Books by Marc Auge

Part memoir, part manifesto, this is a celebration of the bicycle by French anthropologist Marc Auge.

In recent years, social workers have raised concern about the appearance of a new category among the working poor. This book tells about how we live in geographical space and how work and patterns of domicile affect our status and our inner being.

This approach to anthropology focuses on negotiating the social meanings used in making sense of the world, and on the processes of identification that create the difference between same and other.

With an ethnologist's understanding of construct and practice, Marc Auge proves age is unrelated to the development of consciousness, desire, and representations of the self. In bold, eye-opening strokes, he isolates age as a physical marker and casts one's youthful approach to the world as the true measure of life's value.

Offering new ways of understanding the nature of disease, and exploring the idea that health and illness have a special interdependence, The Meaning of Illness shows the positive side of illness and its value in human experience.

Anthropology is both outside of history and within it. Histories of anthropology tend to summarise particular authors' intellectual differences; but, as Marc Auge argues in this book, first published in English in 1982, these differences may be intrinsically derived from intellectual divisions within anthropology as obvious as they are irreconcilable.

For the health of the psyche and the culture, for the individual and the whole society, oblivion is as necessary as memory. One must know how to forget, Marcus Auge suggests, not just to live fully in the present but also to comprehend the past.