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Pierre Clastres

Pierre Clastres (French: [klastʁ]; 17 May 1934 – 29 July 1977) was a French anthropologist, ethnographer, 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. An anarchist seeking an alternative to the hierarchized Western societies, he mostly researched Indigenous peoples of the Americas in which the power was not considered coercive and chieftains were powerless.

Pierre Clastres
Born(1934-05-17)17 May 1934
Paris, France
Died29 July 1977(1977-07-29) (aged 43)
Gabriac, France
Alma materUniversity of Sorbonne
Known for
Scientific career
FieldsAnthropology
Institutions
ThesisLa vie social d'une tribu nomade: les Indiens Guayaki du Paraguay (1965)
Influences
InfluencedAbensour  · Deleuze  · Dwivedi  · Gauchet  · Graeber  · Guattari  · Scott  · Mohan

With a background in literature and philosophy, Clastres started studying anthropology with Claude Lévi-Strauss and Alfred Métraux in 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).

Life and career

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 a student 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 ethnologySocial 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 (right), 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 the Gran Chaco region of Paraguay, where he studied groups of Chulupi people.[10] This experience was used to produce the essays What Makes Indians Laugh and Sorrows of the Savage Warrior.[10] In his fourth expedition Clastres travelled to Venezuela, where he observed the Yanomami people from 1970 to 1971, and wrote The Last Frontier.[11] He briefly visited the Guaraní which migrated from Paraguay to Brazil in his last expedition 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 Indigenous peoples 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 Libre alongside 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

Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians

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

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

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

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

Structuralism, Marxism, and anarchism

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 non-capitalist societies.[45] On Clastres's perspective, according to Viveiros de Castro, "historical materialism was ethnocentric: it considered production the truth of society and labor the essence of the human condition."[41] However, it is not true for primitive societies since they live in a subsistence economy, in which not only they do not have to produce an economic excess but they refuse to do it.[46] In opposition to Marxist's economic determinism, for Clastres, politics was not superstructure; instead it was sui generis, which enabled Amerindian societies to refuse power and statehood.[47] Clastres wrote,

When, in primitive society, the economic dynamic lends itself to definition as a distinct and autonomous domain, when the activity of production becomes alienated, accountable labor, levied by men who will enjoy the fruits of that labor, what has come to pass is that society has been divided into rulers and ruled ... Society's major division ... is the new vertical ordering of things between a base and a summit; it is the great political cleavage between those who hold the force ... and those subject to that force. The political relation of power precedes and founds the economic relation of exploitation. Alienation is political before it is economic; power precedes labor; the economic derives from the political; the emergence of the State determines the advent of classes.

— Clastres, "Society Against the State"[48]

In refusing both Structuralism and Marxism, Clastres, in Moyn's words, "presented his own 'political anthropology' as the more plausible sequel or complement to structuralist analysis."[39] Because of his analysis of power and the State, several commentators say Clastres posites an "anthropological anarchism"[49] or exhibits anarchist influences.[50][51]

On power and coercion

In his 1969 article "Copernicus and the Savages", Clastres reviewed J. W. Lapierre's Essai sur le fondement du pouvoir politique, in which he said primitive societies were societies without power based on Max Weber's "definition of power as the state-based monopoly on legitimate violence".[52] Clastres, however, argued that power does not imply either coercion or violence, and proposed a "Copernican revolution"[52] in political anthropology: "In order to escape the attraction of its native earth and attain real freedom of thought, in order to pull itself away from the facts of natural history in which it continues to flounder, reflection on power must effect a 'heliocentric' conversion."[53]

In another essay, Exchange and Power, he argued that South American Indigenous chieftains are powerless chiefs; they are chosen on the basis of their oratorical talent.[54] And while they have the exclusive right to be polygamous, they have to be generous and offer gifts to their people.[54] However, it was not an exchange: they give and receive each independently; Clastres wrote, "this relationship, by denying these elements an exchange value at the group level, institutes the political sphere not only as external to the structure of the group, but further still, as negating that structure: power is contrary to the group, and the rejection of reciprocity, as the ontological dimension of society, is the rejection of society itself."[55] Clastres then concluded that "the advent of power, such as it is, presents itself to these societies as the very means for nullifying that power."[55] In Le Grand Parler, he argued that "the society itself, not its leader, is the real site of power" and then they can avoid the concentration of power.[22]

