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2009, Irish Journal of French Studies
In this paper I provide a critical examination of Marc Augé’s spatial imagination, from his anthropological studies of African village life in the 1970s to his more recent studies of everyday spatial practices in the contemporary West. Augé’s spatial imagination is apparent throughout his ethnographic writings, but I suggest that his most widely acclaimed book, Non-Lieux/Non-Places, is all-too-frequently read as a theoretical articulation of the changing nature of space in the contemporary West, rather than as a semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical ethnology resulting from one man’s encounters and wanderings in the spaces of contemporary France. I trace parallels between Augé’s writings on non-places and those of a number of other Anglophone and Francophone scholars since the early 1960s, before focusing attention on writings on theories of space and place, and the geographies and histories of globalisation, consumption and mobility, which have led commentators to draw very different conclusions about the sociality and spatiality of late twentieth and early twenty-first century life.
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