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Non-Places. AI generated image 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 w...

Introduction When Marc Augé published Non-Lieux in the early 1990s, he did more than introduce the concept of the non-place. He also articulated a methodological repositioning of anthropology itself. In the section titled “The Near and the Elsewhere,” Augé argued that anthropology must confront the contemporary world directly, abandoning the illusion that its privileged object lies exclusively in distant or disappearing societies. Three decades later, this intervention remains influential. Yet the present that anthropology now encounters is no longer the one Augé described. This article revisits “The Near and the Elsewhere” from today’s perspective, asking whether the conditions that justified Augé’s anthropology of the present have themselves undergone a transformation that calls for renewed scrutiny. Anthropology and the Question of the Present Augé’s starting point is deceptively simple: anthropology has always dealt with the present. Even when it appears oriented toward trad...