Augé, Marc

French anthropologist Marc Augé belongs to the generation of scholars who were trained in the 1960s in Paris—that is, the generation for whom the likes of Louis Althusser, Michel de Certeau, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault can be counted as teachers and crucial influences or antagonists, as the case may be. A prolific, witty, and complex author, Augé considers himself to be an anthropologist; but his lifelong project has been one of reinventing what it means to anthropology in the rapidly changing times we refer to as “postmodernity.” While his work has only recently come to the attention of mainstream AngloAmerican social theory, where it is generally read as part of a tradition of writing on the city and everyday life that includes the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Guy Debord, it has a very distinguished reputation in France.

Marc Augé's career can be divided into three stages, reflecting shifts in both his geographical focus and theoretical development: early (African), middle (European), and late (global). This obviously schematic picture is somewhat forced, because Augé never abandoned his interest in Africa and continued to write about it well into the European and global phases. However, it is nevertheless representative of an intellectual trajectory that begins with very localised ethnographic work and culminates in the elaboration of what he calls an “Anthropology for Contemporaneous Worlds.” These successive stages do not involve a broadening of interest or focus as such, but rather the development of a theoretical apparatus able to meet the demands of the growing conviction that the local can no longer be understood except as a part of the complicated whole.

Augé's career began with a series of extended field trips to West Africa, where he researched the Alladian peoples and cultures situated on the edge of a large lagoon, west of Abidjan on the Ivory Coast. He spent close to two years there, between November 1965 and May 1967, researching almost every conceivable aspect of the culture and history of the region. The culmination of this endeavour is the masterly Le rivage Alladian: Organisation et évolution des villages Alladian (1969). As Tom Conley (2002a) has noted, this work marks a considerable advance on previous anthropological accounts of so-called peoples without history in that it factors colonial history into its interpretation, along with an analysis of spirituality and kinship. The result, Conley (2002a) says, “is moving and almost cinematographic” (p. x).

The sequel, Théorie des pouvoirs et idéologie: Études de cas en Côte d'Ivoire (1975), follows three further field excursions to the Ivory Coast between 1968 and 1971. It was written in the shadow of the student protests of May 1968, which although witnessed only from afar, nevertheless register their effects on this work. “Through the study of ways that a subject can believe in sorcery Augé gathers a sense of the ideology of power as well as the elements that justify it and allow it to be transmitted and reproduced” (Conley 2002a:xii). Augé coined the term “ideo-logic” to describe his research object, which he defined as the inner logic of the representations a society makes of itself to itself. This interest in the “logic” of a particular culture shows the strong influence exerted by Michel de Certeau, who in the same period conducted his own researches into the “cultural logic” of everyday life. A third and final instalment in this series of studies was added in 1977, Pouvoirs de vie, pouvoirs de mort.

...