On torture and war

On their struggle against the State, on keeping their society an egalitarian one, however, they use violent methods: torture and warfare.[56] Moyn said that Clastres "reinterpret[ed] the violence in primitive society as internal and essential to its self immunization against the rise of the state" and "compare[d] it favorably to the grandiose horrors of the statist, modern world."[30] To the first topic, he dedicated "Of Torture in Primitive Societies"; Clastres did not think on it as cruel practice and using Soviet Union penal tattoos on Anatoly Marchenko as example, Clastres affirmed: "It is proof of their admirable depth of mind that the Savages knew all that ahead of time, and took care, at the cost of a terrible cruelty, to prevent the advent of a more terrifying cruelty."[57] Instead he argued torture in rites of passage had the function of prohibiting inequality:

The law they come to know in pain is the law of primitive society, which says to everyone: You are worth no more than anyone else; you are worth no less than anyone else. The law, inscribed on bodies, expresses primitive society's refusal to run the risk of division, the risk of a power separate from society itself, a power that would escape its control. Primitive law, cruelly taught, is a prohibition of inequality that each person will remember.

— Clastres, "Of Torture in Primitive Societies"[30]
 
 
For its perspective on war, Archeology of Violence was said to be "an anti-Hobbes book" (left).[58] However, it also criticized Engels's perspective on the origin of the State,[59] and his idea of State as the ultimate destiny of society.[60] It would lead it to be described as "more anti-Engels, a manifesto against the forced continuism of World History".[58]

On a similar fashion, Clastres argued that war could not be seen as a problem but that it had a political reason.[61] He pointed it was not a constant state of war like the Hobbesian proposition but that it occurred only between different groups.[62] He argued that internal war was purposeful and kept the group segmented, non-hierarchized;[62] according to Viveiros de Castro: "perpetual war was a mode of controlling both the temptation to control and the risk of being controlled. War keeps opposing the State, but the crucial difference for Clastres is that sociality is on the side of war, not of the sovereign."[58] Clastres stated:

For [Hobbes], the social link institutes itself between men due to "a common Power to keep them all in awe:" the State is against the war. What does primitive society as a sociological space of permanent war tell us in counter-point? It repeats Hobbes's discourse by reversing it; it proclaims that the machine of dispersion functions against the machine of unification; it tells us that war is against the State.

— Clastres, "Archeology of Violence: War in Primitive Societies"[63]

On the State

For Clastres, primitive societies possessed a "sense of democracy and taste for equality," and thus intentionally discourage the rise of a State.[55] That is why these societies are not merely characterized as societies without a State, but societies against the State.[55] Viveiros de Castro explained the meaning of "Society against the State" as "a modality of collective life based on the symbolic neutralization of political authority and the structural inhibition of ever-present tendencies to convert power, wealth and prestige into coercion, inequality and exploitation."[41] By affirming it, Clastres criticised both the evolutionist and Marxist ("especially Engelsian") notion that the State would be a necessity and the ultimate destiny in all societies.[47][60] For him, the State does not emerge because of the complexification of productive or political forces but it rises when a community reaches a certain number of members.[64]

On the other hand, his vision of tribal societies without conflict was deemed "romantic" by critics such as Marcus Colchester and Samuel Moyn.[47][65] Moyn wrote: "Many took Clastres's own words"—as in the affirmation that Amerindian societies "could predict the future" and avoid State—"to convict him of primitivism."[66]

Legacy

In Moyn's opinion: "Clastres's romanticized vision of society against the state not only failed to fulfill the primary need of his (but not only his) time—a theory of democratization in which society and state are complementary—but imposed an obstacle to its fulfillment."[65] First, his arguments implied in "a kind of paralyzed mourning" because his "primitivist nostalgia" made people distant from reforms in the present. "In this way, Clastres's anti- but not yet genuinely post-Marxist perception that the state in all its forms is corrupted by a 'neo-theology of history with its fanatic continuism' prevented him from presenting a viable stance for those who are unable to escape the circumstances of Western modernity—which is to say, in a globalized world, everyone."[65]

