Non-Places
Introduction to an Anthropology
of Supermodernity•
MARC AUGE\\

Translated byJohn Howe

VERSO
London· New York

17ris tmrulation has bem publishtd with financial assistana from tire Frmdr

Ministere des Affairrs Etmngcres.
First published by Verso 1995
Reprinted 1997

This edition eVerso 1995
Translation 10 John Howe 1995
First published as NOli-Deux, Illtroduction d Ullt alllhropologie de la
sumrodemite

to Editions du Seuil 1992
All rights reserved
Verso

UK: 6 Mean! Street,London W1V 3HR
USA: 180Varick Street, New York, NY 10014
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN 1--85984-956-3
ISBN 1--85984--051-5 (Pbk)
British Library Cataloguing in PubIicatioD Data
A catalogue record for this book is available nom the
British Library
Library of CODgress CatalogiDg-in-PubIicatioD Data
Auge,Marc.
[Non-lieux, English)
Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodemity I

Mate Aug': ; translated by John Howe.
p.

em.

Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1--85984--956-3. - ISBN 1--85984--051-5 (pbk.)

1. Ethnology-Philosophy.
GN345.A92513

301 '.01-de20

2. Space perception.

I. Title.

1995
94-46299

CIP

Contents
Prologue

1

The Near and the Elsewhere

7

Anthropological Place

42

From Places to Non-Places

75

Epilogue

116

A Few References121

Prologue
On the way to his car Pierre Dupont stopped at the
cash dispenser to draw some money. The device
accepted his card and told him he could have 1800
francs. Pierre Dupont pressed the button beside thisfigure on the screen. The device asked him to wait amoment and then delivered the sum requested,reminding him as it did so to withdraw his card.
'Thank you for your custom,' it added as Pierre
Dupont arranged the banknotes in his wallet.

It was a trouble-free drive, the trip to Paris on the
All autoroute presenting no problems on a Sunday
morning. There was no tailback at the junction where
he joined it. He paid at the Dourdan tollbooth using1Non-Places

his blue card, skirted Paris on the pbipherique and took
the A 1 to Roissy.
He parked in row J of underground level 2, slid his
parking ticket into his wallet and hurried to the Air
France check-in desks. With some relief he deposited
his suitcase (exacdy 20 kilos) and handed his flightticket to the hostess, asking if it would be possible tohave a smoking seat next to the gangway. Silent andsmiling, she assented with an inclination of her head,after first consulting her computer, then gave him
back his ticket along with a boarding pass. 'Boardingfrom Satellite B at eighteen hundred,' she told him.
He went early through Passport Control to do· alittle duty -free shopping. He bought a bottle ofcognac (something French for his Asian clients) and abox of cigars (for himself). Meticulously, he put thereceipt away next to his blue card.
He strolled past the window-displays of luxur ygoods, glancing briefly at their jewellery, clothing andscent bottles, then called at the bookshop where heleafed through a couple of magazines before choosing
an undemanding book: travel, adventure, spy fiction.
Then he resumed his unhurried progress.
He was enjoying the feeling of freedom imparted
by having got r id of his luggage and at the same time,
more intimately, by the certainty that, now that he was'sorted out', his identity registered, his boarding passin his pocket, he had nothing to do but wait for the2

Prologue

sequence of events. 'Roissy, just the two of us!': thesedays, surely, it was in these crowded places where
thousands of individual itinerar ies converged for a
moment, unaware of one another, that there survived
something of the uncertain charm of the waste lands,
the yards and building sites, the station platforms andwaiting rooms where travellers break step, of all the
chance meeting places where fugitive feelings occur ofthe possibility of continuing adventure, the feelingthat ail there is to do is to 'see what happens'.
The passengers boarded without problems. Those
whose boarding passes bore the letter Z wererequested to board last, and he observed with a certain
amusement the muted, unnecessary jostling of the Xs
and Ys around the door to the boarding gangway.
Waiting for take-off, while newspapers were being
distributed, he glanced through the company's in-flightmagazine and ran his finger along the imagined routeof the journey: Heraklion, Larnaca, Beirut, Dhahran,Dubai, Bombay, Bangkok . . . more than nine thou­sand kilometres in the blink of an eye, and a few names
which had cropped up in the news over the years. He
cast his eye down the duty-free price list, noted thatcredit cards were accepted on intercontinental flights,
and read with a certain smugness the advantages con­ferred by the 'business class' in which he was travellingthanks to the intelligent generosity of his firm ('AtCharles de Gaulle 2 and New York, Club lounges are3

Non-Places

provided where you can rest, make telephone calls,
use a photocopier or Minitel . . . . Apart from a per­sonal welcome and constant attentive service, the new
Espace 2000 seat has been designed for extra width andhas separately adjustable backrest and headrest .

.

.' ).

He examined briefly the digitally labelled control panelof his Espace 2000 seat and then, drifting back into theadvertisements in the magazine, admired the aerody­
namic lines of a few late-model roadsters and gazed at
the pictures of some large hotels belonging to an inter­national chain, somewhat pompously described as 'thesurroundings of civilization' (the Mamrnounia in
Marrakesh, 'once a palace, now the quintessence of
five-star luxury ', the Brussels Metropole, 'where thesplendours of the nineteenth century remain verymuch alive'). Then he came across an advertisement
for a car with the same name as his seat, the Renault
Espace: 'One day, the need for space makes itself
felt .... It comes to us without warning.And nevergoes away.The irresistible wish for a space of our own.
A mobile space which can take us anywhere.A space
where everything is to hand and nothing is lack­ing ....' Just like the aircraft really.'Already, space isinside you . . . . You've never been so firmly on the
ground as you are in (the E)space,' the advertisement
ended pleasingly.

4Prologue*

They were taking off. He flicked rapidly through therest of the magazine, giving a few seconds to a piece on'the hippopotamus - lord of the river' which beganwith an evocation of Africa as 'cradle of legends' and'continent of magic and sorcery'; glancing at an article
about Bologna ('You can be in love anywhere, but in
Bologna you fall in love with the city'). A brightly
coloured advertisement in English for a Japanese'videomovie' held his attention for a moment ('Vivid
colors, vibrant sound and non-stop action. Make themyours forever'). A Trenet song, heard that afternoon
over the car radio on the autoroute, had been running
through his head, and he mused that its line abou t the'photo, the old photo of my youth' would soon
become meaningless to future generations. The coloursof the present preserved for ever: the camera as freezer.

An advertisement for the Visa card managed to reassure
him �'Accepted in Dubai and wherever you travel ....
Travel in full confidence with your Visa card').

He glanced distractedly through a few bookreviews, pausing for a moment on the review of awork called Euromarketing which aroused his profes­
sional interest:
The homogenization of needs and consumption pat­terns is one of the overall trends characterizing the new5Non-Placesinternational business environment . . .. Starting froman examination of the effects of the globalization phe­nomenon on Europ ean business, on the validity andcontent of Euromarketing and on predictable develop­
ments in the international marketing environment,
numerous issues are discussed.

The review ended with an evocation of 'the condi­
tions suitable for the development of a mix that would
be as standardized as possible' and 'the architecture ofa European communication'.
Somewhat dreamily, Pierre Dupont put down his
magazine. The 'Fasten seat belt' notice had gone out.
He adjusted his earphones, selected Channel 5 andallowed himself to be invaded by the adagio of Joseph
Haydn's Concerto No.1 in E major. For a few hours(the time it would take to fly over the Mediterranean,
the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal), he would bealone at last.

6

The Near andthe Elsewhere
More and more is being said about the anthropologyof the near. A seminar held in 1987 at the Musee desArts et Traditions populaires ('Social anthropology andethnology of France'), whose papers were published in

1989 under the title L'Autre et Ie semblable, noted aconvergence in the concerns of ethnologists working
elsewhere and· those working here. Both the seminarand the book are explicitly placed in the aftermath of
the reflections started at the Toulouse seminar of 1982('New paths in the ethnology of France') and devel­
oped in a few books and special issues of reviews.
That said, it is by no means certain that (as is so7

Non-Places

often the case) the recognition of new interests andfields for research, of hitherto unsuspected conver­gences, is not based at least par tly on misunder­
standings, or responsible for causing them. A few
preliminary remarks may help to clarify this reflection
on the anthropology of the near.
Anthropology has always dealt with the here andnow. The practising ethnologist is a person situatedsomewhere (his 'here' of the moment) who describes
what he is observing or what he is hearing at thisvery moment. It will always be possible afterwards towonder about the quality of his observation and about
the aims, prejudices or other factors that condition
the production of his text: but the fact remains that all
ethnology presupposes the existence of a direct wit­
ness to a present actuality. The theoretical anthro­pologist, who calls on observations and terrain otherthan his own, refers to observations that have been
made by ethnologists, not to indirect sources which
he would have to strive to interpret. Even the arm­
chair anthropologist we all become from time to time
is different from the historian who exploits a docu­
ment. The facts we seek in Murdock's filesl may have

1. This is a reference to George Peter Murdock's vast ethno­graphic survey, the 'Human Relations Area File', sometimes
known simply as 'Murdock's files', a summary ofwhicb can befound in his Outline cifWorld Cultures, New Haven, 1963. (Tr.]8The Near and the Elsewherebeen obser ved well or badly; but they have been
observed, and in relation to elements (rules of alliance,of lineage, of inheritance) which also belong to'second-degree' anthropology. Anything remote fromdirect obser vation of the ter rain is also remotefrom anthropology; historians who take an interest inanthropology are still not anthropologists. The term
'historical anthropology' is ambiguous to say the least.
'Anthropological history' seems more appropriate. A
symmetrical and inverse example might be found in
the way anthropologists - Africanists, for example are obliged to dip into history, notably in the for m it
has taken in the oral tradition. Ever yone knows
Hampate Ba's dictum that in Africa an old person
dying is 'a library on fire'; but the informant, whether
old or not, is somebody having a conversation, who
tells us less about the past than about what he knowsor thinks about the past. He is not contemporary withthe event he narrates, but the ethnologist is contem­
porary with both the narrative and the narrator. The
informant's account says as much about the present as
it d oes about the past. So the anthropologist, who
has and ought to have historical interests, is neverthe­less not stricto sensu a histor ian. These remarks areintended only to help define approaches and objects:
obviously the work of historians like Ginzburg, Le
Goff or Le Roy Ladurie is of the greatest interest toanthropologists. But it is still the work of historians,

9Non-Places

concerned with the past and derived from the studyof documents.
So much for the 'now'. Let us move on to the'here' . Certainly the European, Wester n 'here'
assumes its full meaning in relation to the distantelsewhere- for merly'colonial' ,now'under­developed' - favoured in the past by Br itish andFrench anthropology. But the opposition of here andelsewhere (a sort of gross division - Europe, rest of theworld - reminiscent of the football matches organized
by England in the days when it still had great football:England vs Rest of the World) can serve as a starting
point for the opposition of the two anthropologies
only by presupposing the very thing that is in ques­tion: that they are indeed two distinct anthropologies.
The assertion that ethnologists are tur ning toEurope as overseas fieldwork becomes more difficult
to arrange is an arguable one. In the first place, there
are still ample opportunities to work abroad, in Africa,
Asia and the Americas . . . . In the second place, thereasons for doing anthropological work in Europe arepositive ones. It is not a matter of second best, ananthropology by default. And it is precisely by exam­
ining these positive reasons that we may come toquestion the Europe/elsewhere opposition that lies
behind some of the more modernist definitions ofEuropeanist ethnology.
The whole idea of an ethnology of the near raises a

10

The Near and the Elsewhere

double question. In the first place, can an ethnology ofEurope lay claim to the same level of sophistication, ofconceptual complexity, as the ethnology of remotesocieties? The answer to this question is generally affir­
mative, at least on the part ofEuropeanist ethnologists
in a forward-looking context. Thus Martine Segalen,
in the collection mentioned above, is able to note withsatisfaction that two kinship ethnologists who haveworked on the same European region should hence­
forth be able to talk to one another 'like specialists inthe same African ethnic group'; while Anthony P.
Cohen points out that kinship studies carried out by
Robin Fox on Tory Island and Marilyn Strathern at
Elmdon show, on the one hand, the central role ofkinship and the strategies based on it in 'our' societies;
and, on the other, the plurality of cultures coexisting ina country like present-day Britain.
It must be admitted, though, that in this form thequestion is baffling. What, one wonders, is being sug­gested:a possible weakness in the capacity ofEuropean societies for symbolization, or the limited
ability ofEuropeanist ethnologists to analyse it?
The second question has an entirely different
significance: are the facts, institutions, modes ofassembly (work, leisure, residential), modes of circula­tion specific to the contemporary world, amenable toanthropological scrutiny? For a start, this question
does not arise solely - far from it - in relation to11

Non-Places

Europe. Anyone with experience of Africa (for exam­ple) is well aware that any attempt at an overall
anthropological approach must take account of a mul­titudeof interacting elementsthat arise

fromimmediate reality, but are not readily divisible into
'traditional' and 'modern' categories. It is well known
that all the institutional forms that have to be recog­
nized in order to grasp social life (salaried labour,business, spectator sports, the media . . . ) play a role,on all the continents , that grows more important by
the day. Secondly, it displaces the original question
completely: it is notEurope that is under scrutiny but
contemporaneity itself, in all the aggressive and dis­turbing aspects of reality at its most immediate.
It is therefore essential not to confuse the questionof method with that of object. It has often been said
(not least, on several occasions, by Levi-Strauss him­self) that the modern world lends itself to ethnologicalobservation, however bad we may be at defining areasof observation within reach of our investigative meth­ods. And we know what importance Gerard Althabe(who cannot have realized at the time that he was
supplying grist to the mills of our politicians) gave tostairwells, to staircase life, in his studies of big housing
estates in Saint-Denis and the Nantes periphery.
It is obvious to anyone who has done fieldworkthat ethnological inquiry has linlitations which arealso assets, and that the ethnologist needs to delineate

12The Near and the Elsewhere

the approximate limits of a group that he will study,
and that will acknowledge him. But there are various
aspects. The aspect of method, the need for effective
contact with interlocutors, is one thing. The repre­
sentativeness of the chosen group is another: in effect,
it is a matter of being able to assess what the people we
see and speak to tell us about the people we do not see
and speak to. The field ethnologist's activity through­out IS the activity of a social surveyor, a manipulator ofscales, a low-level comparative language expert: hecobbles together a significant universe by exploring
intermediate universes at need, in rapid surveys; or by
consulting relevant documents as a historian.He tries
to work out, for himself and others, whom he canclaim to be talking about when he talks about thepeople he has talked to. There is nothing to suggestthat the case of some great African kingdom is any
different from that of an industrial concern in the
Paris suburbs, where this problem of the empiricalreal object - of representativeness-is concerned.

Two things can be said here, one touching on his­
tory and the other on anthropology.Both concern thecare that the ethnologist takes to locate the empiricalobject of his research, to evaluate its qualitative repre­
sentativeness - for here, strictly speaking, the aim is not
to select statistically representative samples but to estab­lish whether what is valid for one lineage, or one
village, is valid for others ... : the difficulty of defining

13

Non-Placesnotions like 'tribe' or 'ethnic group' can be seen in thisperspective.This concern of ethnologists brings them
together with, and at the same time distances themfrom, historians of micro histor y; or - to put it theother way round (for it is ethnologists we are con­cerned with here) - microhistorians find themselves inthe ethnologist's shoes when they are themselves
obliged to question the representativeness of the cases
they analyse; for example, the life of a fifteenth-century
Frioul miller.But in support of this representativenessthey have to fall back on notions like 'traces' and 'indi­
cations' , or resort to exemplary exceptionality; while
the field ethnologist, if he is conscientious, can always
cast his net a little wider and make sure that what hethought he observed in the first place still holds good.
This is the advantage of working on the present, in
truth a modest compensation for the essential advan­
tage possessed by all histor ians: they know what
happens afterwards.
The second remark also touches on the object ofanthropology, but this time its intellectual object or, if
you prefer, the ethnologist's capacity for generaliza­
tion. It is quite obvious that there is a considerable step
between the minute observation of part of a village or
the collection of a range of myths from a given popu­
lation, and the elaboration of a theory on 'elementary
kinship structures' or 'mythologiques'. Structuralism is
not the only thing at issue here. All the main

14

The Near and the Elsewhereanthropological approaches have tended at the very
least to generate a range of general hypotheses which
may have been inspired initially by examination of aparticular case, but have a bearing on the elaborationof problematic configurations going well beyond thiscase alone:theories of witchcraft, matr imonial

alliance, power or relations of production.
WIthout saying anything here about the validity ofthese efforts at generalization, we can note their exis­
tence as a constituent par t of the ethnolog ical
literature to point out that the size argument, when it
is mentioned in connection with non-exotic societies,
concerns only a particular aspect of the research, thusof the method and not the object: neither the empiri­
cal object nor, a fortiori, the intellectual, theoreticalobject, which presupposes comparison as well as gen­eralization.
The question of method could not be confusedwith that of object, for the object of anthropology
has never been the exhaustive description of, say, a vil­lage or part of a village. When they are produced,
monographs of this type are always presented as con­tributions to a still-incomplete inventory, and usually
outline, at least on an empirical level, generalizations
more or less based on the research, but applicable to awhole ethnic group. The first question that arises inconnection

w ith

near-contemporaneity

is

not

whether, or how, it is possible to do fieldwork in a big

15

Non-Places

housing estate, a factory or a holiday camp: that will
be managed, either well or badly. The question iswhether there are any aspects of contemporary social
life that seem to be accessible to anthropological inves­tigation, in the same way that questions of kinship,
marriage, bequest, exchange. and so on, came to theattention of anthropologists of the elsewhere, initiallyas empir ical objects, then as objects of reflection(intellectual objects). In this connection, and in thecontext of the (perfectly legitimate) concerns about
method, it is appropriate to refer to what we will callthe premiss of the object.
This premiss of the object may raise doubts about thelegitimacy of an anthropology of near contemporaneity.
Louis Dumont, in his preface to the revised edition of

LA Tarasque. points out (in a passage quoted in Martine
Segalen's introduction to L'Autre et Ie semblable) that the'shifting of centres of interest' and the change of'prob­
lematics' (what we will call here the changes to
empirical and intellectual objects) prevent our disci­plines from being simply cumulative 'and may evenundermine their continuity'. As an example of the shift­
ing of centres of interest he cites in particular, in contrast
to the study of popular tradition, a 'way of looking at
French social life which is both broader and more finely
differentiated, which no longer makes an absolute dis­tinction between the non-modern and the modern, forexample between the artisanate and industry'.

