Augé’s career began with a series of extended field trips to West Africa, where he researched the Alladian peoples situated on the edge of a large lagoon, west of Abidjan on the Ivory Coast. The culmination of this endeavour is the masterly Le Rivage alladian: Organisation et évolution des villages alladian (1969) [The Alladian Riparian Peoples: Organisation and Evolution of Alladian Villages]. The sequel, Théorie des pouvoirs et Idéologie: Études de cas en Côte d’Ivoire (1975) [Theory of Powers and Ideology: Case Study of the Ivory Coast], followed a series of three further field excursions to the Ivory Coast between 1968 and 1971. Augé coined the term ideo-logic to describe his research object, which he defined as the inner logic of the representations a society makes of itself to itself. A third and final instalment in this series of studies of the Alladian peoples was added in 1977, Pouvoirs de vie, Pouvoirs de mort [Powers of Life, Powers of Death].
