Jackie Roving’s Reviews > Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity > Status Update

Anthropologists and locals alike grapple with this tension—the temptation to see a people and their land as a complete, unchanging whole. But history’s flux—migration, shifting borders, erased landmarks—proves this “totality” fragile. Modern pressures, from bulldozers to urbanization, don’t just reshape land; they erase identity itself. The myth endures, but the world keeps moving.

A founded place is part myth, part reality. It *works*—land is cultivated, generations endure, and threats are resisted. Yet it’s also a fragile illusion: a myth inscribed on the soil, always adjusting to change. The image of a closed, self-sufficient world is a necessary story, one that frames the latest migration as the "first foundation."

The retention of meaning and identity requires spatial outlining of what a thing is and isnt (whether it be in mental, social or physical). For every group to maitain this spatiality their social life depends on requires them to reinforce and uphold what remains internal to them and to exclude (in some cases fight against) what is external.

One concept that the ethnologist and anthropologist study among many things is social spaces. Social spaces dictate a whole range of things whether it be our identities, our origins and the conditions which shape us. Every society is forced to give meaning to these, and this becomes the garden of thought for the anthropologist.

The question of the anthropologist of the 21st century is "What sort of analysis and framework can take into account the new imperatives of today (i.e., renewed focus on individuality, overabundance of spatiality and overabundance of meaning)?"

Augé argues that framework of supermodernity he introduces is capable of meeting this task, especially as am alternative to the framework of postmodernity.

Augé’s third aspect of supermodernity is the focus on the individual. As collective identities (class, religion, nation) destabilize in the late 20th to early 21st century, ethnographers—especially in the West—shift toward studying individual culture and meaning production. This reflects broader societal changes where personal narratives and self-identity take precedence over traditional collective frameworks.

What appears to be the third aspect of supermodernity, as outlined by Augé, is the newly refound focus on the individual. As collective identities during the last 20th to early 21st century become unstable, the focus on individual production of culture and meaning becomes the new interest on many ethnographers/anthropologist, especially those of and within the Western tradition.

The homogenization of spaces—driven by the excess of contemporary spatial forms and flows—helps make possible “non-places,” liminoid spaces of transit and consumption. In these spaces, established meanings and stable forms of belonging are weakened, so users are less co-present as participants and more positioned to pass through, which limits the possibility of active, transformative co-presence in social life.

The new scales and systems through which we measure and experience space create their own challenges and rewards. They tend to standardize everyday environments, so there is less sense of a space as uniquely “given” to particular places and histories. As a result, people can more easily treat spaces—and the meanings they carry—as something they can rearrange, which expands how we can study and create them.