16

The Near and the Elsewhere

I am not convinced that the continuity of a disci­pline is propor tional to that of its objects . The
proposition is certainly dubious when it is applied to
the life sciences, nor am I sure that these are cumula­
tive in the sense implied by Dumont's phrase: theoutcome of research, surely, is new objects of research.

It seems to me even more arguable in the case of thesocial sciences; for when there is change in the modesof grouping and hierarchy it is always social life that is
affected, offering the researcher new objects which like those discovered by the researcher in the life sci­
ences - do not supersede the ones he worked onearlier, but complicate them. That said, however,Louis Dumont's anxiety is not without echoes among
those committed to an anthropology of the here andnow. An example is the amusing comment in L'AutreetIesemblable

byGerardAlthabe,Jacques

Cheyronnaud and Beatrix Le Wita to the effect thatthe Bretons 'are a lot more worried about their loans
from the Credit Agricole than they are about their
genealogies .. .'. Behind this throwaway formulation,
the question of the object is outlined once again: whyshould anthropology attribute more importance tothe Bretons' genealogies than they do themselves(altho u gh it is hard to imagine Bretons being totallyindifferent to them)? If the anthropology of near con­temporaneity had to be based exclusively on the
catego r ies already registered, if it were no t allowed to17Non-Places

formulate new objects, then the act of moving into
new empir ical ter rain would not answer a need,merely the researcher's idle cur iosity.
*

These premisses call for a positive definition of anthro­pological research. We will try to formulate one here,
starting with two observations.
The

fir st oftheseconcer ns

anthropologicalresearch: anthropological research deals in the present
with the question of the other. The question of theother is not just a theme that anthropology encountersfrom time to time; it is its sole intellectual object, thebasis on which different fields of investigation may be
defined. It deals with the other in the present; that is
sufficient to distinguish it from history. And it deals
with it simultaneously in several senses, thus distin­
guishing itself from the other social sciences.
It deals with all forms of other: the exotic otherdefined in relation to a supposedly identical 'we' (weFrench, we Europeans, we Westerners); the other ofothers, the ethnic or cultural other, defined in relation
to a supposedly identical 'they' usually embodied in
the name of an ethnic group; the social other, theinternal other used as the reference for a system ofdifferences, starting with the division of the sexes
but also defining everyone's situation in political,

18

The Near and the Elsewhere

economic and family terms, so that it is not possible tomention a position in the system (elder, younger,
next-born, boss, client, captive . . . ) without referring
to one or more others; and finally the private other not to be confused with the last - which is present at
the heart of all systems of thought and whose (univer­sal) representation is a response to the fact that absoluteindividuality is unthinkable: heredity, heritage, lineage,
resemblance, influence, are all categories throughwhich we may discern an otherness that contributes
to, and complements, all individuality. All the literature
devoted to the notion of the self, inter pretation ofsickness and sorcery bears witness to the fact that oneof the major questions posed by ethnology is also
posed by those it studies: the question concerning
what one might call essential or private otherness.
Representations of private otherness, in the systems
studied by ethnology, place the need for it at the very
heart of individuality, at a stroke making it impossible
to dissociate the question of collective identity fromthat of individual identity. This is a remarkable exam­ple of what the very content of the beliefs studied by
the ethnologist can impose on the approach devised toregister it: representation of the individual interests
anthropology not just because it is a social construc­tion, but also because any representation of theindividual is also a representation of the social linkconsubstantial with him. By the same token, we are19Non-Places

indebted to the anthropology of remote societies and still more to the individuals it studies - for this
discovery: the social begins with the individual; andthe individual is the object of ethnological scrutiny.
The concrete in anthropology is the opposite of thedefinition of the concrete accepted by certain schoolsof sociological thought: something to be seen in termsof orders of magnitude from which all individual vari­ables are eliminated.
Marcel Mauss, discussing the relationship between
psychology and sociology, nevertheless makes a defin­
ition of individuality amenable to ethnologicalscrutiny which has serious limitations. In a curious
passage, he says in effect that the individual studied bysociologists is not the man typical of the modern elite,
divided, controlled and conditioned, but the ordinary
or obsolete man who can be defined as a totality:
The average man today - this is especially true of
women - along with almost all men in archaic or back­ward societies, is a whole; his entire being is affected by
the smallest of his perceptions or by the slightest mental
shock. The study of this 'totality' is therefore crucial indealing with all but the elite of our modern societies.
(Mauss, p. 306)

But the idea of totality - well known to be important
to Mauss, who sees the concrete as the complete -20

The Near and the Elsewhererestricts and, in a sense, mutilates the idea of individ­
uality. More precisely, the individuality he considers is
one that represents the culture, a typical individuality.
This is confirmed in his analysis of the total social
phenomenon, whose interpretation (Levi-Strauss
notes in his 'Introduction to' the Work of Marcel
Mauss') must include not only all the discontinuous
aspects, any one of which (family, technical, eco­nomic) could serve as an exclusive basis for the analy­
sis, but also the image that any of its indigenous
members has or may have of it. Experience of thetotal social fact is doubly concrete (and doubly com­plete): experience of a society precisely located intime and space, but also experience of some individ­
ual belonging to that society. But this individual is
not just anybody: he is identified with the society ofwhich he is an expression. It is significant that to givean idea of what he means by 'an' individual, Mauss
resorts to the definite article: 'the Melanesian from
Island X or Y'. The text quoted above further clarifies
this point. The Melanesian is not total only because
we perceive him in his different individual dimen­
sions, 'physical, physiological, psy chic and socio­
logical', but because his individuality is a synthesis,
the expression of a culture which itself is regarded as awhole.
Much could be said (indeed, a fair amount has been
said here and there) about this conception of culture21Non-Places

and individuality. The fact that in some ways and insome contexts culture and individuality might bedefined as reciprocal expressions of one another is atriviality, or anyway a commonplace, which we use
when we say, for example, that so-and-so is a 'real'
Breton, Briton, Auvergnat or German. The fact thatthe responses of supposedly free individuals can beassessed or even predicted from those of a statisticallysignificant sample does not surprise us either. It is justthat in the meantime we have lear ned to distrust
absolute, simple and substantive identities, on the col­lective as well as the individual level. Cultures 'work'

like green timber, and (for extrinsic and intrinsic rea� sons)never constitute finished totalities;

while

individuals, however simple we imagine them to be,
are never quite simple enough to become detachedfrom the order that assigns them a position: they
>express its totality only from a certain angle. Apartfrom this, the problematic character of all establishedorder would perhaps never manifest itself as such through wars, revolts, conflicts, tensions - without
the triggering flick ·of an individual initiative. Neither
the culture located in time and space, nor the individ­
uals in which it is embodied, defines a base level ofidentity above which any otherness would become
unthinkable. Of course, the culture's 'working' around
its fr inges, or individual strategies inside its institu­
tional systems, do not always have to be taken into

22

The Near and the Elsewhere

account in defining (intellectual) research objects.
Discussion and polemic on this point have sometimes
been affiicted by bad faith, or myopia: let us simply
note, for example, that whether or not a rule isobserved - the fact that it might possibly be evaded ortransgressed - has nothing whatever to do with theexamination of all its logical implications, which con­stitute a genuine research object. But there are other,different research objects, which do require attention
to be given to procedures of transformation or change,
to gaps, initiatives, transgressions, and so forth.
It is important at least to know what one is talking
about; and it is enough for us here to note that, what­ever the level at which anthropological research isapplied, its object is to interpret the interpretation
others make of the category of other on the different
levels that define its place and inlpose the need for it: <­ethnic group, tribe, village, lineage, right down to theelementary particle of kinship, which is known tosubject the identity of the bloodline to the need foralliance; and finally the individual, defined by all ritual
systems as a composite steeped in otherness, a figure
who is literally unthinkable (as, in different ways, arethose of the monarch and the sorcerer).
The second observation is not about anthropology
but about the world in which it finds its objects, andmore especially the contemporary world. It is not thatanthropology has become bored with foreign fields

23

Non-Places

and turned to more familiar terrain, thus risking (asLouis Dumont fears) loss of its continuity; it is that thecontemporary world itself, with its accelerated trans­
formations, is attracting anthropological scrutiny: inother words, a renewed methodical reflection on the
category of otherness. We will examine three of thesetransformations more closely.
T he first is concerned with time, our perception oftime but also the use we make of it, the way we dis­pose of it. For a number of intellectuals, time today is
no longer a principle of intelligibility. T he idea ofprogress, which implied an afterwards explainable interms of what had gone before, has run aground, so to
speak, on the shoals of the twentieth century, follow­
ing the departure of the hopes or illusions that had
accompanied the ocean crossing of the nineteenth.
To tell the truth, this reassessment refers to several
observations that are distinct from one another: theatrocities of the world wars, totalitarianisms and geno­
cidal policies, which (to say the very least) do notindicate much moral progress on the part of human­
ity; the end of the grand narratives, the great systems
of interpretation that aspired to map the evolution of
the whole of humanity, but did not succeed, alongwith the deviation or obliteration of the political sys­
tems officially based on some of them; in sum, a doubt
as to whether history carries any meaning. Perhaps weshould say a renewed doubt, strangely reminiscent of24

The Near and the Elsewhere

the one in which Paul Hazard thought he could dis­cern, at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, the root of the quarrel between theAncients and Moderns and the cr isis of European
consciousness. But Fontenelle's doubts about history
were focused essentially on its method (anecdotal andnot very reliable), its object (the past speaks to us onlyof human folly) and its usefulness (surely young people
really need to know about the period in which they
are going to have to live) . When today's historians especially in France - have doubts about history, it is
not for technical reasons or reasons concerned with!flethod (for history has made progress as a science)
but, more fi.mdamentally, because they find it very
difficult to make time into a principle of intelligibility,
let alon:;: a principle of identity .
Moreover, we now see them paying attention to anumber of major

themesnor mally

considered'anthropological' (the family, private life, 'places ofmemory' ) . These researches meet halfway the public's
interest in obsolete forms. which seem to tell our con­temporaries what they are by showing them what they
are no longer. Nobody expresses this point of view
better than Pierre Nora, in his preface to the first
volume of Lieux de memoire: what we are seeking, hesays in substance, through our religious accumulationof personal accounts, documents, images and all the'visible signs of what used to be'. is what is different

25Non-Places

about us now; and 'within the spectacle of this differ­ence the sudden flash of an unfindable identity. No
longer a genesis, but the deciphering of what we are) in the light of what we are no longer.'
This general finding also corresponds to the declineof the Sartrean and Marxist references of the early
postwar period, which held that in the final analysis
the universal was the truth of the specific; and to therise of what (along with many others) we might callthe postmodern sensibility, the belief that one mode isworth the same as another, the patchwork of modes
signifying the erasure of modernity as the end productof an evolution resembling progress.
This theme is inexhaustible, but the question oftime can be looked at from another point of view,
starting with something very commonplace withwhich we are confronted every day: the accelerationof history. We barely have time to reach maturity
before our past has become history, our individual
histories belong to history writ large. People of myage witnessed in their childhood and adolescence thetight-lipped nostalgia of men who had fought in the
1914-18 war: it seemed to be telling us that they had
lived through some history (and what history!) but
we would never really be able to understand what it
meant. Nowadays the recent past - 'the sixties', 'theseventies', now 'the eighties' - becomes history assoon as it has been lived. History is on our heels,

26

The Near and the Elsewhere

following us like our shadows, like death. History
meaning a series of events recognized as events bylarge numbers of people (the Beatles, '68, Algeria,
Vietnam, Mitterand's victory in '81, Berlin Wall,democratization of East Europe, Gulf War, disinte­
gration of USSR) - events we believe will count in
the eyes of future historians and to which each of us,
while fully aware that our part in them is as insignifi­
cant as Fabrice's at Waterloo, can attach some circum­
stance or image of a personal, particular nature; as if itwere becoming daily less true that men (who else?)
make history without knowing it. Surely this very
overabundance (in a planet growing smalle r by the
day - see below) is a problem to the historian of thecontemporary?
Let us define this point more precisely. The eventor occurrence has always been a problem to those his­
torians who wished to submerge it in the grand sweepof history, w �o saw it as a pure pleonasm between abefore and an after conceived as the development ofthat before. Behind the polemics, this is the meaningof the analysis of the Revolution (an event if everthere was one) suggested by Franc;:ois Furet. W hat
does he tell us in Penser la Revolution? That from the
day the Revolution breaks out, the revolutionary
event 'institutes a new modality of historic action,
one that is not inscribed in the inventory of the situ­
ation'. The revolutionary event (and in this sense the27Non-Places

Revolution is exemplary as an event) cannot be
reduced to the sum of the factors that make it possible
and, after the event, understandable. We would bequite wrong to limit this analysis to the case of the
Revolution alone.
The 'acceleration' of history corresponds, in fact, toa multiplication of events very few of which are
predicted by economists, historians or sociologists.
The problem is the overabundance of events, not thehorrors of the twentieth century (whose only new
feature - their unprecedented scale - is a by-productof technology), nor its political upheavals and intel­
lectual mutations, of which history offers many otherexamples. This overabundance, which can be properly
appreciated only by bearing in mind both ouroverabundant information and the growing tangle ofinterdependences in what some already call the 'world
system', causes undeniable difficulties to historians,
especially historians of the contemporary - a denom­
ination which the density of events over the last few
decades threatens to rob of all meaning. But thisproblem is precisely anthropological in nature.
Listen to Furet defining the dynamic of the
Revolution as an event. It is, he tells us, a dynamic'that might be called political, ideological or .cultural,
whose amplified power of mobilizing men and acting
on things arises from an overinvestment of meaning'(p. 39). This overinvestment of meaning, exemplarily

28

The Near and the Elsewhere

accessible to anthropological scrutiny, is also apparent
in a number of contemporary events (resulting in con­tradictions whose full scale has yet to be measured);

one of these, obviously, is the sudden dissolution ofregimes whose fall nobody had dared to predict; but abetter example perhaps, would be the latent crises,

affecting the political, social and economic life of lib­
eral countries, which we have fallen unconsciously
into the habit of discussing in term s of meaning. Whatis new is not that the world lacks meaning, or has
little meaning, or less than it used to have; it is that weseem to feel an explicit and intense daily need to giveit meaning: to give meaning to the world, not justsome village or lineage. This need to g ive a meani ng
to the present, if not the past, is the price we pay forthe overabundance of events cor responding to a
�ituation we could call 'supermodern' to express its
essential quality: �xces�For each of us has - or thinks he has - the use of it,of this time overloaded with events that encumber
the present along with the recent past. This can only please note - make us even more avid for meaning.

The extension of life expectancy, the passage from thenormal coexistence of three generations to four, arebringing about gradual, practical changes in the orderof social life. By the same token they are expanding
the collective, genealogical and historical memory,
multiplying the occasions on w hich an individual can

29

Non-Places

feel his own histor y intersecting with History, canimagine that the two are somehow connected. The
individual's demands and disappointments are linked
to the strengthening of this feeling.
So it is with an image of excess - excess of time that we can start defining the situation of super­
modernity, while suggesting that, by the very fact ofits contradictions, it offers a magnificent field forobservation and, in the full sense of the ter m, an
object of anthropological research. We could say ofsupermodernity that it is the face of a coin whose
obverse represents postmodernity: the positive of anegative. From the viewpoint of supermodernity, thedifficulty of thinking about time stems from the over­abundance of events in the contemporary world, notfrom the collapse of an idea of progress which - atleast in the caricatured forms that make its dismissal sovery easy - has been in a bad way for a long time; thetheme ofimrninent history, of history snapping at ourheels (almost immanent in each of our day-to-day
existences) seems like a premiss of the theme of themeaning or non-meaning of history. For it is our needto understand the whole of the present that makes it
difficult for us to give meaning to the recent past; theappearance, among individuals in contemporary soci­eties, of a positive demand for meaning (of which the
democratic ideal is doubtless an essential aspect) may
offer a paradoxical explanation of phenomena which

30

The Near and the Elsewhereare sometimes interpreted as the signs of a cnS1S
of meaning; for example, the disappointments ofall the world's disappointed: disappointment withsocialism, with liberalism, and (before long) with post­communism too.
The second accelerated transformation specific tothe contemporary world, and the second figure ofexcess characteristic of supermodernity, concer ns
space. We could start by saying - again somewhat
paradoxically - that the excess of space is correlativewith the shrinking of the planet: with the distancing
from ourselves embodied in the feats of our astronauts
and the endless circling of our satellites. In a sense, ourfirst steps in outer space reduce our own space to an
infinitesimal point, of which satellite photographs
appropriately give us the exact measure. But at thesame time the world is becoming open to us. We arein an era characterized by changes of scale - of coursein the context of space exploration, but also on earth:
rapid means of transport have brought any capital
within a few hours' travel of any other. And in theprivacy of our homes, finally, images of all sorts,
relayed by satellites and caught by the aerials that bris­
tle on the roofs of our remotest hamlets, can give us an
instant, sometimes simultaneous vision of an event
taking place on the other side of the planet. Of course
we anticipate perverse effects, or possible distortions,from information whose images are selected in this31Non-Places

way: not only can they be (as we say) manipulated, but
the broadcast image (which is only one among count­less possible others) exercises an influence, possesses a
power far in excess of any objective information it
carr ies. It should be noted, too, that the screens of theplanet daily carry a mixture of images (news, advertis­
ing and fiction) of which neither the presentation nor
the purpose is identical, at least in principle, but whichassemble before our eyes a universe that is relatively
homogeneous in its diversity. What could be more
realistic and, in a sense, more informative about life in
the United States than a good American TV series?
Nor should we forget the sort of false familiarity thesmall screen establishes between the viewers and theactors of big-scale history, whose profiles become aswell known to us as those of soap-opera heroes andinternational artistic or sporting stars. T hey are like thelandscapes in which we regularly watch them playingout their moves: Texas, Califor nia , Washington,
Moscow, the Elysee, Twickenham, the gruelling stagesof the Tour de France or the Arabian desert; we may
not know them personally, but we recognize them.
This spatial overabundance works like a decoy, but
a decoy whose manipulator would be very hard to
identify (there is nobody pulling the strings). In verylarge part, it serves as a substitute for the universes
which ethnology has traditionally made its own. We
can say of these universes, which are themselves