According to Moyn, another consequence was that it provided a base for thinkers like Marcel Gauchet, who openly do homages to Clastres's work. Clastres was also a major influence for French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.[67][68] His view that totalitarianism was a constant danger in modern societies "makes the security of freedoms against the state the only realistic achievement in a politics without illusions." On the other hand, his effect on left thinkers was that it gave rise to the belief that democracy is primarily a matter of civil society and thus prompted a dichotomy between society and the state, overshadowing the role of the state in the development of an active civil society. While Moyn considered Clastres had "an important role in the rise in contemporary theory of the importance of civil society", his theory "not only forced an excessive burden onto civil society alone as the locus of freedom; it also neutralized a theory of the state, condemned and feared in all its forms".[69] Differently, Warren Breckman concluded Clastres's view on State helped the antitotalitarian current of 1970s French thought.[70]

James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed proposes that Zomia inhabitants were intentionally "using their culture, farming practices, egalitarian political structures, prophet-led rebellions, and even their lack of writing systems to put distance between themselves and the states that wished to engulf them".[71] His thesis sparked some controversy and although he affirmed he made "bold claims" none of them were totally original, attributing some of them to Clastres.[71] Scott commented on how Clastres influenced him: "The reason it was useful for me... is that he was the first person to understand that modes of subsistence are not just grades on some evolutionary scale--from hunting and gathering to swiddening, foraging, agriculture, and so on--but rather that the choice of a mode of subsistence is in part a political choice about how you want to relate to existing state systems".[72]

The influence of Clastres on the philosophers Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan in their philosophical and political writings has been noted.[73] Dwivedi and Mohan have interpreted the political thought of M. K. Gandhi through the works of Pierre Clastres in their book Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics. They propose that Gandhi's concept of non-violence requires the formation of the state as per Clastres, "We will need to make a detour through the great anarchist anthropologist himself – Pierre Clastres – in order to find the steps which will lead us unto the Gandhian temple of non-violence".[74] Permanence of war in primitive societies holds off the formation of the state and the appearance of the concept of violence. Following Clastres they argue that it is the state that makes the distinction between good force and bad force. Dwivedi and Mohan also note that for Clastres the state is the recording apparatus of memories which does not allow any deviation from the state's version of the past. They say that new possibilities for politics are to be found behind the curtain of the state according to Clastres: "At the beginning, in the days spent without records of memory, lost behind the obscure curtain before which the state arrives, lies an epoch without functional isolations: the reign of pure polynomia which grants all possibilities with no realizations. All homologies here remain revealed as nature is pure voluptuousness without any spans to reach it."[74]

Selected works

  • Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (Chronique des indiens Guayaki), 1972
  • Society Against the State (La Société contre l'État. Recherches d'anthropologie politique), 1974
  • Le Grand Parler. Mythes et chants sacrés des Indiens Guaraní, 1974
  • Archéologie de la violence. La guerre dans les sociétés primitives, 1977
  • Archeology of Violence (Recherches d'anthropologie politique), 1980

See also

References

Notes

  1. ^ The title used is the translation by Bowman in The Routledge Dictionary of Anthropologists. Its original title is La vie social d'une tribu nomade: les Indiens Guayaki du Paraguay.[4]

