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Non-Lieux. AI generated image Introduction When Marc Augé introduced the concept of the non-place in Non-Lieux , his aim was not to lament the loss of tradition but to describe a transformation in the texture of everyday experience. Airports, motorways, hotel chains, and supermarkets were not marginal anomalies; they were emblematic spaces of what he called surmodernité . These environments organized movement, access, and identity through procedures rather than narratives, instructions rather than stories. Three decades later, non-places have not disappeared. Yet the conditions under which they operate—and are experienced—have changed. Revisiting Augé today invites a renewed question: what happens to symbolic mediation when everyday life is increasingly organized by systems that not only regulate circulation, but also anticipate, address, and respond? Non-Places and the Solitary Subject Augé famously distinguishes anthropological places from non-places by their relation to identi...

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...

Introduction When Marc Augé published Non-Lieux in the early 1990s, he offered anthropology a conceptual tool for thinking about spaces that had long been overlooked because of their banality. Airports, highways, supermarkets, and hotel chains were not marginal phenomena but emblematic sites of what he termed surmodernité . Rather than opposing tradition and modernity, Augé described a regime of excess: of movement, of information, and of individualized solitude. More than three decades later, the concept of non-place remains widely cited. Yet its continued use often assumes that the spaces Augé described have remained structurally unchanged. This article proposes a different approach. By rereading the prologue of Non-Lieux from today’s perspective, it asks whether the non-places of the early 1990s can still be understood in the same terms, or whether they themselves now demand to be questioned. The Prologue as a Phenomenology of Surmodernity Augé’s prologue follows Pierre Dupo...