32

Non-Places

w ay : not o nly c an th ey b e (as w e s ay ) m anip ulat ed, b ut
th e b ro adc ast im ag e (which is on ly o ne amo ng co unt ­less poss ibl e o th ers ) ex erc ises an influenc e, poss ess es a
pow er far i n exc ess of any obj ectiv e info rmatio n it
c arri es. It shou ld b e not ed, too , th at th e sc reens of th epl an et d aily c arry a mixture of im ag es (n ews, adv ertis ­ing and fiction ) of whic h n eith er th e p res ent ation no r
th e pu rpos e is identic al, at least in p ri nc ip le, but which
ass embl e b efo re o ur ey es a un iv ers e th at is relativ ely
homog en eous in its div ersity . Wh at co uld b e mo rerealistic and , in a s ens e, mo re i nfo rmativ e abou t l ife inth e Un ited St at es th an a good Americ an TV s eries ?
No r sho uld w e fo rg et th e so rt of fal se familiarity th esmall sc reen es tab lish es b etween th e v iew ers an d theac to rs of big-sc al e h is to ry, whos e p ro files b ecom e as
w ell k now n to us as thos e of so ap -op era h ero es andin tern at io nal artistic o r spo rting s tars. Th ey are lik e th elan dsc apes in which w e reg ularly w atch th em pl aying
ou t th ei r mov es : Tex as, C alifo rn ia, Was hing to n,
Moscow, th e Elys ee, Twick enh am, th e g ru elling s tag esof th e Tour d e Franc e o r th e Arabi an d es ert; w e m ay
not kno w th em p ersonally, but w e recogn ize th em .
This s pati al o verabund anc e wo rks lik e a d ecoy, but
a d ecoy whos e manipulato r would b e v ery h ard to
id entify (th ere is nobo dy pu lli ng th e st rings ). In v eryl arg e p art, it s erves as a substi tu te fo r th e univ erses
which ethnolo gy h as t radi tion ally mad e its own . We
c an s ay of th es e univ ers es, wh ich are th ems elv es
32

The Near and the Elsewhere

broadly fictional, that they are essentially universes ofrecognition. The property of symbolic universes isthat they constitute a means of recognition, rather
than knowledge, for those who have inheri ted them:closed universes where everything is a sign; collectionsof codes to which only some hold the key but whose
existen c e everyo n e accepts; totalities which arepartially fictional but effec tive; cosmologies one might
think had been invented for the benefit of ethnolo­
gists. For this is the p oint where the ethnologist's
fantasies meet those of the indigenous people he stud­ies. One of the maj or concerns of ethnology has bee ;'to delineate signifying spaces in the world, societies
identified with cultures conceived as complete wholes:
universes of meaning, of which the individuals andgroups inside them are just an expression, defining
themselves in terms of the same criteria, the samevalues and the same interpretation procedures.

-\

We will not retur n to the concepts of culture andindividuali ty cr iticized above. Suffice it to say that
this ideological conception reflects the ethnologists'
ideology as much as that of the people they study, andthat exper ience of the supermodern world may help
ethnologists to r i d themselves of it - or, more
precisely, to measure its import. For it rests (among
other things) on an organization of space that the
space of moder nity overwhelms and relativizes. Heretoo we should make certain things clear: just as the

33

... .

The Near and the Elsewhere

broadly fictional, that they are essentially universes ofrecognition. The property of symbolic universes isthat they constitute a means of recognition, rather
than knowledge, for those who have inherited them:closed universes where everything is a sign; collectionsof codes to which only some hold the key but whose
existence eve ryo ne accepts; totali ties which arepartially fictional but effective; cosmologies one might
think had been invented for the benefit of ethnolo­
gists. For this is the point where the ethnologist's
fantasies meet those of the indigenous people he stud­ies. One of the major concerns of ethnology has bee;t
to delineate signifying spaces in the world, societies
identified with cultures conceived as complete wholes:
universes of meaning, of which the individuals andgroups inside them are just an expression, defining
themselves in terms of the same criteria, the samevalues and the same interpretation procedures.

--\

We will not return to the concepts of culture andindividuality criticized above. Suffice it to say that
this ideological conception reflects the ethnologists'
ideology as much as that of the people they study, andthat experience of the supermodern world may help
ethnologists to rid themselves of it - or, more
precisely, to measure its import. For it rests (among
other things) on an organization of space that the
space of modernity overwhelms and relativizes. Heretoo we should make certain things clear: j u st as the

33

\-.

Non-Places

intelligence of time, it s eems to us, is more complicatedby the overabundance of events in the present thanundermined by th e radical subv ersion of pr evailingmodes of historical int erpr etation, so the intellig enc eof space is less subverted by current upheavals (for soils
and territories still exist, not just in the reality of facts
on the ground, but even more in that of individual andcollectiv e awareness and imagination) than compli­
cated by the spatial overabundance of th e present. This,as we have seen, is expressed in changes of scale, in the
prolif eration of imaged and imaginary r efer enc es, andin the sp ectacular acceleration of means of transport. Its
concrete outcom e involv es consid erabl e physicalmodifications: urban conc entrations, movements of
population and the multiplication of what we call'non-places', in opposition to the sociological notionof place, associated by Mauss and a whole ethnologicaltradition with the id ea of a cultur e localized in tim eand space. The installations needed for the accelerated
circulation of passengers and goods (high-sp eed roads
and railways, interchanges, airports) are just as muchnon-places as the means of transport themselves, or
the great commercial centres, or the extended transit
camps where the planet'S refugees are parked. For thetime we live in is paradoxical in this aspect, too: at thevery same mom ent when it b ecomes possible to thinkin terms of the unity of terrestrial space, and th e big
multinational networks grow strong, th e clamour of34

The Near and the Elsewhereparticularisms rises; clamour from those who want tostay at home in peace, clamour from those who want':I to find a mother country. As if the conservatism of theformer and the messianism of the latter were con­demned to speak the same language: that of the land
and roots.
One might think that the shifting of spatial para­
meters (spatial overabundance) would confront theethnologist with difficulties of the same order as thoseencountered by historians faced with overabundanceof events. They may well be of the same order, butwhere anthropological research is concerned these dif­ficulties are particularly stimulating. Changes of scale,changes of parameter: as in the nineteenth century, weare poised to undertake the study of new civilizations
and new cultures.
It matters little that to some extent we may be
involved in these as interested parties, for as individu­
als we are far - very far indeed - from knowing �hemin all their aspects. Conversely, exotic cultures seemedso different to early Western observers only when theysuccumbed to the temptation to read them throughthe ethnocentric grille of their own customary behav­
iour. Experience of the remote has taught us to �
de-centre our way of looking, and we should makeuse of the lesson. The world of supermodernity does
not exactly match the one in which we believe welive, for we live in a world that we have not yet

35Non -Places

learned to look at. We have to relearn to think about
space.
The third figure of excess in relation to which thesituation of super modernity might be defined is wellknown to us. It is the figure of the �he individ­
ual, who is making a comeback (as they say ) inanthropological thought itself, as ethnologists, orsome of them, at a loss for new fields in a universe
without territories and theoretically breathless in aworld without grand narratives, having attempted to[deal with cultures (localized cultures, cultures a laj

Mauss) as if they were texts have reached the point of� .

being interested only in ethnographic description as
text; text expressive, naturally, of its author, so that (ifwe are to believe James Clifford) the Nuer, in theend, teach us more about Evans-Pritchard than heteaches us about them. Without questioning here thespirit of hermeneutic research, whose inter pretersconstruct themselves through the study they make ofochers, we will suggest that when it is applied to eth­nology and ethnological literature, a narrowly based
hermeneutics runs the risk of triviality. It is by nomeans certain that the application of deconstructivist
literary criticism to the ethnographic corpus can tell
us much that is not banal or obvious (for example,
that Evans-Pritchard lived during the colonial era).
On the other hand, it is quite possible that ethnology

will be straying from the true path if it replaces its
36

The Near and the Elsewhere

fields of s tudy with the study of those who have done
fieldwork.
But postmodern anthropology (to give the devil hisdue) does seem to depend on an analysis of super­
modernity, of which its reductivist method (field totext, text to author) is in fact j ust a partic ular
expressIon.
I n Western societies, at least, the individual wants tobe a world in himself; he i ntends to interpret the
information delivered to him by himself and for him­self. Sociologists of religion have revealed the singularcharacter even of Catholic practice: practising Catho­
lics intend to practise in their own fashion. Similarly,
the question of relations between the sexes can be
settled only in the name of the undiff erentiated valueof the individual. Note, though, that this individual­
ization of approaches seems less surprising when it isreferred to the analyses outlined above: never before��es been so exp1icjtly affected bycollective history, but never before, either, have the�reference points for collec ve identification been so.
_�ble. The individual JIDlduction of meaningis

���cessary than ever..Naturally, sociology isperfectly placed to expose the illusions on which thisindividualizati on of approaches is based, and theeffects of reproduction and stereotyping which whollyor par tly escape the notice of the players. But the

singular character of the production of meaning,37

Non-Places

backed by a whole advertising apparatus (which talksof the body, the senses, the freshness of living) and awhole political language (hinged on the theme ofindividual freedoms), is interesting in itself. It relates towhat ethnologists have studied among foreigners
under various headings: what might be called local
anthropologies (rather than cosmologies), the systemsof representation in which the categories of identityand otherness are given shape.
So anthropologists are today facing, in new terms, aproblem that raises the same difficulties that Mauss,
and after him the culturalist school, confronted intheir day: how to think about and situate the individ­
ual. Michel de Certeau, in L'Invention du quotidien,talks about ':"tricks. in the arts of doini.J:hat enable�y.�£'l!.�§�!>k£t�9..!2,_rhe..global.ronsR'aints-·of-m0d­

o
e
s eci
e
J ���=_� p al!L�rQ;!Q_:-:-_�Q�i w J.Q _qdJ��Lth�m, .t
make use of the_1!?:�J9_'£9_mrive through a sort of every-��'�'e_cpr'a�J"traCe·--day-tt���in _t� est<l���h_-t
..

i

_ _

h�

d:lei�_ .QW..P__PC:!"�<?!1_�t_!t���a.�ies. But, as Michel deCerteau was aware, these tricks and these arts of doingrefer sometimes to the multiplicity of average individ­
uals (the ultimate in concreteness), sometimes to theaverage of individuals (an abstraction). Similarly Freud,in his 'sociological' works Civilization and its
Discontents and The Future of an Illusion, uses theexpression 'ordinary man'der gemeine Manntocontrast, rather as Mauss does, the general run of indi-

38-

The Near and the Elsewhere
viduals with the enlightened elite: those human indi­viduals capable of making themselves the object of areflective approach.
Freud is perfectly well aware, however, that thealienated man of whom he writes - alienated fromvarious institutions: religion for example - is also all
mankind or Everyman, starting with Freud himself or
anyone else in a position to observe at first hand themechanisms and effects of alienation. This necessaryalienation is clearly the one Levi-Strauss means when

he writes in his 'Introduction to the Work of Marcel

Mauss' that, strictly speaking, it is the person we con­sider healthy in mind who is alienated, since he agrees
to exist in a world defined by relations with others.
Freud, as we know, practised self-analysis. The
question facing anthropologists today is how best to
integrate the subjectivity of those they observe into
their analysis: in other words, how to redefine theconditions of representativeness to take account of therenewed status of the individual in our societies. We
cannot rule out the possibility that the anthropologist,
following Freud's example, might care to consider

himself as indigenous to his own culture - a privileged
informant, so to speak - and risk a few attempts at
ethno-self-analysis.
Beyond the heavy emphasis placed today on theindividual reference (or, if you prefer, the individual­

ization of references), aEe��..2E�h�w...�.!�@.Y..!>�$�y�n39

Non-Places�2._f�£torLQ.f..si.Qg.\JhJ:Uy-: ��ngulari.!Y._�Ls>.Ei�£1�_9f
��5?�p�.Qr..E�.!E!?�r�!E.���.�,r�E���guc�Q[l_ ofp!�<;.e�
the singularities of all sorts that constitute a paradoxi.'.�� .�?�u�te!poi_it". �q �h.��.P;Q������� qf.j�i�!!�I��2g�
acceleration and de-localization sometimes carelesslyred��ed �n(rsumillarlzeo 'iIi"expresslorlS" lik�' 'homog-- .
eci�ati��· �i ���� ��� Qi; \v�rld cU1ture '-.
The question of the conditions for practising ananthropology of contemporaneity should be trans­ferred from the method to the object. This is not tosuggest that questions of method do not have decisive
importance, or that they can be entirely dissociatedfrom the question of object. But the question of
object comes first. It can even be said to constitute a
double premiss, because before taking an interest in
the new social forms, modes of sensibility or institu­
tions that may seem c haracteris t ic of present
contemporaneity we need to pay some attention to
..

....

. . --- ..

) the changes affecting the major categories people use\1when they think about their identity and their rec ip­
rocal relations. The three figures of excess which wehave employed to characterize the situation of supermodernity - overabundance of events, spatial
overabundance, the individualization of referenc es make it possible to grasp the idea of supermodernity
without ignoring its complexities and contradictions,but also without treating it as the uncrossable horizonof a lost modernity with which nothing remains to be
40

The Near and the Elsewhere

done except to map its traces, list its isolates and index
its files. The twenty-first century will be anthropo­
logical, not only because the three figures of excess are
just the current form of a perennial raw material
which is the very ore of anthropology, but also
because in situations of supermodernity (as in the sit­uations anthropology has analysed under the name of'acculturation') the components pile up without
destroying one another. So we can reassure in advance
those passionately devoted to the phenomena studied
by anthropology (from marr iage to religion, fromexchange to power, from possession to witchcraft):they are not about to disappear from Africa, or from
Europe either. But they will make sense again (theywill remake meaning), along with all the rest, in a dif­ferent world, w hose reasons and unreasons theanthropologists of tomorrow, just like those of today,

will have to try to understand.

41

Anthropological Place
The place held in common by the ethnologist andthose he talks about is simply a place: the one occu­
pied by the indigenous inhabitants who live in it,
cultivate it, defend it, mark its strong points and keep
its frontiers under surveillance, but who also detect init the traces of chthonian or celestial powers, ancestors
or spirits which populate and animate its private geog­
raphy; as if the small fragment of humanity making
them offerings and sacrifices in this place were also thequintessence of humanity, as if there were no human­
ity worthy of the name except in the very place of thecult devoted to them.
The ethnologist, on the contrary, sets out to deci­pher, from the way the place is organized (the frontier
always postulated and marked out between wild nature
42

Anthropological Placeand cultivated nature, the permanent or temporary
allonnent of cultivable land or fishing grounds, thelayout of villages, the arrangement of housing andrules of residence - in short, the group's economic,
social, political and religious geography), an order�which is all the more restrictive - in any case, themore obvious - because its transcription in space gives
it the appearance of a second nature. The ethnOlO

thus sees himself as the most subtle and knowledgeableof the inhabitants.

This place common to the ethnologist and its
indigenous inhabitants is in one sense (the sense of theLatin word invenire) an invention: it has been discov­ered by those who claim it as their own. Foundation
narratives are only rarely narratives about autoch­thony; more often they are narratives that bring thespirits of the place together with the first inhabitants inthe common adventure of the group in movement.
The social demarcation of the soil is the more neces­sary for not always being original. For his part, theethnologist examines this demarcation. It may evenhappen that his intervention and curiosity restore to
those among whom he is working an interest in
their own origins which may have been attenuated,even completely stifled, by phenomena connectedwith more recent actuality: urban migrations, thearrival of new populations, the spread of industrial
cultures.

43

Non-Places

A reali ty ce rt ainly lies at the o rig in of this do ub leinv ent ion , and p rov ides its r aw m at eri al and its object.
But it m ay also giv e ri se to fantas ies and i llus io n s: th e
in dig enous fantasy of a socie ty anchored since t im e
imm emo ri al in the p erm anenc e of an int act soil
outside wh ich nothing is really unde rst an dab le; theethnolog ist s' illusion of a soc iety so tr ansp arent to its elf
th at it is fully express ed in the most trivi al of i ts us ages ,i n any one of it s institutions, and in th e to tal pe rson ­ality of each of its memb ers . Kno wledge of thesyst ematic m app ing of n at ure c arried o ut by all
soc ie ties, even nom adic o nes, exten ds th e fant asy andfeeds th e illusion.
,--I
The indig enous fant asy is th at of a clos ed wo rldifo unded once and for all long ago; one w hich , str ic tly
sp eaking , does not h ave to b e und erstood . Eve ryt hingth ere is to know abo ut it is alr eady known : l and ,for est, sp rings, not able fe at ures , re lig ious p lac es , med­
icin al pl an ts , not fo rgett ing th e tempo ral dimensionso f an inven to ry of these plac es whos e l egi ti macy is
pos tu lated, and whose st abi lity is s uppos ed to b e
assu red , by n arr atives abou t o rig ins and by t he rit ual
c alen dar. All th e inh abit an ts have to do is recognize
the mselves i n it when the occ asion arises . Ev ery un ­ex pected event , ev en on e th at is who l y predic tabl e
and rec ur rent fro m the ri tual poi nt of vi ew (lik e birth,
illn ess o r d eath ), dem ands to be inte rp reted not , really,/ in orde r to b e kno wn , b ut in o rd er to b e reco gnized :44

A nthropological Place
to be made accessible to a discourse, a diagnosis, in -"'terms that are already established, whose announce­
ment will not be liable to shock the guardians ofcultural or thodoxy and social sy ntax. I t is. hardly�

surprising that the ��ms of thi..L is<::Q.Ws.e_sho.uld_ten�l__to be spatia . once it has become clear that it is thespatial arrangements that express the group's identityial origins are often diverse, but the group is(�established, assembled and united by the identity ofthe place), and that the group has to defend against
external and inter nal threats to ensure that thelanguage of identity retains a meaning.
One of my first ethnological exper iences, the inter­rog :t tion of a cadaver in Alladian country, wasexemplary from this point of view; all the more exem­

plary since, with variable details, the practice is very
widespread in West Africa, and equivalent techniques
are found in other parts of the world. Basically it
involved making the cadaver say whether the person
responsible for his death was to be found outside theAlladian vill a ges or in one of them; in the village
where the ceremony took place or outside it (and in
this case, whether to east or west); inside or outside his
own lineage, his own house, and so on. It mightsometimes happen that the cadaver would short­circuit the slow progress of the interrogation, pulling
his troop of bearers towards a compound and smash­
ing down the palisade or front door, thus indicating to45.

