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.

As he leaves the cinema where he has just watched Casablanca, one of his favorite films, Julien is approached by a mysterious young woman, Claire. Unbeknownst to Julien, Claire has been following him for several days. Outside the cinema she relays a cryptic message: "Someone's trying to find you." She insists that as a practitioner of the little-known science of narrative psychology she is acting as the anonymous individual's intermediary Slowly, Julien allows himself to be sucked into Claire's investigation, and a strange odyssey through his past ensues. In this novel by Marc Auge, a master of ethnofiction, the two meet up in Paris cafes to discuss the events of their lives - Occupation and Liberation, the Algerian War, and 1968- and Julien puzzles over who in his past could be searching for him. His ex-wife? An enigmatic lover from a seedy corner of Berlin? Soon, Julien realizes he is in the midst of a mysterious game of confession with a woman he knows nothing about. In a quick reversal, he shines the spotlight on Claire. Who is she, and why are her questions so intense? Why does she seem focused on one particular year - 1968? As the story unravels, we begin to understand that the puzzling nature of Claire's quest proves to be a metaphor for other enigmas, including the mysteries of the heart. Beautifully written, Someone's Trying to Find You is a haunting addition to Seagull's French List, and it should not be missed.

If the end of exoticism is one of the characteristics of our time, and if classical anthropology based its study of alterity on this exotic distance from the other, is anthropology still possible, and if so, to what end? The author uses these questions as a point of departure for a probing interrogation of ethnological practice, starting with Levi-Strauss.

For several years, the author has advocated an anthropology of "proximity" in place of the usual anthropology of distance. He has studied such emblematic places of Western modernity as the Parisian Metro, and such emblematic "non-places" as airports and freeways, treating as valid anthropological objects phenomena that others might judge less "pure" or "significant" than systems of filiation or matrimonial alliance. The proper place of the ethnographer, he argues, is sufficiently distanced to comprehend a system as a system, yet participatory enough to live it as an individual. How can one best arrive at such a place?

This book answers by outlining an approach to anthropology that focuses on negotiating the social meanings we and others use in making sense of the world, and on the processes of identification that create the difference between same and other. Why trace a line of demarcation between societies thought to warrant and require anthropological observation and others (namely, our own) thought to demand a different type of study? Once anthropology, through its study of rites, takes social meaning as its principal object, the necessity for a "generalized anthropology" that includes the entire planet seems obvious, especially in view of the rapid proliferation of new networks of communication and the integration ofindividuals into those networks.

Tourists climb the Eiffel Tower to see Paris. Parisians know that to really see the city you must descend into the metro. In this revelatory book, Marc Auge takes readers below Paris in a work that is both an ethnography of the city and a personal narrative. Guiding us through history, memory, and physical space, Auge juxtaposes the romance of the metro with the reality of multiethnic urban France. His work is part autobiography, with impressions from a lifetime riding the trains; part meditation on self and memory reflected in the people and places underneath Paris; part analysis of a place where the third world and the first world meet, where remnants of cultures move and press together; and part a reflection on anthropology in an era of globalization and urban development.

Although he is a pillar of French thought, In the Metro is Auge's first major critical and creative work translated into English. It shows him to be firmly rooted in a tradition of literary ethnography that reaches back to Claude Levi-Strauss and Michel de Certeau, but also engaged in current theoretical debates in literary and cultural studies. In Auge's idiosyncratic and innovative approach, the act of observing the quotidian is elevated to an art. The writer and his history become part of the field he observes, and anthropology interacts with a site -- urban life -- usually reserved for sociology and cultural studies. Throughout, Auge reveals a passion for his milieu, seeing the metro as a place rich with history and literature -- an eclectic egalitarian society.

"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.

"Afuera " documents an exhibition commissioned by the city of Cordoba in an effort to transform and renew the city. It consists of art projects designed for public places, installations in abandoned buildings, residencies and a series of discussions on contemporary art in the city.

In recent years, social workers have raised a new concern about the appearance of a new category among the working poor. Even employed, there are people so overburdened by the cost of living and so under compensated that they cannot afford a place to sleep. Contrary to popular opinion, according to the website for the Coalition for the Homeless, forty-four percent of the homeless in first world countries actually have jobs. In No Fixed Abode, Marc Auge's pathbreaking ethnofiction--a fictional ethnography--a man named Henri narrates his strange existence in the margins of Paris. By day he walks the streets, lingers in conversation with the local shopkeepers, and sits writing in cafes, but at night he takes shelter in an abandoned house. From here, we see a progressive erosion of Henri's identity, a loss of bearings, and a slow degeneration of his ability to relate to others. But then he meets the artist Dominique, whose willingness to share her life with him raises questions about who he has become and about what a person needs in order to be a part of society. This is a book about how we live in geographical space and how work and patterns of domicile affect our status and our inner being. Despite the apparent simplicity of the fictional premise, Auge's book asks serious questions about the nature of our culture.

