A01=Marc Aug
A01=Marc Auge
adulthood and aging
anthropology
Author_Marc Aug
Author_Marc Auge
B06=Jody Gladding
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=JHMC
Category=JMD
Category=NL-HP
Category=NL-JH
Category=NL-JM
Category=QDX
COP=United States
Discount=15
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Format=BC
Format_Paperback
HMM=178
IMPN=Columbia University Press
ISBN13=9780231175890
Language_English
PA=Available
PD=20160524
POP=New York
Price_€10 to €20
PS=Active
PUB=Columbia University Press
SN=European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism
Subject=Philosophy
Subject=Psychology
Subject=Sociology & Anthropology
WMM=140
Product details
- ISBN 9780231175890
- Format: Paperback
- Dimensions: 140 x 178mm
- Publication Date: 24 May 2016
- Publisher: Columbia University Press
- Publication City/Country: New York, US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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"We are awash in time, savoring a few moments of it; we project ourselves into it, reinvent it, play with it; we take our time or let it slip away: it is the raw material of our imagination. Age, on the other hand, is the detailed account of the days that pass, the one-way view of the years whose total sum when set forth can stupefy us. Age wedges each of us between a date of birth that, at least in the West, we know for certain and an expiration date that, as a general rule, we would like to defer. Time is a freedom, age a constraint." Marc Auge remembers his beloved childhood cat, who seemed to grow wise with age, though her essential nature remained unchanged. He considers our belief that objects mature, when it is our perception of them that evolves over time. He wonders why public demonstrations of affection between the elderly make the young so uncomfortable and why we torture ourselves with regret at what might have been. Time can be liberating, he finds; it is a resource we can squander or relish. Yet age is a burden, bound by our personal and cultural neuroses.
With an ethnologist's understanding of construct and practice, Auge isolates age from the development of consciousness, desire, and representations of the self. In bold, eye-opening strokes, he casts age as a physical marker and treats one's youthful approach to the world as the true measure of life's value.
Marc Auge is director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is also the author of Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (1995); The Future (2015); No Fixed Abode: Ethnofiction (2013); Oblivion (2004); and In the Metro (2002). Jody Gladding is a poet who has translated more than twenty works from French.
