WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY SICILIA News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria: Marc Augé: traveling between places and non-places (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Anthropologists who do field research for long periods among distant

peoples know or discover the greater danger they run when the time of
return arrives. Between farewell savages, farewell travels! by
Lévi-Strauss leaving the Brazil of the Bororo, which closes his Tristes
Tropiques (1955), and the announced return to the dowayos of Cameroon by
Nigel Barley, at the end of his book The Innocent anthropologist (1983),
opens up a range of possibilities: there is the anthropologist who
returns to his university and, as if nothing had happened, resumes his
bureaucratic work (and perhaps harbors regrets in secret); and there are
those who, on the contrary, have decided to jump the cultural barrier
and "become wild", even if they know that total existential palingenesis
is impossible. And then there is Marc Augé, who has just left us
definitively, who offers us a third possibility: to continue to exercise
the anthropological gaze also on the world of origin, as if the people
who live there were "others" from the "I" who watches and describes and,
at best, interprets. Because clearly you can only see your country of
origin with ethnographic eyes if you have managed to detach yourself
from deep cultural roots or, at least, know how to put them aside, as
you did when you were with the inhabitants of the forest. Between the
young Marc who takes the metro in Paris to get to his university lessons
and the Augé who travels the same line thirty years later, a lot of
water has passed under the bridges of the Seine and in his gaze, since
now he looks at them as objects of study and this makes the difference
and, ultimately, his Parisian colleagues will not forgive him for it.
Because the great French anthropologist has returned to his home, but he
is not very comfortable and begins to write about what he sees and,
irony of the profession, his name leaves the narrow confines of his
professional community and begins to circulate among the general public
, captured by journalists looking for keys to understanding a world they
already can't explain. And, moreover, he too has no peace between
invitations to give conferences, the price of global success, and new
spaces for research, such as Venezuela or Sicily, to find and express.

Born in Poitiers in 1935, he studied classical literature and human
sciences, resulting in an anthropological and, partly, philosophical
education. He ends up doing research in Africa, especially in Ivory
Coast and Togo, in the context of development projects financed by
ORSTOM, from which he ends up distancing himself. Here he studies
diseases and indigenous systems of treatment, phenomena of shamanism and
spirit possession, power relations and identities, publishing essays and
books on these topics. When he decides to return he seems to come from
another planet, like the alien that in 2012 he will play in the short
film For Too Much Love, shot in Giarre by Alterazioni Video: in a tank
top, Bermuda shorts and flip-flops, with a camera around his neck, while
he tries to incarnate himself in a dog, during the inauguration of the
archaeological park of Giarre in Sicily.

Upon returning to France, while he was processing the large mass of
collected materials, he taught at the School of Advanced Studies in
Social Sciences in Paris, where he was director between 1985 and 1995.
His popular and more philosophical books have partly obscured the his
contribution to anthropology, especially as it refers to the study of
religious and medical phenomena. In any case, some of his books, such as
An Ethnologist in the Metro, have been translated into a large number of
languages and continue to be reprinted. He certainly had the great merit
of attempting the impossible: anthropologically explaining the meaning
of contemporary processes to the same actors who lived them, producing
enthusiasm and rejection at the same time. Thus, Nonluoghi. Introduction
to an anthropology of supermodernity (1992), can be considered at the
same time the most read book in the world in the last twenty years and,
at the same time, the one that has most easily been reduced to a series
of journalistic slogans. Non-places, where the traditional coordinates
of culture that give meaning to existence are lost and individuals pass
by, strangers to the world around them: spaces of ever-increasing
anonymity, while the individual becomes increasingly self-referential,
ending up severing his traditional group roots.

Among the many possible paths in Marc Augé's work, that of the
construction of identity and its crises seems to me to have remained
constant, starting from his works on African shamanism up to his
reflections on old age and the future. For the French anthropologist,
symbolic systems work because they are relational and it is within the
relationship with the other that the subject "resolves itself in the
evidence of the other". Here is the paradox of being social: to find
oneself it is necessary to find others. And even more: to be oneself one
must be other, from which it follows that thinking the difference is
thinking oneself and therefore thinking the world. And if others
disappear from the subject's horizon, the indispensable anchoring for
thinking about oneself disappears. Hence the political value of Marc
Augé's thought, even if he was shy about defining himself ideologically
but quick in supporting causes linked to social rights.

Sitting on the balcony of a friend's apartment, with Caracas at dusk
below us, a little drunk, we talk and talk. Finally I ask him: "Where
are we going"? And he, with a barely visible ironic smile, replies:
"Nowhere, we're not going anywhere...". Escaping was denied to him, by
condition or choice, even if he had entertained the possibility, at
least in a literary way, in his novel Arthur's Mother (2005), where the
protagonist was precisely an anthropologist in search of a missing
friend. He wrote in Stranger to Myself (2011): "Do I escape time by
traveling through space? Rather, I believe that I have not yet lost all
hope of finding myself in front of landscapes and moments that I do not
want to forget and that I would spontaneously entrust to the game of
memory. Not to escape the passing time, but to let it pass, because it
is precisely when it stops and "does not pass" (as Pontalis says) that
sometimes it hurts. We must not stop wanting to write and travel.
Between memory and anticipation, the journey decides: and I set off
again in search of images." Now he's off again: have a good trip Marc...

Emanuele Amodio

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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