Non-Places
his questioners that they need look no further. We canhardly do better than to say that the identity of theethnic group (in this case the composite group the
Alladian happen to be) , which obviously presupposesa thorough mastery of its internal tensions, is main­tained through a constant re-examination of thecondition of its external and internal frontiers which,significantly, have (or had) to be restated, repeated,
reaffirmed on the occasion of almost every individual
death.
The fantasy of a founded, ceaselessly re-founding
place is only half fantasy. For a start, it works well - orrather, it has worked well: land has been cultivated,nature domesticated, reproduction of the generations
ensured; in this sense the gods of the soil have looked
after it well. The territory has been maintained against
external aggressions and internal splits, something weknow is not always the case: in this sense, too, theapparatuses for divination and prevention have beeneffective. This effectiveness can be measured on thescale of the family, the lineage, the village or thegroup. Those who take responsibility for coping withsudden vicissitudes, who uncover and resolve particu­
lar difficulties, are always more numerous than those
who fall victim to or are threatened by them: every­
one holds fast and everything stays together.
It is also a semi-fantasy because, although nobody
doubts the reality of the place held in common and4 fiAnthropological Placethe powers that threaten it or protect it, nobody is
unaware - nobody has ever been unaware - of thereality of other groups (in Africa, many foundation
narratives are basically narratives of war and flight) andthus also of other gods; or of the need to trade andmarr y outside. There is nothing to suggest that,
yesterday or today, the image of a closed and self­
sufficient world could ever - even to those who
diffuse it and therefore identify with it - be anythingother than a useful and necessary image: not a lie but'­a myth, roughly inscribed on the soil, fragile as theterritory whose singularity it founds, subject (as fron­tiers are) to possible readjustment, and for this ver yreason doomed always to regard the most recent
migration as the first foundation.

It is at this point that the indigenous population's

semi-fantasy converges with the ethnologist's illusion.

D

This, too, is only a semi-illusion. For although th

ethnologist can hardly help being tempted to identify

the people he studies with the landscape in which hefinds them, the space they have shaped, he is just asaware as they are of the vicissitudes of their history,

their mobility, the multiplicity of spaces to which theyrefe::, the fluctuation of their frontiers. Moreover, he
may be tempted, like them, to look back from theupheavals of the present towards an illusory past sta­bility. When bulldozers deface the landscape, theyoung people run off to the city or 'allochthones'47

Non-Places/

move in, it is in the most concrete, the most spatial
sense that the landmarks - not just of the territory, butof identity itself - are erased.
But this is not the crucial part of the ethnologist's
temptation, which is intellectual and has long been a
fea:ure of the ethnological tradition.
Calling on a notion that this tradition has itself used
and abused under various circumstances, we will namethis the totality temptation'. Let us return for a
moment to Mauss's use of the notion of total social
fact and Levi-Strauss's commentary on it. The totalityof the social fact, according to Mauss, refers back to
two other totalities: the sum of diff e rent institutions
that go into its make-up, but also the whole range ofdiff erent dimensions that serve to define the individu­
ality of all those who live in it and take part in it. As
we have seen, Levi-Strauss summa rizes this point ofview in remarkable fashion by suggesting that the totalsocial fact is primarily the social fact perceived totally :in other words, an interpretation of the social factwhich includes the picture any of its indigenous
members might have of it. But this ideal of exhaustive
interpretation, which a novelist would find discourag­ing owing to the comprehensive imaginative effort it
might seem to require of him, rests on a very particu­
lar conception of the ' average' man, in which he too
is defined as 'total' because, unlike the representativesof the modern elite, 'his entire being is affe cted by the[48

Anthropological Placesmallest of his perceptions or by the slightest mental
shock' (p.

306). For Mauss, the 'average' man inmodern society is anyone who does not belong to
the elite. But archaism knows nothing but the average.
The 'average' man resembles 'ahnost all men in archaic
or backward societies' in the sense that, like them, hedisplays a vulnerability and permeability to his imme­
diate surroundings that specifically enable him to be
defined as 'total'.
Nevertheless, it is not at all certain that Mauss
regards modern society as an amenable ethnologicalobject; because the ethnologist's object, to him, is asociety precisely located in space and time. In the eth­nologist's ideal territory (that of archaic or 'backward'
societies), all men are 'average' (we could say 'repre­
sentative'); location in time and space is therefore easy
to achieve there: it applies to everyone, and elements
like class divisions, migration. urbanization and in­
dustrialization do. not intrude to scale down its
dimensions and make it more difficult to read. Behind
the ideas of totality and localized society there clearlylies another: that of consistency or transparency
between culture. society and individual.
The idea of culture as text. which is one of the----.--.

more recent manifestations of American culturalism. isalready present in its entirety in the notion oflocalizedsociety. When Mauss illustrates the need to integrate
into the analysis of the total social fact the view of 'any49

Non-Placesindividual' belonging to the society by referr ing to'the Melanesian from Island X or Y ' , it is s ignificant,certainly, that he resorts to use of the definite article(this Melanesian is a prototype, like many another eth­
nic subject promoted to exemplarity at other times
and under other skies) , but also that an island - a small
island - should be offered as an example of the ideal
setting for a cultural to tali ty. The contours and fron­tiers of an island can be des ign ated or traced without
difficulty; and within an archipelago, from island toisland, circuits of navigation a nd exchange form fixed
and recognized i tineraries that draw a clear frontier
between the zone of rela ti v e ide nti ty (re co gn iz e didentity and established relations) and the external
world, a world of absolute foreignness. The ideal, foran ethnologist wishing to characterize singular p artic ­ularities, would be for each ethnic group to have its
own island, possibly linked to others but different fromany other; and for each islander to be an exact r ep licaof his neighbours.
In so far as th e culturalist view of societies tries tobe systematic, its limitations are obvious: to substantify
a singular culture is to ignore its intrinsically prob­
lematic character (sometimes brought to light, how­ever, by its reactions to other cultures or to the jolts ofhistory) ; to ignore, too, a complexity of social tissue
and a variety of individual positions which could
never be deduced from the cultural 'text' . But it
50Anthropological Place

would be wrong to overlook the element of realitythat underlies the indigenous fantasy and the ethno­
logical illusion: the organization of space and thefounding of places, inside a given social group,comprise one of the stakes and one of the modalities
of collective and individual practice. Collectivities (orthose who direct them), like their individual mem­bers, need to think simultaneously about identity andrelations; and to this end, they need to symbolize thecomponents of shared identity (shared by the whole ofa group), particular identity (of a given group or indi­vidual in relation to others) and singular identity (whatmakes the individual or group of individuals different
from any other). The handling of space is one of themeans to this end, and it is hardly astonishing that theethnologist should be tempted to follow in reverse
the route from space to the social, as if the latter had
produced the former once and for all. This .route is
essentially 'cultural' since, when it passes through themost visible, the most institutionalized signs, thosemost recognized by the social order, it simultaneously
designates the place of the social order, defined by thesame stroke as a conunon place.
-,:-.
"We will reserve the term nthropological place
for this concrete and symbolic construction of space,which could not of itself all ow for the vicissitudes andcontradictions of social life, but which serves as a ref­erence for all those it assigns to a position, however
___
____

E

51

]

Non-Places

humble and modest . Moreover, it is b ecause allanthropol ogy is anthro pology of other people's
anthropology that place - anthropological place

-

is a

principle of meaning for the people who live in it, andalso a principle of intelligibility for the person who
observes it. Anthropological place functions on a vari­able scale. The Kabyle house with its shade side and its
light side, its masculine part and feminine part; theMina or Ewe house with its internal legba to protect
the sleeper from his own drives and its threshold legba
to protect him from outside aggression; the dualistlayouts, often embodied on the ground in a highly
mater ial and visible frontier, which directly or indi­
rectly order alli ance, exchange, games and religion;
Eb rie or Atye villages , whose three-way divisionorders the life of the clans and age-classes: all are places
whose analysis has meaning because they have been

invested with meaning,

the need for which isendorsed and confirmed by every new circuit andevery ritual reiteration.
These places have at least three characteristics incommon. They want to be - people want them tobe - places of identity, of relations and of his toThelayout of the house, t e rules 0 residence, the zoningof the village, placement of altars, configuration of
public open spaces, land distribution, cor respond forevery individual to a system of possibilities, prescrip­
tions and interdicts whose content is both spatial and52Anthropological Placesocial. To be born is to be born in a place, to be'assigned to residence ' . 2 In this sense the actual placeof birth is a constituent of individual identity. It often'
ornb chance

nappenslnAfrlca that acl�iid-�h�is"b"youtside the village receives a particular name derived
from some feature of the landscape in which the birth
took place. The bir thplace obeys the law of the' proper' (and of the p ro p er name) mentioned byMichel de Certeau.
Lcuis Marin, for his part, borrows Furetiere's
Aristo telian definition of place (,Primary and im­
mobile surface of a body which surrounds anotherbody or, to speak more clearly, the space in which abody is placed 'J) and quotes his example : 'Everybody
occupies its place.' But this singular and exclusive
occupation is more that of a cadaver in its grave thanof the nascent or livingbody. In the order of birth andlife the p roper place, like absolute i ndividuality,
becomes more difficult to define and think about.
Michel de Certeau perceives the place, of whateversort, as containing the order 'in whose terms elements
are distributed in relations of coexistence' and,2. This expression is used i n French t o mean 'placed underhouse arrest'. [Tr.]3. Louis Marin, 'Le lieu du pouvoir a Versailles', in La
Production des lieux exemplaires, Les Dossiers des seminaires

ITS, 1991, p. 89.

53

Non-Places

although he rules out the possibility of two things
occupying the same 'spot', although he admits thatevery element of the place adjoins others, in a specific'location', he defines the 'place' as an 'instantaneousconfiguration of positions' (p. 173), which boils down
to saying that the elements coexisting in the sameplace may be distinct and singular, but that does notprevent us from thinking either about their interrela­tions, or about the shared identity conferred on themby their common occupancy of the place. Thus, therules of residence which assign the child to his posi­tion (usually with his mother, and therefore also withhis father, his maternal uncle or his maternal grand­

mother) situate him in an overall configuration whose
inscription on the soil he shares with others.
Finally, place becomes necessarily historical fromthe moment when - combining identity with rela­tions - it is defined by a �_��_.s�J:>ility_ . This is thecase even though those who live in it may recognize
landmarks there which do not have to be objects ofknowledge. Anthropological place is historical, forthem, to the precise extent that it escapes history as
science. This place which the ancestors have built(,More pleasing to me is the abode my forefathers
have built

.

.

.'

4 ) , which the recently dead populate

4. Joachim du Belby (1522-60). poet. friend and collaboratorof Ronsard. [Tr.]54A nthropological Placewith signs whose evocation and interpretation require
special knowledge, whose tutelary powers are awak­
ened and reactivated at regular intervals dictated by aprecise ritual timetable: this is the antithesis of thelaces of memory' of which Pierre Nora so aptly
writes that wha't we see in them is essentially how wehave changed, the image of what we are no longer.
The inhabitant of an anthropological place does notmake history; he lives in it. The difference between
these two relationships to history is still very clear to
my generation of Frenchmen and women, who lived
through the 1940s and were able in the village (per­haps only a place they visited for holidays) to attend
Corpus Christi, Rogation days or the annual feast-day
of some local patron saint ordinarily tucked away in an
isolated chapel: when these processions and obser­
vances disappear, their memory does not simply
remir.d us, like other childhood memories, of the pas­sage of time or the changing individual; they haveeffectively disappeared - or rather, they have beentransformed: the feast is still celebrated from time totime, to do things the old way, just as a little threshingis done in the old way every summer; the chapel has
been restored and a concert or show is sometimes puton there. These refurbishments cause a few perplexed
smiles and a certain amount of retrospective musing
among the older locals: for what they see projected at
a distance is the place where they used to believe they

c;

l

55

Non-Places

lived from day to day, but which they are now being
invited to see as a fragment of history. Spectators ofthemselves, tourists of the private, they can hardly be
expected to blame nostalgia or tricks of memory forobjectively evident changes to the space in which they
still live, which is no longer the place where they used(/!oto live.
--,

Of course, the intellectual status of anthropologicalplace is ambiguous. It is only the idea, partially materialized, that the inhabitants have of their relations
with the territory, with their families and with others.
This idea may be partial or my thologized. It varies
with the individual's point of view and position in\Isociety. Nevertheless, it offers and imposes a set of\\references which may not be quite those of natural
harmony or some 'paradise lost' , but whose absence,
when they disappear, is not easily filled. The ethnolo­
gist, for his part, is especially responsive to everything
written on the soil, in the life of those he observes,which signifies closure, careful control of relations
with the outside, the immanence of the divine in thehuman, or the close connection between the necessity
for a sign and its meaning. He is sensitive to thesethings because he carries their image, and the need forthem, within himself.
If we linger for a moment on the definition ofanthropological place we will see, first, that it is geo­
metric. It can be mapped in terms of three simple

56

Anth ropological Placespatial forms, which apply to different institutionalarrangements and in a sense are the elementary formsof social space. In geometric terms these are the line,
the intersection of lines, and the point of intersection.
Concretely, in the everyday geography more familiar
to us, they correspond to routes, axes or paths thatlead from one place to another and have been traced
by people; to crossroads and open spaces where peo­
ple pass, meet and gather, and which sometimes (inthe case of marketplaces, for example) are made verylarge to satisfy the needs of economic exchange; andlastly, to centres of more or less monumental type,religious or political, constructed by certain men andtherefore defining a space and frontiers beyond which
othe:- men are defined as others, in relation with othercentres and other spaces.
But routes, crossroads and centres are not absolutely
independent notions. There is a partial overlap. A
route may pass through diffe rent points of interest, allof which may be places of assembly; sometimes mar­kets define fixed points on a route; and although themarket itself may be the centre of attraction, the space
where it is held may also contain a monument (theshrine of a god, the palace of a sovereign) marking thecentre of a different social space. This combination of
spaces corresponds to a certain institutional complex­
ity. Big markets require specific forms of politicalcontrol; they exist only by virtue of a contract, respect57

Non-Places
for which is ensured by various religious or politicalprocedures: for example, they are places of sanctuary.
As for routes, they cross an assortment of frontiers andlimits which are obviously not intr insic or self­
evident, and are therefore known to need special
economic or ritual arrangements to make them work.
These simple forms are not characteristic only ofgreat political or economic spaces; they also define
village space or domestic space. In his book Mythe etpensee chez les Crees, Jean-Pierre Vernant shows how, inthe Hestia/Hermes couple, Hestia symbolizes the cir- L..
cular hearth placed in the centre of the house, theclosed space of the group withdrawn into itself (andthus in a sense of its relations with itself); while
Hermes, god of the threshold and the door, but also of/ crossroads and town gates, represents movement andrelations with others. Identity and relations lie at theheart of all the spatial arrangements classically studied
by anthropology.
So does history. For all relations that are inscribed inspace are also inscribed in time, and the simple spatial
forms we have mentioned are concretized only in andthrough time. First of all , their reality is historical: in
Africa (and elsewhere) the foundation narratives ofvilla ges or kingdoms often trace a whole journey,punctuated by various preliminary stops, before thefinal, definitive establishment. We know too that mar­kets (like political capitals) have histories; that some are58A nthropological Placecreated as others fade away. A date can be put on theacquisition or creation of a god, and the same applies
to cults and sanctuaries as to markets and political cap­
itals : whether they endure or not, whether they are
expanding or shrinking, the space in which they growo r regress is a historical space.
We ought to say a few words o n the materially
temporal dimension of these spaces. I tineraries aremeasured in hours or days of travel. The marketplace
merits its title only on certain days. In West Africa it iseasy to identify zones of exchange within which there
is a weekly ro tation of market days and marketplaces.
Places devoted to cults, to political or religious assem­
bly, fulfil this role only at certain moments, generally
on fixed dates . Initiation ceremonies and fertility rit­uals take place at regular intervals : the religious orsocial calendar is ordinarily modelled on the agricul­
tural calendar, and the sacral quality of the places inwhich ri tual activity is concentrated might bedescribed as an alternating sacrality. This, incidentally,is what c reates th e co nditions for the memory
attached to certain places, which helps to underline

their sacred character. According to Durkheim, in Les

Formes t!lementaires de la vie religieuse, the notion of thesacred is linked to the retrospective element stenuning
fro m the alternating character of the feast or cer­emony. When he sees the Jewish Passover and aveterans' reunion as equally 'religious' or 'sacred', it is59Non-Places

because they give the participants the opportunity not
only to remind themselves of the group to which they
belong , but also to remember earlier celebrations.
>
The monument, as the Latin etymology of theword indicates , is an attempt at the tangible expressionof permanence or, at the very least. duration. Gods
need s hrines. as sovereigns need thrones and palaces.
to place them above temporal contingencies. They
thus enable people to think in terms of continuity
through the generations. This is well expressed, in away, by one of the interpretations of traditional
African nosology: that an illness can be imputed to theaction of a god angered by the way his shrine isneglected by its builder's successor. Without the mon­umental illusion before the eyes of the living. history
would be a mere abstraction. The social space bristles
with monuments - imposing stone buildings, discreet
mud shrines - which may not be directly functional
but give every individual the justified feeling that , forthe most part , they pre-existed him and will survive
Strangely, it is a set of breaks and discontinuities.
space that expresses continuity in time.
This rna ical effect of spatial construction can beattn uted without hesitation to the fact that thehuman body itself is perceived as a portion of spacewith frontiers and vital centres , defences and weak­nesses, armour and defects. At least on the level of theimagination (entangled in many cultures with that of

him.
L

60

Anthropological Placesocial sy mbolism) , the body is a composite and hier­archized space which can be invaded from the outside.
Examples do exist of ter ritories conceived in theimage of the h uman body, but the inverse - the <­human body conceived as a ter ritory - is very wide­
spread. In West Africa, for example, the componentsof the personality are conceived in terms of a topog­
raphy recalling the Freudian topography, but applied
to realities conceived as being substantially material.
Thus in the Akan civilizations (of present-day Ghana
and the Ivory Coast) the psy che of each individual isdefined by two ' entities' ; the material character ofthei:- existence is indicated directly by the fact that
one of them is assimilated to the shadow cast by thebody, and indirectly by the fact that weakness of the
body is attributed to the weakness or departure of one <of them . Health is defined by their perfect coinci­
dence. On the other hand, a person may be killed if
awakened suddenly, as one of these 'entities' , the dou­
ble that wanders by night, may not have time toreoccupy the body at the moment of waking.
The internal organs themselves or certain parts ofthe body (kidneys, head, big toe) are often conceived
as autonomous, sometimes the abode of an ancestralpresence and for this reason the object of specificcults. In this way the body becomes a collection of <religious places; zon es are

set aside as objects

for anointment or purification. Here the effects

61Non-Places

mentioned above in connection with the constructionof space are seen in play on the human body itself.
Dream journeys become dangerous when they ven­ture too far from the body conceived as a centre. This
centred body is also the site of the convergence or
meeting of ancestral elements, a meeting possessing
monumental value because it involves elements thatexisted before the ephemeral carnal envelope, and willsurvive it. Sometimes the mununification of a body or
the erection of a tomb complete-tthe transformationof the body into a monument after death.
Thus, starting from simple spatial forms, we see
how the individual thematic and the collective the­matic intersect and combine. Political symbolism playson these possibilities to express the power of an
authority, employing the unity of a sovereign figure tounify and symbolize the internal diversities of a social
collectivity. Sometimes this is done by distinguishing
the king's body from other bodies as a multiple body.
The theme of the king's double body is wholly perti­
nent in Mrica. Thus the Agni king of the Sanwi, inthe present-day Ivory Coast, had a double, a slave byorigin, who was called Ekala (after one of the twocomponents or entities mentioned above): withtwo bodies and two ekala his own and that of his
slave double - the Agni sovereign was thought to haveparticularly effective protection, the body of the slave
double obstructing any aggression aimed at the king's-

