Home made strange - interview with ethnologist Marc Auge - Interview

ArtForum, Summer, 1994 by Jean-Pierre Criqui

Jean-Pierre Criqui talks with Marc Auge

Since his first published writings appeared some twenty-five years ago, Marc Auge has progressively turned his attention toward the Western society from which he comes, and which is now as much an object of study as the African societies he initially examined. There is nothing surprising about this: when the ethnologist returns to the place he started from, how can he logically abandon the habits of observation and analysis that underlie his practice? It was inevitable, then, that Auge's field of research would be as broad as possible, and that his work on himself and his own culture would also reflect his desire to know the other. This back-and-forth is at the heart of his anthropological project, and is most strikingly illustrated in the dialectic he has continuously stressed between alterity and individuality, and between collective representations and individual ones, as something like the two sides of the same coin. "It is not just because the representation of the individual is a social construct that it is of interest to anthropology; it is also because any representation of the individual is necessarily a representation of the social bond consubstantial with it. By the same token, we are indebted to the anthropology of faraway societies, and even more so to those it has studied, for this discovery: the social begins with the individual, and the individual comes under an anthropological [pur]view," he writes in Non-lieux (Nonplaces, 1992).

Like Auge's books, the conversation that follows may call to mind the practices of many different artists: Robert Smithson, incomparable exegete of the mutations of contemporary space, and inventor of the "nonsite"; or Lothar Baumgarten, who discovered the colonizing impulse, and its characteristic obliviousness to the other, even in the Paris subway system (in a 1986-87 exhibition at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, "Acces aux quais" (To the trains). Art has long been one of the objects of the "anthropological view." That it should become an agent of that view now seems freshly urgent.

JEAN-PIERRE CRIQUI: Your new book, Le Sens des autres (The meaning of others), is both an overview and a program: one can see in it your concern for an anthropology as much of the nearby as of the far away. Before I come back to this double concern, I'd like you to recall your beginnings. How does one become an Africanist?

MARC AUGE: I'd love to say you become one by accident, but if I must elaborate, let me say that being trained in literature, I wanted to get away from strictly academic study and to pursue more speculative thinking. That and a curiosity about other cultures put me on this path. There were, of course, other determining factors, like meeting Georges Balandier.

You must realize that for people of my generation, who were students in the late '50s and early '60s, there was no special curriculum in ethnology. We all came to it from somewhere else--mostly from the humanities and philosophy, sometimes from history. This was a time when the possibilities for practicing anthropology professionally broadened a bit. The dominant intellectual tendency of the time was antifunctionalism, characterized by Structuralist research and by a condemnation of any simple teleology derived from a narrow focus on correspondences between various levels of a societal whole.

Obviously, the reintroduction of the individual into the social sciences, which to me seems the most significant event in the field in the last twenty years, led to a certain distance with respect to Structuralism. We should, however, be clear what we mean by Structuralism, for the idea of defining an object of study on a strictly logical level--of devising a system through which one can understand the logical dimensions of, say, matrimonial alliances, with all the generality and abstractness that project supposes--still seems to me a legitimate undertaking.

JPC: Starting with Genie du paganisme (Spirit of paganism, 1982), you seem to be approaching an ethnology of contemporary industrial society. That book is about not only polytheistic thought in African societies, but also the paganism inherent in traditionally Christian ones.

MA: Yes, that book came at a moment after my fieldwork in Africa, when I began to think about it from a distance. To put it briefly, I'd been trying to understand the interpretive systems of the lagoon-dwellers of Ivory Coast--the local way of seeing that makes ideas about the individual, the social relation, and the event so difficult to dissociate from each other. I was particularly concerned with representations of individuals and of the human body, and with how to link the logics of practice, behavior, and actions of power and influence to the logic of representation.

The interpretation of death or of illness occurs at this level, on which the analysis of language, representations, and actions constitutes a kind of unified whole. I had studied African systems of prophecy, focusing on figures from the beginning of the century who, reacting to contact with the civilization of Europe, established a new practice for individuals caught under colonialism--displaced, troubled, and searching for meaning. It seemed to me necessary at some point to look at paganism again, and to see how its particular combination of meaning and knowing can always be found in industrialized societies.