Citations

  1. ^ a b c d Moyn 2004, p. 57.
  2. ^ a b BnF.
  3. ^ Dykes 2005, p. 122.
  4. ^ a b c d e Gaillard 2004, p. 310.
  5. ^ a b c d e Cartry 1978, p. 44.
  6. ^ Plot 2013, p. 51.
  7. ^ a b c d e Moyn 2004, p. 61.
  8. ^ Monnier 2003, p. 22.
  9. ^ a b Moyn 2004, p. 58.
  10. ^ a b c d e f g Abensour 2007, p. 52.
  11. ^ a b c Abensour 2007, p. 53.
  12. ^ Glowczewski 2008, p. 87.
  13. ^ a b Delacampagne 1997, p. 103.
  14. ^ Gaillard 2004, p. 310–311.
  15. ^ a b Dean 1999, p. 9.
  16. ^ a b c d Geertz 1998, p. 69.
  17. ^ a b c Wallace 1998, p. 1.
  18. ^ a b Dean 1999, p. 10.
  19. ^ Wallace 1998, p. 2.
  20. ^ a b Abbink 1999.
  21. ^ a b c d e f Moyn 2004, p. 62.
  22. ^ a b c Gaillard 2004, p. 311.
  23. ^ a b Viveiros de Castro 2010, p. 10.
  24. ^ Plot 2013, p. 67.
  25. ^ Geertz 1998, p. 72.
  26. ^ Clastres 1989.
  27. ^ Clastres 1989, "Contents".
  28. ^ Abensour 2007, p. 90.
  29. ^ a b c d e f g h i Cartry 1978, p. 45.
  30. ^ a b c Moyn 2004, p. 67.
  31. ^ Clastres 2010.
  32. ^ Clastres 2010, p. 326.
  33. ^ a b MIT Press.
  34. ^ Clastres 2010, "Contents".
  35. ^ Abensour 2007, p. 318.
  36. ^ a b Abensour 2007, p. 319.
  37. ^ Plot 2013, p. 22.
  38. ^ Curtis 2000, p. XV.
  39. ^ a b c Moyn 2004, p. 63.
  40. ^ Gottraux 1997, p. 205.
  41. ^ a b c d Viveiros de Castro 2010, p. 12.
  42. ^ Abensour 2007, p. 54.
  43. ^ Clastres 2010, p. 223.
  44. ^ Clastres 2010, p. 224.
  45. ^ Abensour 2007, p. 54–56.
  46. ^ Clastres 1989, p. 195.
  47. ^ a b c Parkin 2010, p. 237.
  48. ^ Clastres 1989, p. 198.
  49. ^ Viveiros de Castro 2010, p. 15.
  50. ^ Parkin 2010, p. 236.
  51. ^ Graham 2009, p. 372.
  52. ^ a b Moyn 2004, p. 64.
  53. ^ Moyn 2004, p. 65.
  54. ^ a b Moyn 2004, p. 59.
  55. ^ a b c d Moyn 2004, p. 60.
  56. ^ Moyn 2004, p. 66–67.
  57. ^ Moyn 2004, p. 68.
  58. ^ a b c Viveiros de Castro 2010, p. 13.
  59. ^ Moyn 2004, p. 77.
  60. ^ a b Clastres 2010, p. 167–168.
  61. ^ Moyn 2004, p. 69-70.
  62. ^ a b Moyn 2004, p. 70.
  63. ^ Clastres 2010, p. 277.
  64. ^ Dosse 2010, p. 261.
  65. ^ a b c Moyn 2004, p. 78.
  66. ^ Plot 2013, p. 56.
  67. ^ Viveiros de Castro 2010, p. 34.
  68. ^ Bogue 2007, p. 149.
  69. ^ Moyn 2004, p. 79.
  70. ^ Breckman 2013, p. 168.
  71. ^ a b Hammond 2011.
  72. ^ Gilman & Guilhot 2014, p. 111.
  73. ^ Reghu 2019.
  74. ^ a b Mohan & Dwivedi 2018.