62

A nthropological Place

person . If he failed in this role and the king died, theekala would naturally follow him into the grave. Moreremarkable, however, and more widely attested thanmultiplication of the king's body, are the concentra­tion and condensation of the space in which sovereignauthority is localized. The sovereign is very frequently
under a sort of ho use arrest, condemned to semi­
inunobility, to hours of exposure on the royal throne,
presented as an obj ec t to his subj ec ts . Frazer - and,through hinl, Durkheim - was struck by this passivity/

massivity of the sovereign body, and noticed that it
was a feature conunon to monarchies very remotefrom one another in time and space - for example,
ancient Mexico, Africa around the Bight of Benin,
and Japan. Especially remarkable in all these examples
is the possibility that an object (throne, crown) , oranother human body, might sometimes be consideredan acceptable substitute for the sovereign's body infulfilli n g the function of fixed centre of the kingdom,which involves spending long hours in a state of min­eral immobility.
Thi5 inlmobility, and the narrowness of the confines
containing the sovereign figure, quite literally form acentre that underlines the permanence of the dynasty,

and o:ders and unifies the internal diversity of thesocial body. Note that the identification of power withthe place where it is exercised, or the monument thathouses its representatives, has become a constant of63

Non- Places

political discourse in modern states. Anyone nanling
the White House or the Kremlin is referring simulta­
neously to a monumental place, a human individual,
and a power structure. Successive metonynlies havegiven us the habit of designating a country by its
capital and a capital by the name of the building occu­
pied by its rulers. Political language is naturally spati aJ <­(if only in its use of the concepts left and right) ,doubdess because of its need to think simultaneously
about unity and diversity; and centrality is themost approximate, the most imaged and the mostmaterial expression of tllis double and contradictory
intellectual constraint.
The notions of itinerary, intersection, centre andmonument are useful not only for the description of
traditional anthropological places. They can also be
applied to contemporary French space, urban space inparticular. Paradoxically, they even enable us to char­acterize it as a specific space although, by definition,
they are criteria of comparison.
It is usual to describe France as a centralized coun­try. It certainly is one on the political level, at least
since the seventeenth century ; and despite recent
efforts at regionalization, it is still a centralized country
on the adnlinistrative level (the initial ideal of theFrench Revolution had even been to divide up theadministrative constituencies along rigidly geometriclines) . It remains one in the minds of the French, as a64Anthropolog ical Place
result notably of the layout of its road and rail net­
works , both conceived, at least initially, as spiders'
webs with Par is at the centre.
To be more precise, not only is Par is laid out more
like a capital than any other in the world, but there is
not a town in France that does not aspire to be thecentre of a region of variable size, or has not managed
over the years and centuries to build itself a monu­
mental centre (what we call the ' town c entre ') tosymbolize and materialize this aspiration. The small est
French towns, even villages, always boast a 'town cen­tre' containing monuments that symbolize religious
author ity (church or cathedral) and civil author ity(town hall, sous-prifecture or, in big towns, the prifec­ture) . The church (Catholic in most parts of France)
overlooks a square or open space through which manyor most cross-town routes pass. The town hall isnearby; even where this defines a space of its own , theplace de la Millie is seld om more than a stone's throwfrom the place de l'Eglise. Also in the town centre,
and always close to the town hall and the church, amonument to the dead has been erected. Lay in con­cept, this is not really a religious place but amonument whose value is histor ical (a memorial tothe d ead of two world wars whose names are gravenin the stone) : on certain annual feast-days, notably the

1 1 th of November, the civil and sometimes military
author ities commemorate there the sacrifice of those65

NOll-Places

who have fallen for their country. These so-calle d' commemoration services ' correspond fairly closely
to the enlarged - in other words, social - definition
Durkheim suggests for th e religious p henomenon.

/ Doubtless they derive a particular efficacy from'hap­pening in a place where the intimacy between theliving and the dead was once expressed in more every­
day fashion: in many villages we still find the trace ofa layo ut going back to medieval times , when the
church, surrounded by the cemetery, lay at the very
centre of active social life.
The town centre is an active place. Under the tra­ditional conception of provincial towns and villages(brought to literary life during the first half of thiscentury by authors like Giraudoux and Jules Romain) ,in towns and villages as they appeared under the Third
Republic and to a large extent still appear today, theleading cales, hotels and businesses are concentrated in
the town centre, not far from the square where themarke t is held (when, that is, market square andchurch square are not one and the same) . At regular
weekly intervals, on Sunday or Market Day, the cen­tre ' c omes to life ' . The new towns produ c e d bytechnicist and voluntarist urbanization proj ects haveoften been criticized for failing to offer 'places for liv­
ing' , equivalent to those produced by an older, slower
history: where individual itineraries can intersect andmingle, where a few words are exchanged and soli-

66

A nthropological Placetudes momentarily forgotten, on the church steps, infront of the town hall, at the cafe counter or in the
baker's doorway: the rather lazy rhythm and talkative
mood that still characterize Sunday mornings in con­tempcrary provincial France.
This France could be defined as a whole, a clusterof centres of greater or lesser importance that polarize
the administrative, festive and trading activities of aregion of variable size. The organization of routes the road system linking these centres to each otherthrough a network, actually very close-grained, oftrunk roads (between centres of national importance)and departmental roads (between centres of depart­
mental importance) - is wholly in keeping with thispolycentred and hierarchized layout: on the kilometrestones which punctuate roads at regular intervals, thedistance to the nearest settlement used to be inscribedalong with the distance to the nearest large town.
Today this information tends to appear more legibly
on big signs appropriate to the intensified and accel­
erated traffic.
Every settlement in France aspires to be the centre
of a significant space and of at least one specific activ­
ity. Thus Lyon, a large metropolis, claims among other
titles that of ' capital of gastronomy'; the small town ofThiers can call itself the ' cutlery capital'; Digouin, a
big market town, is the 'pottery capital'; and Janze,really no more than a large vill age, boasts that it is the67Non-Places'birthplace of the free-range chicken ' . These claims tovarious forms of glory appear today at the settlements 'boundaries , along with signs mentioning their twin­ning with towns or vill ages elsewhere in Europe. In away, these signs give proof of modernity and integra­
tio n in the new European economic space. They
coexist with other signs (and information boards) giv­
ing a detailed account of the historic curiosities of theplace : fourteenth- or fifteenth-century chapels, castles
and palaces, megaliths , museums of crafts, lace or pot­tery. Historical depth is vaunted in the same breath as

openness to the outside world, as if the one wereequivalent to the o ther. Every town or village not ofrecent origin lays public claim to its history, displaying
it to the passing motorist on a series of signboards
which add up to a sort of 'business card' . Making thehistorical context explicit in this way, which in fact isquite a recent practice, coincides with a reorganizationof space (the creation of bypasses and main motorway
routes avoiding towns) that tends, inversely, to short­circ u i t

thehistoricalcontextbyavoidingthemonuments that embody it. It may be interpreted
quite legitimately as an attempt to attract and hold theattention of the passer-by, the tourist; but it can havesome measure of effectiveness only in combination
with the taste for history, for identities rooted in thesoil, which has become an undeniable feature ofFrench sensibility over the past twenty years . The

68Anthrop ological Place

dated monument is cited as a proof of authenticity
which ought in itself to arouse interest: a gap is
opened up between the landscape's present and thepast to which it alludes. The allu sion to the past com­plicates the present.
We might add that a minimal historical dimension
has always been imparted to French urban and village
space by the choice of street names. Streets and squares
have always been used for conunemoration. Of course
it is traditional for certain monuments with an effectof redundancy which, incidentally, is not without
charm - to lend their names to the streets leading up
to them, or the squares on which they are built. Thus
we long ago lost count of rues de la Gare, rues duTheatre and places de la Mairie. But the main streets
in towns and villages are more usually named after
notables of local or national life, or great events ofnational history; so that to write an exegesis of all thestreet names in a metropolis like Paris one would haveto review the entire history of France, from
Vercingetorix to de Gaulle . Anyone who regularly
takes the Metro, who learns the Paris Undergroundand its station names echoing the streets or monu­
ments on the surface, experiences a sort ofmechanized daily imm ersion in history that condi­
tions Parisians to think of Ah�sia, Bastille and Solfhino ("as spatial landmarks rather than historical references.
Roads and crossroads in France thus tend to-69Not/- Places.,

become 'monuments' (in the sense of testimonies andreminders) when the names they have been given
immerse them in history. These incessant references tohistory cause frequent cross-connections between thenotions of itineraries, crossroads and monuments. The
connections are particularly clear in towns (especially
Paris), where historical references are always more
densely encrusted. Paris does not have one centre; on
motorway signs, central Paris is indicated sometimes
by the image of the Eiffel Tower, sometimes by theformula 'Paris-Notre-Dame ' , which refers to theoriginal historic heart of the capital, the lle de la Cite,
encirled by the river Seine a few kilometres from theEiffel Tower. So there are several centres in Paris. On
the administrative level, we should note an ambiguity
which has always caused problems in our political life
(showing clearly how centralized this is): Paris is botha town, divided into twenty arrondissements, and thecapital of France. On a number of occasions theParisians have believed themselves to be making thehistory of France, a conviction (rooted in memories of
1 7 89) which has been known to cause tension
between the national government and the municipal
government. Until very recently, apart from a shortperiod during the revolution of 1 848, Paris has done
without a mayor since 1 795; the capital's twen ty
arrondissements have been run by their twenty town
halls under the joint supervision of the prefect of the70Anthropological Place

department of la Seine and the prefect of police. The
municipal council dates only from 1 834. When thestatutes of the capital were reformed a few years ago
and Jacques Chirac became mayor of Paris, part ofthe political debate was about whether or not thispost would help him b e come President of the
Republic. Nobody really thought he would want to
run a town - even one containing a sixth of theFrench population - as an end in itself. The existenceof three Parisian palaces (the Elysee, Matignon and theHotel de Vill e) , whose vocations are distinct (albeit
with a very problematic distinctness) , plus at least twoother monuments of equivalent importance, the Palais
du Luxembourg (seat of the Senate) and the National
Assembly (where the deputies sit) , shows pretty clearly
that the geographical metaphor suits our political life
because it attempts to be centralized and continuously
aspires, despite the existence of distinct authorities
and functions , to define or identify a centre of thecentre, from which everything would start and where
everything would finish. Obviously it is not simply aquestion of metaphor when people wonder, as theysometimes do, whether the centre of power is shiftingfrom the Elysee to Matignon or even from Matignon

to the Palais-Royal (where the Constitutional Councilsits) : and we may j ustly ask ourselves whether theconsisten tly tense and turbul ent nature of French
democratic life does not result pardy from the tension

71Non-Places

between a political ideal of plurality, democracy andbalance (on which everyone is in theoretical agree­ment) and an intellectual, geographico-political modelof government inherited from history (which is notvery compatible with this ideal, and which perpetually
incites the French to rethink its basic principles andredefine its centre) .
On the geographical level, then, those Parisians not the most numerous group - who still have time tostroll about could experience the centre of Paris as anitinerary following the course of the Seine, plied byriver steamers from which most of the capital's histor­
ical and political monuments can be seen. But there
are other centres identified with squares, with cross­roads in which monuments are placed (Etoile,
Concorde) , with monuments themselves (the Opera,
the Madeleine) or with the roads leading to them(avenue de l'Opera, rue de la Paix, Champs-Elysees) ,as if everything in the capital of France had to becomea centre and a monument. Indeed, this process is stillgoing on, even though the specific characters of thedifferent arrondissements are fading away at the sametime. We know that each of these used to have its
own character, that the cliches in songs about Paris are
not without foundation; and it would certainly still bepossible in our time to make a detailed description of
the arrondissements, their activities, their 'personalities'
in the sense in which American anthropologists have72

A nthrop ological Placeused the term, but also of their transformations andthe movements of population which are altering theirethnic or social make-up. Leo Malet 's detec tive
thrill ers , many of which are set in the fourteenth andfifteenth arrondissements, hark back nostalgically to the

1 950s, but are still not wholly out of date.
All th e same, p eople live less and less in Paris(although they still work there a lot) , and this change
appears to be the sign of a more general mutation in
our country. Perhaps the relationship with history thathaunts our landscapes is being aestheticized, and at
the same time desocialized and artificialized. Certainly,
we all commemorate Hugues Capet and the Revol­ution of 1 789 in th e same spirit; we are still capable ofconfronting each other fiercely over differences in our

relations with our common past and the contradictoryinterpretations of events which have marked it. But,
sinc e Malraux, our towns have been turning into
museums (restored, exposed and floodlit monuments,
listed areas, pedestrian precincts) while at the sametime bypasses, motorways, high-speed trains and one­way systems have made it unnecessary for us to linger
in them.

But this turning away, this bypassing. is not withoutsome fe eling of remorse, as we can see from thenumerous signboards inviting us not to ignore thes p l e n do u rs of thearea a n d its traces of history.

Paradoxically, it is at the city limits, in the cold,73Non-Places
gloomy space of big housing schemes, industrial zones
and supermarkets, that the signs are placed inviting us
to visit the ancient monuments ; and alongside themotorways that we see more and more references tothe local curiosities we ought to stop and examine,instead of j ust rushing past; as if alluding to former
times and places were today just a manner of talking
about present space.

74

From Places to
Non-Places
The presence of the past in a present that supersedes it
but still lays claim to it: it is in this reconciliation that
Jean Starobinski sees the essence of modernity. In a
recent article he points out in this connection thatcertain authors, indubitably representative of moder­nity in art, outlined

the possibility of a polyphony in which the virtually in­finite interlacing of destinies, actions, thoughts and rem­iniscences would rest on a bass line that chimed the hoursof the terrestrial day, and marked the position that used tobe (and could still be) occupied there by ancient ritual.

He quotes the first pages ofJoyce's Ulysses, containing
the words of the liturgy: ' Introibo ad altare Dei' ; the75Non- Places

beginning of Remembrance of Things Past, where thecycle of the hours around the Combray bell tower
punctuates the rhythm 'of a vast and solitary bourgeois
day'; and Claude Simon's Histoire, in whichmemories of religious school, the Latin prayer in themorning, grace at midday, the evening Angelus, provide
landmarks amid the views, the disassembled schemes,

the quotations of all sorts that stem from every period of

existence, from the imagination and the historical past,
proliferating in apparent disorder around a cen tralsecret . . . .

These 'premodern figures of continuous temporality,
which the modern writer tries to show he has not for­gotten even as he is becoming free of them' are also
specific spatial figures from a world which since theMiddle Ages, as Jacques Le Goff has shown, had built
itself around its church and bell tower by reconcilinga recentred space with a reordered time. Starobinski's
article begins significantly with a quotation from thefirst poem in Baudelaire's Tableaux parisiens, where thespectacle of modernity brings together in a single
poetic flight:. . . the workshop with its song and chatter;
Chim neys and spires, those masts if the city,
And the great skies making us dream if eternity.

