Farewell to Marc Augé, the great philosopher and anthropologist has died

Marc Augé, a great anthropologist, ethnologist, writer and philosopher, who has been a member of the scientific committee of the festivalfilosofia since 2009, passed away today, at the age of 87. «With Augé, a friend and a teacher who has given to the festivalfilosofia and its audience – explains a note -, as to many audiences around the world, some lessons from which there is no turning back, such as the idea that our cultural practices are immersed in symbolic systems that it is essential to study with the tools of anthropology: a a discipline that Augé, a great specialist in African terrain, also practiced by turning that particular type of gaze to our societies, in the belief that, in order to be intelligible, cultural processes imply that in their analysis we make ourselves ‘strangers to ourselves’.

Marc Augé, former director d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, of which he was President for a long time, after having contributed to the development of Africanistic disciplines, has elaborated an anthropology of contemporary worlds attentive to the ritual dimension of everyday life and modernity. Among his recently translated works: Nonluoghi. Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity (Milan 1993); Between borders. Cities, places, interactions (Milan 2007); The craft of the anthropologist (Turin 2007); The beauty of the bicycle (Turin 2009); The metro revisited (Milan 2009); For an anthropology of mobility (Milan 2010); Stranger to myself (Turin 2011); Future (Turin 2012); On the road and off course (Turin 2012); The new fears (Turin 2013); Civil ethics: horizons (with L. Boella, Padua 2013); The paradoxes of love and loneliness (Modena 2014); The anthropologist and the global world (Milan 2014); Ageless time. Old age does not exist (Milan 2014); Trust in oneself, trust in the other, trust in the future (Roccafranca 2014); The power of images (Milan 2015); The three words that changed the world (Milan 2016); Another world is possible (Turin 2017); On the free. For the hell of it! (Milan 2018); So who is the other? (Milan 2019); Sharing the human condition. A handbook for our present (Milan 2019). (HANDLE).