[2] Marc Augé’s career can be divided into three stages, reflecting shifts in both his geographical focus and theoretical development: early (African), middle (European), and late (Global).

These successive stages do not involve a broadening of interest or focus as such, but rather the development of a theoretical apparatus able to meet the demands of the growing conviction that the local can no longer be understood except as a part of the complicated global whole.

Augé coined the term ideo-logic to describe his research object, which he defined as the inner logic of the representations a society makes of itself to itself.

In this period of his career, Augé took the novel approach of applying methods developed in the course of fieldwork in Africa to his local Parisian context.

Augé focused on four key aspects of contemporary Parisian society: (i) the paradoxical increase in the intensity of solitude brought about by the expansion of communications technologies; (ii) the strange recognition that the other is also an ‘I’; (iii) the non-place, the ambivalent space that has none of the familiar attributes of place - for instance, it incites no sense of belonging; (iv) the oblivion and aberration of memory.

The third or global stage yielded four books: Non-Lieux, Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (1992); trs.

It is at least partially the result of Augé's travels—for instance, his concept of the non-place refers to those spaces one typically encounters when travelling such as airports, bus terminals, hotels and so on, which one often only remembers in very generic terms.