networks, Augé’s suggestion appears less paradoxical than prescient. An ethnology of solitude does not describe a marginal phenomenon. It addresses one of the most widespread conditions of contemporary life: being alone together, in motion, among images, within systems that know us without ever meeting us.

References

Augé, M. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (J. Howe, Trans.). Verso.