supermodernity (surmodernité) French anthropologist Augé, Marc’s term for the present historical conjuncture as outlined in a series of four books commencing with: Non-Lieux, Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (1992), translated as Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995); Le Sens des autres: Actualité de l’anthropologie (1994), translated as A Sense for the Other: The Timeliness and Relevance of Anthropology (1998); Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains (1994), translated as An Anthropology for Contemporaneous Worlds (1998); and Le Guerre des rêves: exercises d’ethno-fiction (1997), translated as The War of Dreams: Exercises in Ethno-Fiction (1999). The present times, as Augé sees things, are not so much ‘post’ modern, in the sense of spelling the end of something, as being in excess of the modern, meaning the present age is not yet different in kind from what we refer to as ‘modernity’, but in the extremeness of its difference in degree it is rapidly approaching that point. Another way of putting this is to note that three symptoms of modernity have, for their own different historical reasons, come to define the present in a way that was not previously true. The three excesses he speaks of are: (i) time; (ii) space; (iii) individuality. By an excess of time, Augé means our sense of contemporaneity is stretched past its limit by the welter of events we are expected to register at any one time. The exemplary image of this is, as Jameson has suggested, the gaunt figure of David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth (director, Roeg 1976), helplessly watching some 50 televisions at once. The excess of space, which goes hand in hand with the excess of time, and obviously exacerbates it, too, is the paradoxical result of the so-called shrinking of the planet---air travel puts even the remotest regions of the globe within reach, satellite technology allows us to view the world from our living rooms and watch events unfold in real time. The excess of individuality is the paradoxical result of the enforced solitudes of modern life---long commutes to work, the lonely hours in front of the computer, and so on. Our ego expands to fill the vacuum of the shattered collectivities that in more traditional times coordinated daily life. There is an obvious element of nostalgia in Augé’s analyses, but there is also a serious and interesting attempt to fabricate a new way of thinking about and doing anthropology. See also postmodernity. Further Reading: I. Buchanan ‘Non-Places: Space in the Age of Supermodernity’ in R. Barcan, and I. Buchanan (eds.) Imagining Australian Space (1999). J. Frow Time and Commodity Culture (1997).