Pierre Clastres (French: [klastʁ]; 17 May 1934 – 29 July 1977) was a

French anthropologist and ethnologist. He is best known for his contributions to the field
of political anthropology, with his fieldwork among the Guayaki in Paraguay and his theory
of stateless societies. Seeking an alternative to the hierarchized Western societies, he
mostly researched indigenous people in which the power was not considered coercive and
chiefs were powerless.
With a background in literature and philosophy, Clastres started studying anthropology
with Claude Lévi-Strauss and Alfred Métraux since the 1950s. Between 1963 and 1974 he
traveled five times to South America to do fieldwork among the Guaraní, the Chulupi, and
the Yanomami. Clastres mostly published essays and, because of his premature death, his
work was unfinished and scattered. His signature work is the essay collection Society
Against the State (1974) and his bibliography also includes Chronicle of the Guayaki
Indians (1972), Le Grand Parler (1974), and Archeology of Violence (1980).

Contents

 1Life and career

 2Works
o 2.1Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians
o 2.2Society Against the State
o 2.3Le Grand Parler
o 2.4Archeology of Violence
 3Thought
o 3.1Structuralism, Marxism and anarchism
o 3.2On power and coercion
o 3.3On torture and war
o 3.4On the State
 4Legacy
 5Selected works
 6See also
 7References
o 7.1Notes
o 7.2Citations
o 7.3Sources
o 7.4Further reading
 8External links

Life and career[edit]

Clastres was born on 17 May 1934, in Paris, France.[2] He studied at University of
Sorbonne,[3] obtaining a licence in Literature in 1957,[4][5] and a Diplôme d'études
supérieures spécialisées in Philosophy the following year.[4] He began working
in Anthropology after 1956[6] as student a of Claude Lévi-Strauss, working at the Laboratory
of Social Anthropology of the French National Centre for Scientific Research during the
1960s.[4][7] He was also a student of Alfred Métraux at the École pratique des hautes
études (EPHE) in 1959.[8]
Clastres's first published article was released in 1962,[9] a year before Clastres went into an
eight-month trip to a Guayaki community in Paraguay with the help of Métraux.[7] The
Guayaki's study served as base to an article for Journal de la Société des
Américanistes,[10] to his 1965 doctoral thesis in ethnology—Social Life of a Nomadic Tribe:
The Guayaki Indians of Paraguay[a]—,[4][5] to "The Bow and the Basket", as well as to his first
book, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (1972).[10]
Clastres was student of the anthropologists Alfred Métraux (left) and Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose
ideas influenced him.
In 1965 Clastres returned to Paraguay and he met the Guaraní—this encounter led him to
write Le Grand Parler (1974).[10] In 1966 and 1968 Clastres went into expeditions to
Paraguayan groups of Chulupi people in the Gran Chaco region.[10] This experience was
used to produce the essays "What Makes Indians Laugh" and "Sorrows of the Savage
Warrior."[10] In his fourth travel Clastres observed the Venezuelan Yanomamifrom 1970 to
1971 and wrote "The Last Frontier".[11] He briefly visited the Guaraní which migrated from
Paraguay to Brazil in his last mission in 1974.[11]
In 1971 he became lecturer at the fifth section of the EPHE, and was promoted to director
of studies of the religion and societies of South American Indians in October 1975.[5] That
same year he left his office as researcher of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology—which
he occupied since 1961—after conflicts over Lévi-Strauss's theories.[5][12] In 1977 he took in
part in the establishment of the journal Librealongside the former members of Socialisme
ou Barbarie Miguel Abensour, Cornelius Castoriadis, Marcel Gauchet, Claude
Lefort and Maurice Luciani.[13] Later that year, Clastres, aged 43, died in Gabriac, Lozère,
on 29 July, in a car accident.[2][13]

