Marc Auger, the French anthropologist of the uninhabited places, has died

If there is One of the things that marked Mark Ogg, the anthropologist and philosopher who passed away yesterday at the age of 87, was the secular.. for him pagan genius (1982) The Answer, 180 Years Later, Al Gnie du Christianisme (1802) by Chateaubriand, to culminate in satirical and irreverent profanity The three words that changed the world (2016), an entertaining political fantasy film, in which an extraordinary Pope Francis looks down on St. Peter’s Square to declare that “God does not exist.”

Born in Poitiers on September 2, 1935, Augustus conducted ethnographic research mainly in Africa and Latin America, He directed the prestigious Cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, of which he was also presidentand the French Institute for Development Research (IRD).

Tireless traveler He devoted many of his works to human “mobility”. In the world, like ethnologist in metre (1986) and The Funny The beauty of the bike (2008), but his international fame is linked above all to his “non-places” intuition (Change places. An Introduction to the Anthropology of Ultra-Modern1992).

Man is a symbiotic animal – write – e It needs patterned relationships in space and time, he needs “places” where his individual identity is built through contact and thanks to getting to know others. Non-places are those spaces artificially created for the needs of exchange, where the individual is a unit without personal identity.

Are airports, railway stations, large shopping centers, iWhere millions of people flow and pass every day, without this huge flow being able to build important relationships. Here the individual alone uses impersonal symbols and follows general rules of conduct. Nowhere is the product of advanced modernity or, better, in Augustus’ definition, “modernity”: the evolution of society as a result of globalization and the overcoming of postmodernism.

Nowhere is a product of consumerism, not only of material or perishable goods, but above all of communications: Communication is the consumer good par excellence and, paradoxically, it never ceases to become individual. The need for relationships, in which we build “places” to assert one’s identity and escape from destructive loneliness, pushes us to search for fragments of society in the spaces themselves – like those groups of young people who meet in supermarkets or around stations – but above all in the network, in social networks, the wonderful places free from obsession and compulsive dependence, where it is dissatisfied and loved by others.

On several occasions Augustus celebrated the bistro as a perfect example of a place par excellence (Ethnologist at the Bistro2015), where people experience authentic relationships and find joy in life. The problem is that we have moved from a mass society to a more rigid division into three classes: the powerful, the minority who escape national laws; The Consumers, the privileged heirs of a disappearing middle class; The excluded, who are denied hope. Salvation is sought in evasion, in travel, in leaving oneself.

the New social practices often choose non-ritual escape routes, true forms of utopia realization – Foucault’s “heterosexuals” – recreating new connections, even ephemeral, in holiday villages or in the most hospitable countries (Portugal, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, Malta, Morocco), final destinations for retirees in search of tranquility and affordable luxury. But even migrations from the poorest countries are forms of “hetero-divergence”, to seek welcoming places to realize the dream of a better life, often mired in the Mediterranean or in refugee camps.

For immigrants, Ogg believes assimilation is essentialfull integration in the country of arrival to avoid the risks of terrorism; He sees multiculturalism as a deadly trap, which maintains and exacerbates the ethnic divide, institutionalizing it.

He wrote enlightening pages about time (What happened to the future?2008; future2012; Time without age2014; Another possible world2017), and came to the conclusion that One always dies young, because the differences between generations that marked the ages of human life are lost, with the roles and behaviors (also aesthetic) of the developmental stages. To the point of being able to say today that aging does not exist. Thus time crystallizes and reduces the future to a probabilistic possibility.

Modernity eradicated the narratives of the past and made the utopia of the nineteenth century a purely economic and quantitative issue. Perhaps the inability to plan for the future lies in the existential struggle in the presentWe change the world before we even imagine it. That is why we feel it as a stranger, something that does not belong to us. In short, nowhere.