76

From Places to Non-Places'Bass line' : the expression Starobinski employs to
evoke ancient places and rhy thms is signifi cant :moder nity does not obliterate them but pushes theminto the background. They are like gauges indicating
the passage and continuation of time. They survive
like the words that express them and will express themin future. Moder nity in art preserves all the temporal­

ities of place, the ones that are located in space and inwords.
Behind the cy cle of the hours and the outstanding
features of the landscape, what we find are words andlanguages : the specialized words of the liturgy, of'ancient ritual ' , in contrast to the 'song and chatter' of
the workshop; and the words , too, of all who speak
the same language, and thus recognize that they
belong to the same world. Place is completed throughthe word, through the allusive exchange of a few
passwords between speakers who are conniving in
pr ivate complicity. Vincent Descombes wr ites ofProust 's Franrroise that she defines a 'rhetorical ' terri­
tory shared with everyone

who is capable offollowing her reasoning, those whose aphor isms ,vocabulary and modes of thought for m a 'cosmol­
ogy ' : what the nar rator ofThings Past calls the'Combray philosophy ' .
If a place can be defined as relational, histor ical
and concerned with identity, then a space which can­notbe defined as relational,

77

or histor ical,

orNon-Places

concerned with identity will be a non-place. The
hypo thesis advanced here is that supermodernity
produces non-places. meaning spaces which are not
1t"themselves anthropological places and which. unlike
Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier
places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted
to the status of 'places of memory', and assigned to acircumscribed and specific position. A world where
people are born in the clinic and die in hospital,
where transit points and temporary abodes are prolif­
erating under luxurious or inhuman conditions (hotel
chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps,
shantytowns threatened with demolition or doomed
to festering longevity) ; where a dense network ofmeans of transport which are also inhabited spaces isdeveloping; where the habitue of supermarkets, slot
machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly,
through gestures, with an abstract, unmediatedcommerce; a world thus surrendered to solitary in­dividuality, to the fleeting, the temporary andephemeral, offers the anthropologist (and others) a
new obj ect, whose unprecedented dimensions might
usefully be measured before we start wondering towhat sort of gaze it may be amenable. We should addthat the same things apply to the non-place as to theplace. It never exists in pure form; places reconstitutethemselves in it; relations are restored and resumed init; the ' millennial ruses' of 'the invention of the78

From Places to Non-Places

everyday' and ' the arts of doing' , so subtly analysedby Michel de C erteau , can clear a path there anddeploy their strategies. Place and non-place are rather
like opposed polarities : the first is never completely
erased, the second never totally completed; they arelike palimpsests on which the scrambled game ofidentity and relations is c easelessly rewr i tten . B u t
non-places are the real measure of our time ; o n e that
could be quantified - with the aid of a few con­ve rsions b e tween area, volume and distance - bytotalli n g all the air, rail and motorway routes , themobile cabins called 'means of transport' (aircraft,trains and road vehicles) , the airports and railway sta­tions , ho tel chains , leisure parks , large retail outlets,and finally the complex skein of cable and wirelessnetworks that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the
purposes of a communication so peculiar that it often
p u ts the i ndivi dual in contact o nly with anotherimage of himself.

71
derives from the opposition between place and space. I
The distinction betwe en places a nd non-place

An essenti al p reliminary here is the analysis of thenotions of place and space suggested by Michel deC erteau . He himself does not oppose 'place' and'space' in the way that ' place' is opposed to ' non­place ' . Space, for him , is a ' frequented plac e ' , 'anintersection of moving bodies ' : it is the pedestrians
who transform a street (geometrically defined as a79

Non-Places

place by town planners) into a space. This parallel
between the place as an assembly of elements coexist­
ing in a certain order and the space as animation ofthese places by the motion of a moving body is backed
by several references that define its terms . The first ofthese references (p. 173) is to Merleau-Ponty who, in
his Phenomenologie de la perception, draws a distinction
between 'geometric' space and 'anthropological space'in the sense of ' existential' space, the scene of anexperience of relations with the world on the part ofa being essentially situated 'in relation to a milieu' .
The second reference i s t o words and the act of
locution:
The space could be to the place what the word becomeswhen it is spoken: grasped in the ambiguity of being

accomplished, changed into a term stemming from mul­
tiple conventions, uttered as the act of one present (orone time) , and modified by the transformations resulting
from successive influences

.

.

.

.

(p. 1 73)

The third reference, which stems from the second,
highlights the narrative as an effort that ceaselessly' transforms places into spaces and spaces into places'(p. 1 74) . There follows , naturally, a distinction
between ' doing' and 'seeing' , observable in everyday
language which by turns suggests a picture ('thereis . . . ) and organizes movements ('you go in, you'

80From Places to Non-Places

cross, you turn . . .') , or in map signs: from medieval
maps, essentially comprising the outlines of routes anditineraries, to more recent maps from which 'routedescribers' have disappeared and which display, on thebasis of ' elements of disparate origins ' , an ' inventory'of geographical knowledge. Lastly, the narrative, andespecially the j ourney narrative, is compatible withthe double necessity of ' doing' and 'seeing' (,histories
ofj ourneys and actions are punctuated by the mentionof the places resulting from them or authorizingthem ' , p. 1 77) but is ultimately associated with what
Certeau calls 'delinquency' because it 'crosses ' , ' trans­
gresses' and endorses 'the privileging of the route overthe inventory' (p. 1 90) .
A few terminological definitions are needed at thispoint. Place, as defined here, is not quite the place
Certeau opposes to space (in the same way that thegeometrical figu re is opposed to movement, theunspoken to the spoken word or the inventory to theroute) : it is place in the established and symbolized
sense, anthropological place. Naturally, this sense has
to be put to work, the place has to come to life andjourneys have to be made, and there is nothing toforbid the use of the word space to describe thismovement. But that is not what we are saying here:
we include in the notion of anthropological place thepossibility of the journeys made in it, the discourses
uttered in it, and the language characterizing it. And

81

Non-Places

the notion of space, in the way it is used at present (totalk about the conquest of o uter space, in terms
which, for the time being, are more functional thanlyrical, or to designate unnamed or hard-to-nameplaces as well as possible, or with the minimum of
inaccuracy, in the recent but already stereotyped lan­
guage of travel, hotel and leisure institu tions : 'leisurespaces ' , 'sports spaces ' , rather like 'rendezvous point ') ,seems to apply usefully, through the very fact of its
lack of character izati on, to the no n-symbolized
surfaces of the planet .
As a result, we might be tempted to contrast thesymbolized space of place with the non-symbolized
space of non-place. But this would hold us to theexisting negative definition of non-places, which
Michel de Certeau's analysis of the notion of space
may help us to improve upon.
The term 'space' is more abstract in itself than theterm 'place' , whose usage at least refers to an event(which has taken place) , a myth (said to have takenplace) or a history (high places) . It is applied in muchthe same way to an area, a distance between two
things or points (a two-metre ' space' is left between
the posts of a fence) or to a temporal expanse ('in thespace of a week') . It is thus eminently abstract, and it

is significant that it should be in systematic if still

somewhat differentiated use today, in current speech
and in the specific language of various institutions

82

From Places to Non-Places
representative of our time. The Grand LArousse illustre
makes a separate case of ' airspace ' , which designatesthat part of the atmosphere in which a state controls

the air traffic (less concrete, however, than its maritime

equivalent, ' territorial waters ') , but also cites otheruses whi ch testify to the ter m 's plas ticity. I n theexpression 'European judicial space' it is clear that thenotion of frontier is implied but that, setting aside thisnotion of frontier, what is expressed is a whole insti­
tutio nal and normative

mass which cannot b e

localized. T h e expression 'advertising space ' applies
either to an area or to a length of time 'set aside foradvertising in the various media' ; ' buying space' refers
to all the ' operations carried out by an adve rtising
agency in connection with advertising space ' . The
craze for the word 'space ' , applied indiscriminately toauditoriums or meeting-rooms ('Espace Cardin' inParis, 'Espace Yves Rocher' at La Gacilly) , p arks orgardens (' green space ') , aircraft seats ('Espace 2000')
and cars (Renault 'Espace') , expresses not only thethemes that haunt the contemporary era (advertising,image, leisure, freedom, travel) but also the abstractionthat corrodes and threatens them, as if the consumersof contemporary space were invited first and foremost
to treat themselves to words.
To frequent space, Michel de Certeau writes, is 'to
repeat the gleeful and silent experience of i nfancy: tobe other, and go over to the other, in a place ' (p. 1 64) .

83

Non-Places

The gleeful and silent experience of infancy is that of
the first journey, of birth as the primal experience ofdifferentiation, of recognition of the self as self and asother, repeated later in the experiences of walking as
the first use of space, and of the mirror as the first
identification with the image of the self. All narrative
goes back to infancy. When he uses the expression'�e narratiyes' , de Certeau means both the narra­
tives that 'traverse ' and ' organize ' places ('Everynarrative is a journey narrative . . :, p. 1 7 1 ) and theplace that is constituted by the writing of the narrative( . . . reading is the space produced by frequentationof the place constituted by a system of signs - anarrative' , p. 1 73) . But the book is written before
being read; it passes through different places before
becoming one itself: like the journey, the narrativethat describes it traverses a number of places. This
plurality of places, the demands it makes on the
powers of observation and description (the impossi­
bility of seeing everything or saying everything) , andthe resulting feeling of 'disorientation' (but only atemporary one: 'This is me in front of the Parthenon,'you will say later, forgetting that when the photo wastaken you were wondering what on earth you were
doing there) , causes a break or discontinuity between
the spectator-traveller and the space of the landscape
he is contemplating or rushing through. This prevents
him from perceiving i t as a place, from being fully'

84

From Places to Non- Places

present in it, even though he may try to fill the gap
with comprehensive and detailed information out ofguidebooks . . . or journey narratives.
When Michel de Certeau mentions 'non-place', itis to allude to a sort of negative quality of place, anabsence of the place from itself, caused by the name it
has been given. Proper names, he tells us, impose on
the place ' an injunction coming from the other (a his­
tory . . . ) It is certainly true that someone who, in
describing a route, states the names appearing along it,
does not necessarily know much about the places. But
can a name alone be sufficient to produce 'this erosion
or non-place, gouged' out of a place 'by the law of theother' (p. 1 59) ? Every itinerary, Michel de Certeau' .

says, is in a sense 'diverted' by names which give it'meanings (or directions) that could not have been
predicted in advance ' . And he adds: 'These names
create non-place in the places; they turn them into
passages' (p. 1 56) . We could say, conversely, that theact of passing gives a particular status to place names,that the fauldine resulting from the law of the other,and causing a loss of focus, is the horizon of every
journey (accumulation of places, negation of place) ,and that the movement that 'shifts lines' and traverses
places is, by definition, creative of itineraries: that is,words and non-places.
Space, as frequentation of places rather than a place,stems in effect from a double movement: the traveller's
85Non- Places

movement, of course, but also a parall el movement of
the landscapes which he catches only in partial

glimpses, a series of 'snapshots' piled hurriedly into his
memory and, literally, recomposed in the account hegives of them, the sequencing of slides in the com­

me:1tary he imposes on his entourage when he returns.

Travel (something the ethnologist mistrusts to the pointof 'hatred'S) constructs a fictional relationship between

gaze and landscape. And while we use the word 'space'to describe the frequentation ofplaces which specificallydefines the journey, we should still remember that there
are spaces in which the individual feels himself to be aspectator without paying much attention to the specta­

cle. As if the position of spectator were the essence ofthe spectacle, as ifbasically the spectator in the positionof a spectator were his own spectacle. A lot of tourism
leaflets suggest this deflection, this reversal of the gaze,by offering the would-be traveller advance images ofcurious or contemplative faces, solitary or in groups,
gazing across infinite oceans, scanning ranges of snow­
capped mountains or wondrous urban skylines: his own
image in a word, his anticipated image, which speaks
only about him but carries another name (Tahiti , Alped' Huez, New York) . .The traveller's space may thus be,the archetype of non-place.

----

5. 'Je hiis les voyages et les explorations . . . ' (Claude Levi­

Strauss, Tristes Tropiques) . [Tr.]86

From Places to Non-Places
To the coexistence of worlds, and the combined
experience of anthropological place and somethingwhich is no longer anthropological place (in substance
Starobinski's definition of modernity) , movement adds
the particular experience of a form of solitude and, inthe literal sense, of ' taking up a position': the experi­ence of someone who, confronted with a landscape heought to contemplate, cannot avoid contemplating,'strikes the pose' and derives from his awareness of thisattitude a rare and sometimes melancholy pleasure.
rThus it is not surprising that it is among solitary' travellers' of the last century - not professional trav­
ellers or scientists, but travellers on impulse or for
unexpected reasons - that we are most likely to findprophetic evocations of spaces in which neither iden­-�
tity, nor relations, nor histo�J�allyJ)1akes-;s ces in which solitud
perienced as an overbur­

p

;;-��

any

�

dening or emptying of individuality, in which only the
movement of the fleeting images enables the observer
to hypothesize the existence of a past and glimpse thepossibility of a futur�
Even more than Baudelaire (who derived satisfac­
tion from the mere urge to travel) one thinks at thispoint of Chateaubriand, who travelle d incessantly,
who knew how to see, but who saw mainly the deathof civilizations, the destruction or degradation of
once-glittering landscapes, the disappointing shards ofc rumbled mo numents .

Vanished Sparta,

87

ruinedNon-Places

Greece occupied by an invader wholly ignorant of its
ancient splendours, conjured up before the 'passing'traveller a simultaneous image of lost history and life
passing by, but it was the j ourney's movement itself
that seduced him and drew him on. A movement
whose only end was itself, unless it was the writingthat fixed and reiterated its image.
Everything is clearly stated from the beginning of
the first preface to Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem . In it
Chateaubriand denies having made the journey 'towrite about it' , but admits that he used it to look for'images' for Les Martyrs. He has no scientific preten­sions: 'I make no attempt to follow the footsteps ofpeople like Chardin, Tavernier, Chandler, Mungo
Park, Humboldt . . .' (p. 1 9) . So that finally this work,
for which no purpose is admitted, answers a contra­
dictory desire to speak of nothing but its author
without saying a single thing about him to anyone:

For the rest, it is the man, much more than the author,
who will be seen throughout; I speak eternally about
myself, and did so in all confidence, since I had nointention of publishing my Memoirs. (p. 20)
The vantage points favoured by the visitor anddescribed by the writer are evidently the ones fromwhich a series of remarkable features can be seen
( . . . Mount Hyrnettus to the east, Mount Pantelicus'

88From Places to Non- Places

to the north, the Parnes to the north-west . . . ) , but'

the contemplation ends, significantly, the moment itturns back on itself, becomes its own obj ect, andseems to dissolve under the vague multitude of simi­
lar views from the past and still to come:This picture of Attica, the spectacle I was contemplating,had been contemplated by eyes that closed for the lasttime two thousand years ago. I too will pass on when
my tur n comes: other men as fleeting as myself will one
day have the same thoughts on the same ruins .

(p. 1 53)
The ideal vantage point - because it combines theeffect of movement with distance - is the deck of aship putting out to sea. A description of the vanishingland is sufficient to evoke the passenger still straining
to see it: soon it is only a shadow, a rumour, a noise.
This abolition of place is also the cons umm a tion o�
the j ourney, the traveller's last pose:

As we drew away, the columns of Sunium showed more
beautifully above the waves : they could be seen per­fec tly against the azure of the sky because of theirextreme whiteness and the balminess of the nigh t .

Already we were quite far from the cape, although ourears were still struck by the seething of the waves at thefoo t of the rock, the murmur of the wind in the89Non-Places

junipers, and the song of the crickets which today alone
inhabit the temple ruins: these were the last sounds that
I heard in the land of Greece. (p. 190)
Whatever he may claim ('I shall perhaps be the lastFrenchman to leave my country for travels in the HolyLand with the ideas, the purpose and the feelings of anancient pilgrim ' , p. 1 33) , Chateaubriand was not on apilgrimage. The high point at the end of the pilgrim­age is, by definition, overloaded with meaning. The
meaning people seek there is worth the same to theindividual pilgrim today that it always was . The itin­erary leading to it, dotted with stages and high spots,
comprises with it a ' one-way' place, a 'space' in thesense employed by Michel de Certeau. AlphonseDupront points out that the sea crossing itself has an
initiatory value here :Thus, on pilgrimage routes, when a crossing is necessary,
there is a discontinuity and, as it were, a banalization ofheroism. Land and water are very unequal in showing
people at their best, and above all sea crossings cause abreak imposed by the mysteriousness of water. Behindthese apparent facts was hidden another, deeper reality,
which seems to have been perceived intuitively bycertain early-twelfth-century churchmen: that of thecompletion, through a sea journey, of a rite of passage.
(p. 3 1 )90

From Places to Non-Places

Chateaubriand's case is another thing entirely; his ulti­
mate destination was not Jerusalem but Spain, where
he planned to join his mistress (the Itineraire is not a
confession, though: Chateaubriand shows discretionand 'maintains the pose') . And he finds the holy places
less than inspiring. Too much has already been written
about them:. . . Here I experience a difficulty. Should I produce anexact portrait of the holy places? But then I could only
repeat what has already been said: never perhaps has
there been a subject so little known to modem readers,
yet never was any subject more completely exhausted.
Should I omit the picture of these holy places? But
would not that be to remove the most essential part of
my voyage, to deprive it of what is its end and purpose?
(p. 308)
Doubtless, too, the Christian he would like to be can­not celebrate the relentless decline of all things quite
so glibly in these places as he does when he gazes
across Attica and Sparta. Instead he resorts to assiduous
description, makes a show of erudition, quotes wholepages of travellers or poets like Milton or Tasso. What
he is doing here is being evasive, and the abundance ofverbiage and documentation really does make it pos­sible to identify Chateaubriand's holy places as a
non-place, very similar to the ones outlined in pictures91Non-Places
and slogans by our guidebooks and brochures. If weturn for a moment to the definition of modernity as
the willed coexistence of two different worlds(Baudelairean modernity) , we can see that the experi­ence of non-place as a turning back on the self, asimultaneous distancing from the spectator and thespectacle, is not always absent from it. Starobinski,commenting on the first poem of the Tableauxparisiens, insists that it is the coexistence of two worlds,
chimneys alongside spires, that makes the modern
town; but that it also locates the particular position of
the poet who, broadly speaking, wants to see thingsfrom high up and far away, and belongs neither to theuniverse of religion nor to that of labour. For
Starobinski, this position corresponds to the double
aspect of modernity: 'Loss of the subject among thecrowd - or, inversely, absolute power, claimed by theindividual consciousness.'
But it can also be said that the position of the poetin the act of looking is a spectacle in itself. In thisParisian tableau, it is Baudelaire who occupies thecentral position, the one from which he sees the town
but which another self, at a distance, makes the objectof a 'second sight' :Chin on m y two hands, from m y mansarded eyrie,

I shall see the workshop with its song and chatter,

Chimneys, spires .

.

.