This is the French anthropologist as we've never heard him before: Marc Auge coined the term `non-place' to describe uniquitous, global airports, hotels and motorways filled with anonymous individuals. In this new book, he casts his anthropologist's eye on a subject close to his heart: cycling. In In Praise of the Bicycle, Auge takes us on a personal journey of his own, on a two-wheeled ride around our cities, and on a journey into ourselves. We all remember the thrill of riding a bike for the first time and the joys of cycling. Here he reminds us that these memories are not just personal, but rooted in a time and a place, in a history that is shared with millions of others. Part memoir, part manifesto, Auge celebrates cycling as a way of reconnecting with the places in which we live, and, ultimately, as a necessary alternative to our disconnected world.

Anthropology is changing. Traditionally seen as the comparative study of cultural diversity, Anthropology now faces an increasingly globalised world, a world in which societies are not discrete or unique but are all, to some degree, connected. The role of the anthropologist is now less the comparative study of specific cultures than the study of the flow of goods, persons and ideas in the contemporary world. The World of the Anthropologist is a guide to this changing world, revealing what Anthropology is today and what anthropologists do now. This book explains what remains of a traditional Anthropology - such as the anthropological construction of kinship, politics, religion and economics as well as the continuing centrality of fieldwork -- and also explores the newer territory which Anthropology is studying, such as performance, science, sexuality, media, ethics, and visual culture. Clearly explaining the key ideas and methods which underpin the subject -- from fieldwork through to the construction of knowledge itself - The World of the Anthropologist offers a fascinating insight into and overview of Anthropology today.

One year after the attack against the Twin Tower and the Pentagon, we are still asking ourselves what happened on that swptember11th. This terrible terrorist act encouraged the author to analyze the facts from anthropological and historical view to discover if there is really an "after and before."

For Marc Auge, best-selling author of Non-Places, the prevailing idea of "the Future" rests on our present fears of the contemporary world. It is to the future that we look for redemption and progress; but it is also where we project our personal and apocalyptic anxieties. By questioning notions of certainty, truth, and totality, Auge finds ways to separate the future from our eternal, terrified present and liberates the mind to allow it to conceptualize our possible futures afresh.

Marc Auge was eleven or twelve years old when he first saw "Casablanca." Made in 1942 but not released in France until 1947, the film had a profound effect on him. Like cinephiles everywhere, Auge was instantly drawn to Rick Blaine's mysterious past, his friendship with Sam and Captain Renault, and Ilsa's stirring, seductive beauty. The film-with its recurring scenes of waiting, menace, and flight-occupies a significant place in Auge's own memory of his uprooted childhood and the wartime exploits of his family.

Marc Auge's elegant and thoughtful essay on film and the nature of both personal and collective memory contends that some of our most haunting memories are deeply embedded in the cinema. His own recollections of the hurried, often chaotic embarkations of his childhood, he writes, are become intertwined with scenes from "Casablanca" that have become bigger in his memory through repeated viewings in the movie houses of Paris's Latin Quarter.

Seamlessly weaving together film criticism and memoir, "Casablanca" moves between Auge's insights into the filmgoing experience and his reflections on his own life, the collective trauma of France's wartime history, and how such events as the fall of Paris, the exodus of refugees, and the Occupation-all depicted in the film-were lived and are remembered.

Anthropology is changing. Traditionally seen as the comparative study of cultural diversity, Anthropology now faces an increasingly globalised world, a world in which societies are not discrete or unique but are all, to some degree, connected. The role of the anthropologist is now less the comparative study of specific cultures than the study of the flow of goods, persons and ideas in the contemporary world. The World of the Anthropologist is a guide to this changing world, revealing what Anthropology is today and what anthropologists do now. This book explains what remains of a traditional Anthropology - such as the anthropological construction of kinship, politics, religion and economics as well as the continuing centrality of fieldwork -- and also explores the newer territory which Anthropology is studying, such as performance, science, sexuality, media, ethics, and visual culture. Clearly explaining the key ideas and methods which underpin the subject -- from fieldwork through to the construction of knowledge itself - The World of the Anthropologist offers a fascinating insight into and overview of Anthropology today.

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 in fact be intrinsically derived from intellectual divisions within anthropology as obvious as they are irreconcilable. Auge identifies, in contemporary debates in French anthropology, the paths that perhaps allow us to transcend these oppositions. On doing so, he explores and clarifies the relationship that anthropology enjoys with history, on the intellectual plane, and with politics, on the historical plane. His argument is stimulating and challenging, and will interest all social anthropologists and sociologists concerned with the theoretical foundations of their disciplines, as well as demonstrating to historians and political scientists what anthropology has to offer them.

For Marc Auge, best-selling author of "Non-Places," the prevailing idea of "the Future" rests on our fears of the present. It is to the future that we look for redemption and progress; but it's also where we project our personal and apocalyptic fears. By questioning notions of certainty, truth, and totality, Auge finds ways to separate the future from our eternal, terrified present and develops a way of thinking about the future that is liberated from constricted concepts of time.

"From the Trade Paperback edition."