Works[edit]
Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians[edit]
Clastres's first book was originally published in France by Plon in 1972 under the
title Chronique des indiens Guayaki: ce que que savent les Aché, chasseurs nomades du
Paraguay (Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians: The Knowledge of the Aché Hunter Nomads
of Paraguay).[14] He was interested in Guayaki because there was little research on them
since Alfredo Stroessner's dictatorship forced them to live under territorial restriction and
launched a pacifying campaign between 1959 and 1962.[7][15] In the book, the author
describes Guayaki culture with a focus on their cycle of life and their "daily struggles for
survival."[15] He describes their mores on rites of passage, marriage, hunting, warfare, and
death,[16] as well as their relation with non-Indian people and nature.[17] In 1976 Paul Auster,
then a "penniless unknown", translated the book into English but it was only published in
1998 by Zone Books.[16][17] Auster translated the work because he was fascinated by
Clastres's prose, which "seemed to combine a poet's temperament with a philosopher's
depth of mind."[7]

Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians's literary qualities attracted novelist Paul Auster; critics, however,
qualified it as a "romantic" work.
Although its literary qualities have been what attracted Auster,[7] the work has been
criticized as "romantic".[16][18] Anthropologist Clifford Geertz said Clastres had a
"Rousseauian primitivism, the view that 'savages' are radically different from us, more
authentic than us, morally superior to us, and need only to be protected, presumably by us,
from our greed and cruelty."[16] Bartholomew Dean, writing for the journal Anthropology
Today, declared, "Clastres' ahistoricism, rhetorical romanticism, and museumification sadly
obscures the ongoing challenges facing indigenous peoples like the Guayaki."[18]
In opposition to Geertz and Dean, David Rains Wallace said it was an "unsettling" work
because it "is not quite the nostalgic view of primitive life that now prevails in literary
circles."[17] Wallace asserted Clastres's "might have misinterpreted" the Guayaki's relation
with nature because "he was predisposed to see stronger oppositions between culture and
nature" as a Structuralist. However, he wrote "Whatever the validity ... of Clastres'
interpretation of Guayaki thought, his evocation of their lost lives has great charm, an
attraction that arises automatically from our civilized fascination with wild people who seem
so strange at first, dodging naked through the forest, but who prove to be so much like us
in feelings if not in thought and habits."[19]
In Anthropology Today, Jon Abbink explained the historical context in which Clastres wrote
the book and argued, "in presenting them as 'indigenes' with specific cultural values and
identity, he has also tried to ground their presence and their historical rights".[20] Abbink also
refused the idea it had not a critical perspective; Clastres's focus on the problems Western
society could bring to the Guayaki is against "the arrogant idea ... that they should be
reformed in our image and respond to our models of social and economic life".[20]

Society Against the State[edit]

Main article: Society Against the State
Considered his major work[21][22] for introducing the concept of "Society against the
State",[23] La Société contre l'État. Recherches d'anthropologie politique was first published
by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1974.[24] When it was first translated by Urizen Books in 1977
as Society Against the State: The Leader as Servant and the Human Uses of Power
Among the Indians of the Americas, however, it did not receive major attention.[25] In 1989,
Zone Books republished it as Society Against the State: Essays in Political
Anthropology.[26] It is a collection of eleven essays: "Copernicus and the Savages",
"Exchange and Power: Philosophy of the Indian Chieftainship", "Independence and
Exogamy", "Elements of Amerindian Demography", "The Bow and the Basket", "What
Makes Indians Laugh", "The Duty to Speak", "Prophets in the Jungle", "Of the One Without
the Many", "Of Torture in Primitive Societies", and the title article "Society Against the
State".[27]
"Exchange and Power" was originally published in the journal L'Homme in 1962.[9] In the
same journal were published "Independence and Exogamy" in 1963,[5] "The Bow and the
Basket" in 1966,[28] "Elements of Amerindian Demography" and "Of Torture in Primitive
Societies" in 1973.[29][30] "What Makes Indians Laugh" was originally published in Les Temps
modernes in 1967,[10]and "Copernicus and the Savages" was published in Critique in
1969.[29] "Prophets in the Jungle" and "Of the One Without the Many" were both published
in L'Éphémère in 1969 and 1972 respectively.[29] In 1973, "The Duty to Speak" was released
on Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse.[29]

Le Grand Parler[edit]
In France, Le Grand Parler. Mythes et chants sacrés des Indiens Guaraní was published
by Éditions du Seuil in 1974.[29] The book was never officially translated into English; Moyn
calls it The Great Speech: Myths and Sacred Chants of the Guarani Indians,[21] while The
Routledge Dictionary of Anthropologists referred to it as The Oral Treasury: Myths and
Sacred Song of the Guarani Indians.[22] Clastres had the help of Paraguayan
ethnologist León Cadogan to come in contact with the Guaraní and to translate his
ethnographic material.[21] In the book, the focus was towards the "beautiful words" in
the paeans they used to worship their gods.[10][21]

