In anthropology, ideas of culture have always traveled from the exotic periphery to the metropole. Like English gentry returning from a stint with the East India Company, anthropologists and their theories accrued both power and prestige in the colonies. With the advent of several major critiques of anthropology's guilty past, most notably Talal Asad's Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter and Johannes Fabian's Time and the Other , anthropologists began their long journey towards redressing their fear of the modern with an innovative series of Baudelairean meditations on the dialectics of modernity and tradition, urban and rural, simple and complex. As innovative and catalyzing as many of these ethnographies are, however, there is a pungent whiff of recidivism about them. These days, it seems, ethnographies are fairly redolent with the image of the plucky subaltern, stubbornly appropriating the reifying and alienating discourses and institutions of the colonial for their own more native, egalitarian, and sometimes utopian ends.
Most anthropologists have yet to reconcile themselves to a lived modernity.
Anthropologists owe it to themselves, the people they study, and to their reading audience to theorize the modern in its worldwide manifestations of affect and effect. As a fieldworker with experience in both West Africa and France, ranging from the study of ritual to the sociology of science, Auge, perhaps, is in a particularly good position to tell us something about the world's varied modernities without stepping into either fanciful abjections of the Other or narcissistic reflections on Self. Many ethnographies begin with a similar invitation to place oneself in the midst of a tableau vivant composed of village, atoll, and grinning natives. It's also instructive to note that as anthropologists have shifted away from their obsession with the primitive so have their static descriptions of museum dioramas given way to dynamic, more piecemeal narratives. But the propensity towards these in situ evocations are characteristic, Auge suggests, of anthropological place , the identification of culture with geography.