ABSTRACT
The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time - which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. Christianity marked the space and geography of the American world with its fundamental sign. Utopias are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places - places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.