Sources

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  • Abensour, Miguel, ed. (2007). El espíritu de las leyes salvajes: Pierre Clastres o una nueva antropología política (in Spanish). Carina C. Battaglia (translator). Buenos Aires: Del Sol. ISBN 978-950-9413-08-5.
  • Bibliothèque nationale de France. Clastres, Pierre (1934-1977) (in French). Retrieved 4 April 2015.
  • Bogue, Ronald (2007). Deleuze's Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. ISBN 9780754660323.
  • Breckman, Warren (2013). Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-marxism and Radical Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231512893.
  • Cartry, Michel (1978). "Pierre Clastres (1934-1977)". Annuaire de la Ve Section de École Pratique des Hautes études. École pratique des hautes études. 89 (85): 35–45. doi:10.3406/ephe.1976.17149.
  • Clastres, Pierre (2010). Archeology of Violence. Jeanine Herman (translator). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). ISBN 978-1-58435-093-4.
  • Clastres, Pierre (1989). Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. Robert Hurley; Abe Stein (translators). New York: Zone Books. ISBN 0-942299-01-9.
  • Curtis, David Ames (2000). "Translator's Foreword". In Lefort, Claude (ed.). Writing: the Political Test. Durham: Duke University Press. pp. VII–XXXVIII. ISBN 9780822325208.
  • Dean, Bartholomew (April 1999). "Critical Re-Vision: Clastres' Chronicle and the Optic of Primitivism". Anthropology Today. London: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. 15 (2): 9–11. doi:10.2307/2678262. JSTOR 2678262.
  • Delacampagne, Christian (1997). "Un ethnologue contre l'État". L'anti-autoritarisme en ethnologie: actes du colloque du 13 avril 1995 (in French). Bordeaux: Bordeaux Segalen University. pp. 103–108. ISBN 9782906691070.
  • Dosse, François (2010). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-51867-3.
  • Dykes, Nicholas (2005). "The Facts of Reality: Logic and History in Objectivist Debates About Government". The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. Penn State University Press. 7 (13): 79–140. ISSN 1526-1018.
  • Gaillard, Gérald (2004). (PDF). Peter James Bowman (translator). London and New York: Routledge. pp. 310–311. ISBN 0-415-22825-5. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-02-19. Retrieved 2015-04-26.
  • Geertz, Clifford (22 October 1998). "Deep Hanging Out". The New York Review of Books. XLV (16): 69–72.
  • Gilman, Nils; Guilhot, Nicolas (1 April 2014). ""Transforming the Nature of the Struggle": An Interview with James C. Scott". Humanity. 5 (1): 111–122. doi:10.1353/hum.2014.0001.
  • Glowczewski, Barbara (2008). "Guattari et l'anthropologie: aborigènes et territoires existentiels". Multitudes (in French). 3 (34): 84–94. doi:10.3917/mult.034.0084.
  • Gottraux, Philippe (1997). "Socialisme ou Barbarie": un engagement politique et intellectuel dans la France de l'après-guerre (in French). Paris: Payot Lausanne. ISBN 9782601032192.
  • Graham, Robert (2009). "Society Against The State" (PDF). Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas: Volume Two: The Emergence of the New Anarchism (1939-1977). Montreal: Black Rose Books. pp. 372–385. ISBN 978-1-55164-311-3.
  • Hammond, Ruth (4 September 2011). "The Battle Over Zomia". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 17 May 2016.
  • MIT Press. "Archeology of Violence, new edition". Retrieved 27 April 2015.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
  • Mohan, Shaj; Dwivedi, Divya (2018). Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-Politics. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781474221733 – via Google Books.
  • Monnier, Alain (2003). Nostalgie du néolithique: de Lausanne à Las Lomitas, documents sur Alfred Métraux, ethnologue. Geneva: Labor et Fides. ISBN 9782830911237.
  • Moyn, Samuel (2004). "Of Savagery and Civil Society: Pierre Clastres and the Transformation of French Political Thought". Modern Intellectual History. 1: 55–80. doi:10.1017/S1479244303000076. S2CID 145643749.
  • Parkin, Robert (2010). "The French-speaking Countries". In Barth, Frederik; Gingrich, Andre; Parkin, Robert; Silverman, Sydel (eds.). One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-03827-8.
  • Plot, Martín, ed. (2013). Claude Lefort: Thinker of the Political. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9780230375581.
  • Reghu, J. (14 April 2019). "Gandhi as Chrysalis for a New Philosophy". The Wire.
  • Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2010). "The Untimely, Again". Archeology of Violence. Ashley Lebner (translator). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). pp. 9–52. ISBN 978-1-58435-093-4.
  • Wallace, David Rains (29 March 1998). "Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians. By Pierre Clastres. Translated from the French by Paul Auster. Zone Books: 352 pp., $25.50". Los Angeles Times: 3.