92

From Places to Non-Places
Here Baudelaire is not j ust referring to the necessary (coexistence of ancient religion and new industry, or
the absolute power of individual consciousness, but
describing a very particular and modern form of soli­
tude. The spelling out of a position, a 'posture ' , anattitude in the most physical and commonplace senseof the term, comes at the end of a movement thatempties the landscape, and the gaze of which it is the
obj ect, of all content and all meaning, p recisely
because the gaze dissolves into the landscape andbecomes the obj ect of a sec ondary, u nattribu tablegaze - the same one, or another.
In my opinion these shifts of gaze and plays ofimagery, this emptying of the consciousness , can becaused - this time in systemati c , generalized andprosaic fashion - by the characteristic features of what

I have proposed to call 'supermodernity' . JThese sub­j e c t th e individual c o nsciousn ess to entirely newexperiences and ordeals of solitude, directly linked
with the appearance and proliferation of non-place�But before going on to examine the non-places ofsupermodernity in detail, it may be useful to mention,
albeit allusively, the attitudes displayed by the mostrecognized representatives of artistic ' modernity' inrelation to the notions of place and space. We knowthat Benj amin's interest in Parisian ' passages ' and,more generally, in iron and glass architecture, sterns
partly from the fac t that he sees these things as93

Non-Places
embodying a wish to prefigure the architecture of thenext century, as a dream or anticipation. By the same
token, we may wonder whether yesterday's representa­
tives of modernity, who found material for reflection in
the world's concrete space, might not have illuminatedin advance certain aspects of today's supermodernity;
not through the accident of a few lucky intuitions, but
because they already embodied in an exceptional way(because they were artists) situations (postures, attitudes)
which, in more prosaic form, have now become thecommon lot.

lclearly the word 'non-place' designates two com­plementary but distinct realities : spaces formed inrelation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce,
leisure) , and the relations that individuals have withthese spaces. Although the two sets of relations over­lap to a large extent, and in any case officially(individuals travel, make purchases, relax) , they arestill not confused with one another; for non-places
mediate a whole mass of relations, with the self andwith others, which are only indirectly connected with

their purposes. As anthropological places create theorganically social, so non-places create solitary con­tractuality. Try to imagine a Durkheimian analysis ofa transit lounge at RoissyU.

The link between individuals and their surround­ings in the space of non-place is established throughthe mediation of words, or even texts . We know, for a

94

J..

From Places to Non-Places

start, that there are words that make image - or rather,images: the imagination of a person who has neverbeen to Tahiti or Marrakesh takes flight the moment
these :lames are read or heard. Hence the TV gameshows that derive so much of their popularity fromgiving rich prizes of travel and accommodation ('aweek for two at a three-star hotel in Morocco', 'afortnight's full board in florida') : the mere mention of
the prizes is su ffi cie nt to give pleasure to viewers who
have never won them and never will . The 'weight ofwords' (a source of pride to one French weekly, which (.
backs it up with ' the impact of photos') is not
restricted to proper names; a number of common
nouns (holiday, voyage, sea, sun, cruise . . . ) some­times, in certain contexts, possess the same evocative
force. It is easy to imagine the attraction that might
have been and may still be exercised, elsewhere and in
the opposite direction, by words we find less exotic, oreven devoid of the slightest effect of distance:
America, Europe, West, consumption, traffic . Certain
places exist only through the words that evoke them,and �n this sense they are non-places, or rather. ima�­
inary places: banal utopias, cliches, They are theopposite of Michel de Certeau's non-place. Here theword does not create a gap between everyday func­
tionality and lost myth: it creates the image, produces
the myth and at the same stroke makes it work (TVviewers watch the programme every week, Albanians
95Non-Places

camp in Italy dreaming of America, tourism expands) .
!B ut the real non-places of supermodernity - theones we inhabit when we are driving down the
motorway, wandering through the supermarket or sit­ting in an airport lounge waiting for the next flight toLondon or Marseille - have the peculiarity that they
are defined partly by the words and texts they offer us :their 'instructions for use', which may be prescriptive(,Take right-hand lane ') , prohibitive (,No smoking')
or informative ('You are now entering the Beaujolais
regio ul\ Sometimes these are couched in more or lessexplicit and codified ideograms (on road signs, maps
and tourist guides) , sometimes in ordinary language.
This establishes the traffic conditions of spaces inwhich individuals are supposed to interact only withtexts, whose proponents are not individuals but 'moral
entities' or institutions (airports, airlines, Ministry ofTransport, commercial c ompanies , traffic police,
municipal councils) ; sometimes their presence is
explicitly stated ('this road section financed by theGeneral Council', 'the state is working to improveyour living conditions') , sometimes it is only vaguely
discernible behind the injunctions, advice, commen­
taries and 'messages' transmitted by the innumerable'supports' (signboards, screens, posters) that form an
integral part of the contemporary landscap,:JFrance's well-designed autoroutes reveal landscapes
somewhat reminiscent of aerial views, very differentr96From Places to Non-Placesfrom the ones seen by travellers on the old nationaland departmental main roads. They represent, as it
were, a change from intimist cinema to the big sky ofWesterns. But it is the texts planted along the waysidethat tell us about the landscape and make its secretbeauties explicit. Main roads no longer pass throughtowns, but lists of their notable features - and, indeed,
a whole commentary - appear on big signboards
nearby. In a sense the traveller is absolved of the needto stop or even look. Thus, drivers batting down the
au toroute du sud are urged to pay attention to athirteenth-century fortified vill age, a renowned vine­yard, the 'eternal hill ' of Vezelay, the landscapes of the
Avallo nnais and even those of Cezanne (the return ofculture into a nature which is concealed, but stilltalked about) . The landscape keeps its distance, but its
natural or architectural details give rise to a text,
sometimes supplemented by a schematic plan when it
appears that the passing traveller is not really in a posi­tion to see the remarkable feature drawn to his
attention, and thus has to derive what pleasure he canfrom the mere knowledge of its proximity.
Motorway travel is thus doubly remarkable : i t
avoids, for functional reasons, all the principal places
to which it takes us ; and it makes comments on them.
Service stations add to this information, adopting an
increasingly aggressive role as centres of regional cul­ture, selling a range of local goods with a few maps
97

Non-Places
and guidebooks that might be useful to anyone who isthinking of stopping. Of course the fact is that most of
those who pass by do not stop ; but they may pass byagain, every summer or several times a year, so that an
abstract space, one they have regular occasion to readrather than see, can become strangely familiar to themover time; much as other, richer people get used tothe orchid-seller at Bangkok airport, or the duty-free
shop at Roissy I .
I n the France o f thirty years ago, therou tesnationales, departmental main roads and railways used
to penetrate the intimacy of everyday life. The differ­ence between road and rail routes, from this point ofview, was like the difference between the front andback of something; the same difference is still partiallyperceptible today to anyo ne who keeps to depart­
mental main roads and the railways (TGV excepted) ,especially regional lines (where they still exist, for sig­
nificantly it is the local services, the roads of local
interest, that are vanishing fastest) . D epartmental
roads, which today are often rerouted to bypass towns
and villages, used to pass through their main streets ,lined with houses on both sides. Before eight o'clockin the morning or after seven at night, the traveller
would drive through a desert of blank fa�ades (shuttersclosed, chinks of light filtering through the slats , but
only sometimes, since bedrooms and living-rooms
usually faced the back of the house) : he was witness to98

From Places to Non-Places

the worthy, contained image the French like to give ofthemselves, that every Frenchman likes to project to
his neIghbours . The passing motorist used to see
something of towns which today have become names
on a route (La Ferte-Bernard, Nogent-Ie-Rotrou) ;the texts he might happen to decipher (shop signs,
municipal edicts) during a traffic hold-up, or while
waiting at a red light, were not addressed primarily tohim. Trains, on the other hand, were - and remain more indiscreet. The railway, which often passes
behind the houses making up the town, catches
provincials off guard in the privacy of their daily lives,
behind the fa�ade, on the garden side, the kitchen or
bedroom side and, in the evening, the light side (while
the street, if it were not for public street lighting,would be the domain of darkness and night) . Trainsused to go slowly enough for the curious traveller tobe able to read the names on passing stations, but thisis made impossible by the excessive speed of today's
trains. It is as if certain texts had become obsolete forthe contemporary passenger. He is offered others: onthe aircraft-like train the TGV has become, he can leaf
through a magazine rather like the ones provided byairlines for their passengers: it reminds him, in articles,
photos and advertisements, of the need to live on thescale (or in the image) of today's world.
Another example of the invasion of space by t�xt isthe big supermarket. The �tomer wanders roVnd in99

Non-Places
silence, reads labels, weighs fruit and vegetables on amachine that gives the price along with the weight;
then hands his credit card to a young woman as silent
as himself - anyway, not very chatty - who runs eacharticle past the sensor of a decoding machine before
checking the validity of the customer's credit card.
There is a more direct but even more silent dialogue
between the cardholder and the cash dispenser: heinserts the card, then reads the instructions on its
screen, generally encouraging in tone but sometimes
including phrases ('Card faulty' , 'Please withdraw yourcard', 'Read instructions carefully ') that call him rather
sternly to order. All the remarks that emanate fromour roads and commercial centres, from the street­
corner sites of the vanguard of the banking system(,Thank you for your custom' , 'Bon voyage' , 'Weapologize for any inconvenience') are addressed simul­
taneously and indiscriminately to each and any of us:
they fabricate the 'average man', defined as the user ofthe road, retail or banking system. They fabricate him,and may sometimes individualize him: on some roads
and motorways a driver who presses on too hard isrecalled to order by the sudden flashing ( 1 1O! 1 1 0!) ofa warning sign; at some Paris junctions, cars that jump
red lights are photographed automatically. Every credit
card carries an identification code enabling the dis­penser to provide its holder with information at thesame time as a reminder of the rules of the game:t OO

From Places to Non-Places'You may wi thdraw 600 francs.' fAnthrop ologicalplace' is for med by indiv idual identities , throughcomplicities of language, local references, the un­for mulated rules of liv ing know-how; non-placecreates the shared identity of passengers, customers or
Sunday drive� No doubt the relative anonymity that

goes with this temporary identity can even be felt as aliberation, by people who, for a time, have only tokeep in line, go where they are told, check theirappearance. As soon as his passport or identity card has

been checked, the passenger for the next flight, freed
from the weight of his luggage and everyday respon­
sibilities, rushes into the ' duty-free ' space; not somuch, perhaps, in order to buy at the best prices as toexperience the reality of his momentary availability,
his unchallengeable position as a passenger in theprocess of departing.
Alone, but one of many,khe user of a non-place isin contractual relations with it (or with the powersthat govern it) ' He is reminded. when Il,cessary thatthe contract exists.lOne elPJJJ e ot io tbis is th e w:1¥ thenon-Elace is to be u�ed; the ticket he has bought! thecard he will have to sbQW at the tollbooth.:., even the...
trolley he trundles IQun,d the sYPSWlarkct, ;u;e all mo%or less clea� sisns., of\Wfrhe contract alway s relates tothe individual identity of the contracting party. To �etinto the departure lounge of an airport, a ticket -alway s inscribed with the passenger's name - must first101

Non-Places
be presented at the check-in desk; proof that the con­tract has been respected comes at the immigration
desk, with simultaneous presentation of the boarding
pass and an identity document: different countries
have different requirements in this area (identity card,
passport, passport and visa) , and checks are made at
departure time to ensure that these will be properly
fulfill e d. So the passenger accedes to his anonymity
only when he has given proof of his identity; when hehas countersigned (so to speak) the contract. The
supermarket customer gives his identity when he paysby cheque or credit card; so does the autoroute driver
who pays the toll with a card. In a way, the user of the
non-place is always required to prove his innocence.
Checks on the contract and the user's identity, a priori
or a posteriori, stamp the space of contemporary con­sumption with the sign of non-place : 6 it can beentered only by the innocent. Here words hardly
count any longer. There will be no individualization(no right to anonymity) without identity checks.
Of course, the criteria of innocence are the estab­lished, official criteria of individual identity (enteredon cards, stored in mysterious databanks) . But the6. The expression non-lieu, which in the present text usuallymeans 'non-place', is more commonly used in French in thetechnicaljuridicial sense of ' no case to answer' or 'no grounds forprosecution': a recognition that the accused is innocent. [Tr.}1 02

From Places to Non-Places

innocence itself is something else again: .�person_en�the space of non-place is relieved c:>f his usual
determinants. He becomes no more than what he·does or experi-ences ill the role orpassenger, cusfo�­or dilv�ernaps he -is S"tiTl weighed down l;Y·i:he-p�:--­vious day's worries, the next day's concerns; but he isdistanced from them temporarily by the environmentof the moment. Subjected to a gende form of posses­
sion, to which he surrenders himself with more or lesstalent or conviction, he tastes for a wbjle like anyone
who is possessed ....: ilie"passive joys of identity-loss,
�nd the more aaive [!leasure of role-playing.
What he is confronted with, finally, is an image of
himself, but in truth it is a pretty strange image. The
only face to be seen, the only voice to be heard, in thesilent dialogue he holds with the landscape-text
addressed to him along with others, are his own: theface and voice of a solitude made all the more bafllin gby the fact that it echoes millions of others. The
passenger through non-places retrieves his identity
only at Customs, at the tollbooth, at the check-out
counter. Meanwhile, he obeys the same code asothers, receives the same messages, responds to thesame entreaties. lfhe space of non-place creates neither-r-y--so--ll"i-=" tu-a"Te--,-a-=n""'ldsingular identi �--n-o:-r-re-'l;-a-:-ti:-o-n-s-;-o-nI

rinlihtud.;J

There is no room there for history unless it has
been transformed into an element of spectacle, usu.a11y
1 03

Non-Places
in allusive texts. What reigns there is actuality, theurgency of the present moment. Wince non-places are�re to be passed through, they are measured in unitsof tim� I tineraries do not work without timetables,
lists of departure and arrival times in which a corner isalways found for a mention of possible delays. They
are lived through in the present. The present of thej ourney, materialized today on long-distance flights
by a screen giving minute-to-minute updates on theaircraft's progress. From time to time the flight captainmakes this explicit in a somewhat redundant fashion:'The city of Lisbon should be visible to the right of
the aircraft.' Actually there is nothing to be seen: once
again, the spectacle is only an idea, only a word. On
the motorway, occasional luminous signs give theambient temperature and information helpful to thosefrequenting the space : 'Two-kilometre tailback on
A3'. This present is one of actuality in the broad sense:
in aircraft, newspapers are read and reread; some air­lines even retransmit TV current affairs programm e s.
Most cars are fitted with radios; the radio plays con­tinuously in service stations and supermarkets:
buzzwords of the day, advertisements, a few snippets ofnews are offered to - inflicted on - passing customers.
verything proceeds as if space had been trapped bytime, as if there were no history other than the last
forty-eight hours of news, as if each individual history
were drawing its motives, its words and images, from

fE

1 04

From Places to Non-Places,!,he inexhaustible stock of an unending history in the-presenU
Assailed by the images flooding from commercial,transport or retail institutions, the passenger in non­places has the simultaneous experiences of a perpetualpresent and an encounter with the self. Encounter, L..
identification, image: he is this well-dressed forty-year­
old, apparently tasting ineffable delights under theattentive gaze of a blonde hostess; he is this steady-eyed
rally driver hurling his turbo-diesel down some god­
forsaken African back-road; and that virile-looking
fellow at whom a woman is gazing amorously because
he uses toilet water with a wild scent: that is him too.
If these invitations to identification are essentially mas­
culine, it is because the ego-ideal they proj ect ismasculine; at present, a credible businesswoman or
woman driver is perceived as possessing 'masculine'
qualities. The tone changes, naturally, in supermarkets,
those less prestigious non-places where women are ina majority. Here the theme of equality (even. eventu­
ally, disappearance of the distinction) between thesexes is broached in symmetrical and inverse fashion:
new fathers. we sometimes read in 'women's' maga­zines, take an interest in housework and enjoy looking
after babies. But even in supermarkets the distantrumble of contemporary prestige is audible: media,
stars. the news. For the most remarkable thing in all
this remains what one might call the ' intersecting
1 05

Non-Places
participation' of publicity and advertising apparatuses.
Conunercial radio stations advertise big stores ; big
stores advertise commercial radio. When trips toAmerica are on special offer at the travel agencies, theradio tells us about it. Airline company magazines
advertise hotels that advertise the airline companies;
the interesting thing being that all space consumers
thus find themselves caught among the echoes andimages of a sort of cosmology which, unlike the ones
traditionally studied by ethnologists, is objectively uni­versal, and at the same time familiar and prestigious.
This has at least two results. On the one hand, theseimages tend to make a system; they outline a world ofconsumption that every individual can make his own

because it buttonholes him incessantly. The tempta­
tion to narcissism is all the more seductive here in thatit seems to express the conunon law: do as others do
to be yourself. On the other hand, like all cosmolo­
gies,

this

new

cosmology

p roduces

effectsofrecognition. A paradox of non-place: a foreigner lost;."in a country he does not know (a 'passing stranger')can feel at home there only .� .�he anonymi ty .2f-

motorway�...s.enri ce �aL1s., hi.g..s.to.tes or hotel chains.

For him, an oil company logo is a reassuring land­mark; among the supermarket shelves he falls withrelief on sanitary, household or food products vali­
dated by multinational brand names. On the other
hand, the cowltries of East Europe retain a measure of

1 06

From Places to Non-Places

exoticism, for the simple reason that they do not yet
have all the necessary means to accede to the world­
wide consumption space.
*In the concrete reality of today's world, places andspaces, places and non-places intertwine and tangle
together. The possibility of non-place is never absent
from any place. Place becomes a refuge to the habitueof non-pbces (who may dream, for example, of own­
ing a second home rooted in the depths of thecountryside) . Places and non-places are opposed (orattracted) like the words and notions that enable us todescribe them. But the fashionable words - those that
did not exist thirty years ago - are associated with
non-places.
us we can contrast the realities of transit(transit camps or passengers in transit) with those ofresidence or dwelling; the interchange (where nobody
crosses anyone else's path) with the crossroads (where
people meet) ; the passenger (defined by his destination)with the traveller (who strolls along his route signifi­
cantly, the SNCF still calls its customers travellers until
they board the TGV; then they become passengers) ,the housing estate7 ('group of new dwellings' , Laroussesays) , where people do not live together and which

,rh

-

-!J

7. L 'e'lSemble. [Tr.]107Non-Places
never situated in the centre of anything (big estates
characterize the so-call e d peripheral zones or out­

skirts) , with the monument where people share andconunemorate; communication (with its codes, images
and strategies) with language (which is spoken) .
Vocabulary has a central role here because it is what
weaves the tissue of habits, educates the gaze, informs
the landscape. Let us return for a moment to Vincent
D escombes 's proposed definition of the notion of' rhetorical country ' based on an analysis o f the
Combray 'philosophy' , or rather, ' cosmology ' :r Where is the character at hwne? The question bears lesson a geographical territory than a rhetorical territory(rhetorical in the classical sense, as defined by therhetorical acts : plea, accusation, eulogy, censure, rec­ommendation, warning, and so on) . The character is athome when he is at ease in the rhetoric of th�- p_c:oPle_�th -�_�oni�lf��§!es·mLT"flesTgn ·ofbeirig at home is <f..

the ability to make oneself understood without to omuch diffi culty, and to follow
the reasoning of others.

