Editorial Columbia
Fecha de edición abril 2016 · Edición nº 1
Idioma inglés
EAN 9780231175890
Libro
encuadernado en tapa blanda
"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 Aug 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, Aug 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 Augé (Poitiers, 1935) es uno de los principales antropólogos del mundo, especializado en la disciplina de la etnología. Doctor en Letras y Ciencias Humanas, ha impartido clases de Antropología y Etnología en la École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) de París, en la que ocupó el cargo de director entre 1985 y 1995. También ha sido responsable y director de diferentes investigaciones en el Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). Sus libros han sido best sellers en Estados Unidos, Francia, España y América Latina.
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