Further reading

  • Abensour, Miguel (2011). "The Counter-Hobbes of Pierre Clastres". In Breaugh, Martin; Holman, Christopher; Magnusson, Rachel; Mazzocchi, Paul; Penner, Devin (eds.). Thinking Radical Democracy: The Return to Politics in Post-War France. Martin Breaugh; Devin Penner (translators). Tornto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 9781442650046.
  • Abensour, Miguel (2011). Democracy Against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Movement. Max Blechman; Martin Breaugh (translators). Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 9780745650098.
  • Clastres, Hélène (1995). The Land-without-Evil: Tupi-Guarani Prophetism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
  • Clastres, Pierre (1975). "Entretien avec P. Clastres" (PDF). L'Anti-mythes (in French) (9).
  • Coulon, Christian (1997). "La pensée en contre-pente de Pierre Clastres". L'anti-autoritarisme en ethnologie: actes du colloque du 13 avril 1995 (in French). Bordeaux. pp. 109–117. ISBN 9782906691070.
  • Lefort, Claude (2000). "Dialogue with Pierre Clastres". Writing: the Political Test. Durham: Duke University Press. pp. 207–235. ISBN 9780822325208.
  • Leirner, Piero de Camargo; Toledo, Luiz Henrique de (2003). "Lembranças e reflexões sobre Pierre Clastres: entrevista com Bento Prado Júnior". Revista de Antropologia (in Portuguese). University of São Paulo. 46 (2). doi:10.1590/S0034-77012003000200011.
  • Schachter, Marc D. (2008). Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship: From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. p. 69. ISBN 9780754664598.
  • Silvero, José Manuel (2010). "La Unidad es el Mal. El legado de Pierre Clastres" (PDF). In Zanardini, José; de Bosio, Beatriz González (eds.). Enseñanzas del Bicentenario ante los desafíos globales de hoy (in Spanish). Vol. 58. Asunción: Universidad Católica "Nuestra Señora de la Asunción". pp. 599–608. ISBN 9789995376338.
  • Silvero, José Manuel. "Apuntes en torno a la noción de Poder en Pierre Clastres" (PDF). In Secretaría Nacional de Cultura (Org.) (ed.). Paraguay: Ideas, Representaciones e Imaginarios (in Spanish). Asunción: Secretaría Nacional de Cultura. pp. 55–74. ISBN 9789996767210.
  • Tiqqun (2011). "Sorrows of the Civilised Warrior". This Is Not a Program. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). ISBN 978-1-58435-097-2.

External links

  • Full text of Society Against the State
  • (in English)
  • A page from the Librairie Libertaire, describing Clastres and linking to some of his essays (in French)