-

without any need for long explanations. The rhetorical,country of a character ends where his interlocutors nolonger understand the reasons he gives for his deeds andactions. the criticisms he makes or the enthusiasms hedisplays. A disturbance of rhetorical communication
marks the crossing of a frontier, which should of course
be envisaged as a border zone, a marchland, rather thana clearly drawn line. (p. 179)L

1 08

From Places to Non-Places
If Descombes is right, we can conclude that in theworld of supermodernity people are always, and never,at home : the frontier zones or 'marcWands ' he men­tions no longer open on to totally foreign worlds.

Wupermodernity (which stems simultaneously fromthe three figures of excess: overabundance of events,
spatial overabu ndance and the individualization ofreferences) naturally finds its full expression in non­plac e s . 1 Words
non-

and

imagesintransitthro u gh

pfa ces can take root in the - still diverse - places

where people still try to construct part of their daily
life. Conversely, it may happen that the non-placeborrows its words from the soil, something seen on
autoroutes where the ' rest areas ' - the term ' area 'being truly the most neutral possible, the antithesis o fplace - are sometimes named after some particularand mysterious attribute of the surrounding land: aire
du Hibou, nre du Gite-aux-Loups, aire de la Combe­
Tourmente, aire des Croqu ettes . . . So we live in aworld where the experience that ethnologists tradi­tionally called ' cultural contact' has become a general
phenomenon. The first problem with an ethnology of
the 'here' is that it still deals with an ' elsewhere' , but
an ' elsewhere' that cannot be perceived as a singularand distinct (exotic) object. These multiple perme­
ations have become apparent in language. The use of'basic E nglish' by c ommunications and marketing
technologies is revealing in this respect: it is less a

1 09

�

Non-Places
question of the triumph of one language over the oth­ers than of the invasion of all languages by a universal
vocabulary. What is signifi cant is the need for thisgeneralized vocabulary, not the fact that it uses English
words . Linguistic enfeeblement (if that is the namewe give to the decline of semantic and syntactic com­
petence in average spoken language) is attributable
more to this generalization than to subversion of one
language by another.
It now becomes clear what distinguishes super­
modernity from moderni ty as defined by Starobinski
through Baudelaire. Supermodernity is not all there
is to the c ontemp o rary. In the modernity of the
Baudelairean landscape, on the other hand, everythingis combined, everything holds together: the spires andchimneys are the 'masts of the ci� What is seen by

the spectator of modernity is the interweaving of oldand new. Super modernity, though, makes the old(history) into a specific spectacle, as it does with all]

exoticism and all local p articularity History and exo­
ticism play the same role in it as the ' quotations' in a
written text : a status superbly expressed in travel
agency catalogues. In the non-places of supermoder­nity, there is always a specific position (in the window,
on a poster, to the right of the aircraft, on the left ofthe motorway) for 'curiositie s ' p resented as suc h:pineapples from the Ivory Coast; Venice - city of theDoges ; the Tangier Kasbah; the site of Alesia. But

1 10

From Places to Non-Places

they play no part in any synthesis, they are not inte­

grated with anything; they simply bear witness, during
a journey, to the coexistence of distinct individualities,
perceived as equivalent and unconnected .

\Slnce non­places are the space of supermodernity, supermodern­
ity cannot aspire to the same ambitions as modernity.
When individuals come together, they engender thesocial and organize places . ' But the space of super­
moderni ty is inhabited by this contradiction: it deals
only with individuals (customers, passengers, users ,listeners) , but they are identified (name, occupation,
place of birth , address) only on entering or leavinuTS'lnce non-places are the space of supermodernity, thisparadox has to be explained: it seems that the social
game is being played elsewhere than in the forward
p osts of contemporaneity. It is in the manner o fimmense parentheses that non-places daily rec eiveincreasing numbers of individuals. And they are theparticular target of all those whose passion for retain­�

ing or conquering territory drives them to terroris

Airports and aircraft, big stores and railway stations
have always been a favoured target for attacks (to say
nothing of car bombs) ; doubtless fo r reasons ofefficiency, if that is the right word. But another reason
might be that, in a more or less c o n fused way,
those pursuing new socializations and localizations
can see non-places only as a negation of their ideal.
The non-place is the opposite of utopia : it exists , and111

Non-Places

it does not contain any organic society.
At this p oint we again come across something
touched upon earlier: the question of politics. In an
article on the state of the town, 8 Sylviane Agacinski
recalls the ideal and aim of the National Convention
member Anacharsis Cloots . Hostile to all 'embodied'
power, he called for the death of the king. All local­
ized power, all singular sovereignty, even the divisionof humanity into different peoples, seemed to him
incompatible with the indivisible sovereignty of thehuman species. Seen from this point of view the cap­
ital, Paris, is a privileged place only to the extent that'an uprooted, deterritorialized thought' is privileged.
'The paradox of the seat of this abstract, universal and p erhaps not simply bourgeois
humanity ' ,Agacinski writes , 'is that it is also a non-place, anowhere, something like what Michel Foucault who did not envisage it as including the town - calle da heterotop ia ' (pp. 204-5) . Today it is certainly the casethat the tension between thought concerned with theuniversal and thought concerned with territoriality is
manifest on a world scale. We have looked at this here
in only one of its aspects, starting with the observationthat an increasing proportion of humanity lives, atleast part of the time, outside territory, with the resultthat the very conditions defining the empirical and the-

8. 'La ville inquiete' , Le Temps de La rej1exion, 1 987.

1 12

From Places to Non-Places

abstract are shifting under the influence of the three­fold acceleration characteristic of supermodernity.
The 'out-of-place' or 'non-place' frequented by theindividual under supermodernity is not the 'non­place' of government, with its tangle of contradictory
double necessities: to think about and locate the uni­versal, to erase and found the local, to affirm andchallenge origins. This unthinkable aspect of power
which has always lain at the base of the social order when necessary by inverting, as if by an arbitrary act ofnature, the terms used for thinking about it undoubtedly finds a particular expression in therevolutionary wish to think simultaneously aboutauthority and the universal, to challenge both despo­
tism and anarchy; but it is a more general constituentof every localized order, which must by definition
produce a spatialized expression of authority. The
constraint that limits the thought of Anacharsis Cloots(and sometimes gives him an appearance of 'naivety')is that he sees the world as a place; a place belonging
to the whole human species, admittedly, but involving
the organization of a space and recognition of a cen­tre. It is significant, incidentally, that when mention ismade these days of 'Europe of the Twelve' or the'New World Order' , the question that immediately
arises is still that of the real centre of these entities:
Brussels (not to mention Strasbourg) or Bonn (not tojump the gun with Berlin) ? New York and the UN,
1 13

Non-Places
or Washington and th e Pentagon? Thought based onplace haunts us still , and the 'resurgence ' of nation­
alisms , which is giving it new relevance, could pass fora ' return' to the localization from which Empire, as
the would-be forerunner of the human species still tocome, might seem to have represented a withdrawal.
But in fact the language of Empire was the same asthat of the nations that rej ect it, perhaps because theformer Empire and the new nations need to conquer
modernity before moving on to supermoderni ty.
Empire, considered as a ' totalitarian' universe, is nevera non-place. On the contrary, the image associatedwith it is that of a universe where nobody is everalone, where everyone is under close control, where
the past as such is rej ected (has been swept away) .

JEmpire, like the world of Orwell or Kafka, is not pre­modern but 'para-modern ' ; a botched modernity, inno case the successor to modernity, featuring none of
the three figures of supermodernity that we have tried
to define. One might even say that it is its exact neg­
ative. Blind to the acceleration of history, it rewrites it;it protects i ts subj ects from the feeling that space isshrinking by limiting freedom of movement andinformation; similarly (as can clearly be seen from .its
bad-tempered reactions to initiatives in favour ofhuman rights) , it removes the individual reference
from its ideology and takes the risk of projecting it
outside its frontiers: a shimmering figure of absolute

1 14

From Places to Non-Places

evil or supreme seductiveness . Of course the firstexample that springs to mind is the former Soviet
Union, but there are other empires, big and small;the tendency of some of our politicians to believe thatthe single party and sovereign executive are a necessary
preliminary to democracy in Africa and Asia isstrangely reminiscent of the modes of thought whose
obsolescence and intrinsically perverse character they
denounce when they talk about Eastern Europe. The
stumbling block to the coexistence of places and non­places will always be political. Doub tless the East
European countries, and others, will find theirpositions in the world networks of traffic and con­sumption . But the extension of the non-places
corresponding to them - empirically measurable andanalysable non-places whose definition is primarily
economic - has already overtaken the thought ofpoliticians, who spend more and more effort wonder­
ing where they are going only because they are lessand less sure where they are.

1 15

Epilogue
When an international flight crosses Saudi Arabia, thehostess announces that during the overflight thedrinking of alcohol will be forbidden in the aircraft.
This signifies the intrusion of territory into space.
Land = society = nation = culture = religion: theequation of anthropological place, fleetingly inscribedin space. Returning after an hour or so to the non­place of space, escaping from the totalitarian
constraints of place, will be just like a return to some­thing resembling freedom.
A few years ago the talented British novelist David
Lodge published a modern version of the quest for theHoly Grail, a novel set with effective humour in thecosmopolitan, international and narrow world of aca116

Epilogue

demic :inguistic and semiological research . 9 The
humour in this case is sociological: the academic
world depicted is only one of the social 'networks'
deployed today all over the planet, offering diverse
individuals the opportunity for singular but strangely
similar journeys. Knight-errantry, after all , was no dif­ferent, and individual wanderings, in today's reality as
in yesterday's myths, still carry expectation, if nothope.
*

Ethnology always has to deal with at least two spaces:that of the place it is studying (village, factory) and thebigger one in which this place is located, the source of
influences and constraints which are not without
effects on the internal play of local relations (tribe,
kingdom, state) . The ethnologist is thus doomed tomethodological strabismus: he must lose sight neitherof the immediate place in which his observation iscarried out, nor of the p ertinent frontiers of its
external marchlands.
In the situation of supermodernity, part of thisexterior is made of non-places, and parts of the non­places are made of images. Frequentation of non-places
today provides an experience - without real historical
9. Small World. Penguin. 1 985 .
117Non-Places
precedent - of solitary individuality combined with
non-human mediation (all it takes is a notice o r
a screen) between the individual and t h e publicauthority.
The ethnolog i st of c ontemporary societies thus
finds the individual presence in the surrounding uni­verse to which, traditionally, he habitually referred thegeneral determinants that gave meaning to par ticularconfigurations or singular accidents.
*

It would be a mistake to see this play of images as
nothing but an illusion (a postmodern fo r m of alien­
ation) . The reality of a phenomenon has never been
exhaustively understood by analysing its determinants.
What is significant in the experience of non-place is
its power of attraction , inversely p roportion al to>- .

territorial attraction, to the gravitational pull of place
and tradition. This is obvious in different way s in theweekend and holiday stampedes along the motorway s,
the diffi culty experienced by traffic controllers in

coping with jammed air routes the success of the,latest forms of retail dis tribution. But it is also appar­
ent in certain other phenomena that might at first be

attributed to the wish to defend territorial values orrecover patrimonial identities. Perhaps the reason why
immi grants worry settled people so much (and often

1 18

Epilogue

so abstractly) is that they expose the relative nature ofcertainties inscribed in the soil: the thing that is soworrying and fascinating about the character of theimmigrant is the emigrant. The state of contemporary
Europe certainly forces us to envisage the 'return' of
nationalisms. Perhaps, though, we should pay more
attention to the aspects of this ' return' that seemessentially to express rejection of the collective order:
obviously the model of national identity is available togive form to this rejection, but it is the individual
image (the image of the free individual course) thatanimates and gives meaning to the model today, andmay weaken it tomorrow.
*

In one form or another, ranging from the misery of
refugee camps to the cosseted luxury of five-star
hotels, some experience of non-place (in dissociablefrom a more or less clear perception of the accelera­tion of history and the contraction of the planet) is
today an essential component of all social existence.
Hence the very particular and ultimately paradoxicalcharacter of what is sometimes regarded in the West as
the fashion for 'cocooning' , retreating into the self:
never before have individual histories (because of theirnecessary relations with space, image and consump­tion) been so deeply entangled with general history,
1 19

Non-Places

history tout court. In this situation, any individual atti­
tude is conceivable: flight (back home, elsewhere) ,fear (of the self, of others) , but also intensity of expe­
rience (performance) or revolt (against establishedvalues) . It is no longer possible for a social analysis todispense with individuals, nor for an analysis of indi­viduals to ignore the spaces through which they are intransit.
*One day, perhaps, there will be a sign of intelligent life
on another world. Then, through an effect of solidar­
ity whose mechanisms the ethnologist has studied ona small scale, the whole terrestrial space will become asingle place. Being from earth will signify something.
In the meantime. though, it is far from certain thatthreats to the environment are sufficient to produce
the same effect. The community of human destinies isexperienced in the anonymity of non-place, and insolitude.
*

So there will soon be a need - perhaps there already isa need - for something that may seem a contradictionin terms: an ethnology of solitude.

120

A Few References
Certeau, Michel de, L'Inventiol'/ du ql4otidien . 1 . Arts defaire ( 1 990 edn) , Gallirnard, 'Folio-Essais' .
Chateaubriand, Itineraire d e Paris a Jerusalem ( 1 964edn) , Julli ard.
Descombes, Vincent, Proust, philosophie du roman,
Editions de Minuit, 1 987 .
Dumont, Louis, La Tarasque, Gallimard, 1 987.
Dupront, Alphonse, Du sacre, Gallimard, 1 987.
Furet, Fran�ois, Penser la Revolution, Galli mard, 1 978.
Hazard, Paul, La Crise de la conscience europeenne,
1 680- 1 7 1 5, Artheme Fayard, 1 96 1 .
Mauss, Marcel, Sociologie et atlthropologie, PUF, 1 966.
Starobinski , Jean , ' Les cheminees et les clochers ' ,Magazine litteraire 280, Sep tembe r 1 990.
121

A Few References

L'Autre et Ie semblable. Regards sur I'ethnologie des societes
contemporaines, collected and edited by Martine
Segalen, Presses du CNRS, 1 989.

122

NON-PLACES
I n troduc tion to an Anthropology of S upermodernity,�

MARC AUGEt'

Tra n s l ated by J o h n H o we

. An ever-i ncrea s i n g p ro po rt i o n of o u r l i ve s is s p en t

in s u pe rmarket s . a i rports a n d

hot e l s , o n motorways or i n f r o m o f TV s , co mp u t e rs a n d c a s h ma c h i nes . T h i s i nvasio nof the world by what M a rc Auge calls ' non-space' res u l t s in a profound a l te r a tion of
awa r e n ess : some t h i ng we perceive, but o n ly i n a pa rtial and i ncohere n t m a n n e r.

Auge uses the concept of ' s upermodern lty ' to describe the logic of these late­capita l i s ph e n o m e n a - a logi c of excess ive I n formation a n d excessive space

In th i s

fa sci na t i ng a n d l u c i d e s s a y he s e e k s to esta b l i s h a n i n te l lec tu a l arma u re for an

S t a r t i n g with an attempt to d i sen ta ng leh istory, Auge g oe s on to map t h e distinction between place,e nc r u s ed with h isto rical monuments a n d creative of soc i a l l ife, a n d non-place. toan h ropo logy

ofa nt h ropology f rom

s u pe rmodernity.

wh i ch i n d i v i d u a l s a r e connec ed in a u n i form manner a n d where no o r g a n i c social life
i s po s s i ble .
Unli eB a u de la l rea n

modernity,

whe re

old

and

new

are

Interwove n ,s u p e r modern i t y is s e l -con ta i n e d : from t h e mo t o r w a y o r a i rcraft . local or exotic
particulantles are p rese n ted two-d i m e n sionally as a sort of theme-pa r k spec ac le .

Auge does not suggest t h a t supermod e m ity is a l l-encompass i ng : pla c es sti l l eX i s t
ou s i d e non-p lace a n d t e n d to reco n s l i t u e t h e m s e l ves i n side

i t . B u t he a r g ue spowe r f u l l y t h a t we are i n t r a n s i t t h rough non-place f o r m o r e a n d m o r e of o u r t i me , a s

if between i m mense parentheses, and c o n c l u d e s that h is n e w form of so � i ude

should be come the s u bj ect of a n a nt h ropology of its own .

Marc Auge is Director of Studies al the Ecole des hautes etudes en sCiences soclales In
Paris. His books Include La traversee du Luxembourg. Un erhnologue dans Ie merro a n d
Domaines a t cMreaux

Shopping m a l l s . m o t o rways. a i r p o rt l o u n g es - we a re a l l fa m i l i a r w i t h t h e s e
c u r i o u s s p a c e s w h i c h a re b o t h everyw h e re a n d n o w h e r e . B u t o n l y now do we
h a ve a c o h e re n t a n a l ys i s of t h e i r far- re a c h i n g effects o n p u b l i c and p r i v a t eexpe r i en ce . M a rc Auge h a s become t h e i r a n t h r o p o l og i st, a n d h a s wr itt e n at i me l y a n d o r i g i n a l book.

P a t r i c k W r i g ht. a u t h o r of The Vii/age ThaI Died for England.

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