Archeology of Violence[edit]
Recherches d'anthropologie politique, posthumously published in France by Éditions du
Seuil in 1980, was first translated into English by Semiotext(e) in 1994 as Archeology of
Violence.[21][31] The book collects the chapters of a work Clastres started writing before his
death—the two last chapters of Archeology of Violence[32]—and Clastres's last
essays.[33] Ranging from articles about ethnocide and shamanism to "primitive" power,
economy and war,[33] it is composed by twelve essays: "The Last Frontier", "Savage
Ethnography", "The Highpoint of the Cruise", "Of Ethnocide", "Myths and Rites of South
American Indians", "Power in Primitive Societies", "Freedom, Misfortune, the Unnameable",
"Primitive Economy", "The Return to Enlightenment", "Marxists and Their Anthropology",
"Archeology of Violence: War in Primitive Societies", and "Sorrows of the Savage
Warrior".[34]
"The Last Frontier" and "The Highpoint of the Cruise" were originally published in Les
Temps modernes in 1971.[35] "Savage Ethnography" and "Of Ethnocide" were published
in L'Homme in 1969 and 1974 respectively.[29] For Flammarion's Dictionnaire des
mythologies et des religions (1981), Clastres wrote "Myths and Rites of South American
Indians".[36] Interrogations was the journal in which "Power in Primitive Societies" was
released in 1976.[29] "Freedom, Misfortune, the Unnameable" was written for a 1976
scholarly edition of Étienne de La Boétie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.[37][38] "Primitive
Economy" was the title given to the preface Clastres wrote for the French edition
of Marshall Sahlins's Stone Age Economics.[36] "The Return to Enlightenment" was released
in Revue Française de Science politique in 1977.[29] Both "Archeology of Violence: War in
Primitive Societies" and "Sorrows of the Savage Warrior" were published in Libre in
1977,[29] and "Marxists and Their Anthropology" was published on the same journal in
1978.[39]

Thought[edit]
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Structuralism, Marxism and anarchism[edit]

Initially a member of the Union of Communist Students with influences from the libertarian
socialist group Socialisme ou Barbarie,[40] Clastres became disenchanted
with Communism after the raising of Stalinism and abandoned the French Communist
Party in 1956,[23] seeking for a new point of view.[1] In François Dosse's words, for Clastres
and other adherents of Lévi-Strauss's Structural anthropology, "it was a matter of locating
societies that had been sheltered from the unitary map of Hegelian Marxist thinking,
societies that were not classified in Stalinist handbooks."[1] Although initially adept of
Structuralism, Abensour wrote that "Clastres is neither Structuralist,
nor Marxist."[11] Similarly, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro declared Society Against the
State and Archeology of Violence can be considered "the chapters of a virtual book that
could be named Neither Marxism nor Structuralism."[41] For Clastres, in Viveiros de Castro's
words, "both privileged economic rationality and suppressed political intentionality."[41]
According to Samuel Moyn, Clastres's first article, "Exchange and Power", "exhibited a
vestigial structuralism" that he would abandon on subsequent essays.[21] On "Marxists and
Their Anthropology" Clastres criticised structuralist perspective on myth and kinship
because it ignores their place of production—the society.[42] He said that, for structuralism,
kinship only has the function to prohibit incest. "This function of kinship explains that men
are not animals, [but] does not explain how primitive man is a particular man." It neglects
that "kinship ties fulfill a determined function, inherent in primitive society as such, that is,
an undivided society made up of equals: kinship, society, equality, even combat."[43] On
myths, Clastres said, "The rite is the religious mediation between myth and society: but, for
structuralist analysis, the difficulty stems from the fact that rites do not reflect upon each
other. It is impossible to reflect upon them. Thus, exit the rite, and with it, society."[44]
With Structuralism's crisis in the later 1960s, Marxist anthropology became an alternative to
it.[39] Clastres, however, was critical of it because Marxism was developed on the context of
capitalist societies and anthropologists were using it to analyse no