pierre, clastres, french, klastʁ, 1934, july, 1977, french, anthropologist, ethnographer, ethnologist, best, known, contributions, field, political, anthropology, with, fieldwork, among, guayaki, paraguay, theory, stateless, societies, anarchist, seeking, alte. Pierre Clastres French klastʁ 17 May 1934 29 July 1977 was a French anthropologist ethnographer 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 An anarchist seeking an alternative to the hierarchized Western societies he mostly researched Indigenous peoples of the Americas in which the power was not considered coercive and chieftains were powerless Pierre ClastresBorn 1934 05 17 17 May 1934Paris FranceDied29 July 1977 1977 07 29 aged 43 Gabriac FranceAlma materUniversity of SorbonneKnown forSociety Against the StateArcheology of ViolenceScientific careerFieldsAnthropologyInstitutionsCentre national de la recherche scientifique 1961 1975 Ecole pratique des hautes etudes 1971 1977 ThesisLa vie social d une tribu nomade les Indiens Guayaki du Paraguay 1965 InfluencesHeidegger 1 HegelLevi StraussMarxMetrauxNietzsche 1 RousseauSahlinsSocialisme ou BarbarieInfluencedAbensour Deleuze Dwivedi Gauchet Graeber Guattari Scott MohanWith a background in literature and philosophy Clastres started studying anthropology with Claude Levi Strauss and Alfred Metraux in the 1950s Between 1963 and 1974 he traveled five times to South America to do fieldwork among the Guarani 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 1 Life and career 2 Works 2 1 Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians 2 2 Society Against the State 2 3 Le Grand Parler 2 4 Archeology of Violence 3 Thought 3 1 Structuralism Marxism and anarchism 3 2 On power and coercion 3 3 On torture and war 3 4 On the State 4 Legacy 5 Selected works 6 See also 7 References 7 1 Notes 7 2 Citations 7 3 Sources 7 4 Further reading 8 External linksLife and career EditClastres 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 Diplome d etudes superieures specialisees in Philosophy the following year 4 He began working in Anthropology after 1956 6 as a student of Claude Levi 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 Metraux at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes 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 Metraux 7 The Guayaki s study served as base to an article for Journal de la Societe des Americanistes 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 Metraux left and Claude Levi Strauss right whose ideas influenced him In 1965 Clastres returned to Paraguay and he met the Guarani this encounter led him to write Le Grand Parler 1974 10 In 1966 and 1968 Clastres went into expeditions to the Gran Chaco region of Paraguay where he studied groups of Chulupi people 10 This experience was used to produce the essays What Makes Indians Laugh and Sorrows of the Savage Warrior 10 In his fourth expedition Clastres travelled to Venezuela where he observed the Yanomami people from 1970 to 1971 and wrote The Last Frontier 11 He briefly visited the Guarani which migrated from Paraguay to Brazil in his last expedition 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 Indigenous peoples 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 Levi Strauss s theories 5 12 In 1977 he took in part in the establishment of the journal Libre alongside 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 Lozere on 29 July in a car accident 2 13 Works EditChronicle 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 Ache chasseurs nomades du Paraguay Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians The Knowledge of the Ache 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 Societe contre l Etat Recherches d anthropologie politique was first published by Les Editions 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 Ephemere 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 sacres des Indiens Guarani was published by Editions 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 Leon Cadogan to come in contact with the Guarani 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 Editions 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 Etienne de La Boetie 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 Francaise 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 EditStructuralism 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 Francois Dosse s words for Clastres and other adherents of Levi 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 non capitalist societies 45 On Clastres s perspective according to Viveiros de Castro historical materialism was ethnocentric it considered production the truth of society and labor the essence of the human condition 41 However it is not true for primitive societies since they live in a subsistence economy in which not only they do not have to produce an economic excess but they refuse to do it 46 In opposition to Marxist s economic determinism for Clastres politics was not superstructure instead it was sui generis which enabled Amerindian societies to refuse power and statehood 47 Clastres wrote When in primitive society the economic dynamic lends itself to definition as a distinct and autonomous domain when the activity of production becomes alienated accountable labor levied by men who will enjoy the fruits of that labor what has come to pass is that society has been divided into rulers and ruled Society s major division is the new vertical ordering of things between a base and a summit it is the great political cleavage between those who hold the force and those subject to that force The political relation of power precedes and founds the economic relation of exploitation Alienation is political before it is economic power precedes labor the economic derives from the political the emergence of the State determines the advent of classes Clastres Society Against the State 48 In refusing both Structuralism and Marxism Clastres in Moyn s words presented his own political anthropology as the more plausible sequel or complement to structuralist analysis 39 Because of his analysis of power and the State several commentators say Clastres posites an anthropological anarchism 49 or exhibits anarchist influences 50 51 On power and coercion Edit In his 1969 article Copernicus and the Savages Clastres reviewed J W Lapierre s Essai sur le fondement du pouvoir politique in which he said primitive societies were societies without power based on Max Weber s definition of power as the state based monopoly on legitimate violence 52 Clastres however argued that power does not imply either coercion or violence and proposed a Copernican revolution 52 in political anthropology In order to escape the attraction of its native earth and attain real freedom of thought in order to pull itself away from the facts of natural history in which it continues to flounder reflection on power must effect a heliocentric conversion 53 In another essay Exchange and Power he argued that South American Indigenous chieftains are powerless chiefs they are chosen on the basis of their oratorical talent 54 And while they have the exclusive right to be polygamous they have to be generous and offer gifts to their people 54 However it was not an exchange they give and receive each independently Clastres wrote this relationship by denying these elements an exchange value at the group level institutes the political sphere not only as external to the structure of the group but further still as negating that structure power is contrary to the group and the rejection of reciprocity as the ontological dimension of society is the rejection of society itself 55 Clastres then concluded that the advent of power such as it is presents itself to these societies as the very means for nullifying that power 55 In Le Grand Parler he argued that the society itself not its leader is the real site of power and then they can avoid the concentration of power 22 On torture and war Edit On their struggle against the State on keeping their society an egalitarian one however they use violent methods torture and warfare 56 Moyn said that Clastres reinterpret ed the violence in primitive society as internal and essential to its self immunization against the rise of the state and compare d it favorably to the grandiose horrors of the statist modern world 30 To the first topic he dedicated Of Torture in Primitive Societies Clastres did not think on it as cruel practice and using Soviet Union penal tattoos on Anatoly Marchenko as example Clastres affirmed It is proof of their admirable depth of mind that the Savages knew all that ahead of time and took care at the cost of a terrible cruelty to prevent the advent of a more terrifying cruelty 57 Instead he argued torture in rites of passage had the function of prohibiting inequality The law they come to know in pain is the law of primitive society which says to everyone You are worth no more than anyone else you are worth no less than anyone else The law inscribed on bodies expresses primitive society s refusal to run the risk of division the risk of a power separate from society itself a power that would escape its control Primitive law cruelly taught is a prohibition of inequality that each person will remember Clastres Of Torture in Primitive Societies 30 For its perspective on war Archeology of Violence was said to be an anti Hobbes book left 58 However it also criticized Engels s perspective on the origin of the State 59 and his idea of State as the ultimate destiny of society 60 It would lead it to be described as more anti Engels a manifesto against the forced continuism of World History 58 On a similar fashion Clastres argued that war could not be seen as a problem but that it had a political reason 61 He pointed it was not a constant state of war like the Hobbesian proposition but that it occurred only between different groups 62 He argued that internal war was purposeful and kept the group segmented non hierarchized 62 according to Viveiros de Castro perpetual war was a mode of controlling both the temptation to control and the risk of being controlled War keeps opposing the State but the crucial difference for Clastres is that sociality is on the side of war not of the sovereign 58 Clastres stated For Hobbes the social link institutes itself between men due to a common Power to keep them all in awe the State is against the war What does primitive society as a sociological space of permanent war tell us in counter point It repeats Hobbes s discourse by reversing it it proclaims that the machine of dispersion functions against the machine of unification it tells us that war is against the State Clastres Archeology of Violence War in Primitive Societies 63 On the State Edit For Clastres primitive societies possessed a sense of democracy and taste for equality and thus intentionally discourage the rise of a State 55 That is why these societies are not merely characterized as societies without a State but societies against the State 55 Viveiros de Castro explained the meaning of Society against the State as a modality of collective life based on the symbolic neutralization of political authority and the structural inhibition of ever present tendencies to convert power wealth and prestige into coercion inequality and exploitation 41 By affirming it Clastres criticised both the evolutionist and Marxist especially Engelsian notion that the State would be a necessity and the ultimate destiny in all societies 47 60 For him the State does not emerge because of the complexification of productive or political forces but it rises when a community reaches a certain number of members 64 On the other hand his vision of tribal societies without conflict was deemed romantic by critics such as Marcus Colchester and Samuel Moyn 47 65 Moyn wrote Many took Clastres s own words as in the affirmation that Amerindian societies could predict the future and avoid State to convict him of primitivism 66 Legacy EditIn Moyn s opinion Clastres s romanticized vision of society against the state not only failed to fulfill the primary need of his but not only his time a theory of democratization in which society and state are complementary but imposed an obstacle to its fulfillment 65 First his arguments implied in a kind of paralyzed mourning because his primitivist nostalgia made people distant from reforms in the present In this way Clastres s anti but not yet genuinely post Marxist perception that the state in all its forms is corrupted by a neo theology of history with its fanatic continuism prevented him from presenting a viable stance for those who are unable to escape the circumstances of Western modernity which is to say in a globalized world everyone 65 According to Moyn another consequence was that it provided a base for thinkers like Marcel Gauchet who openly do homages to Clastres s work Clastres was also a major influence for French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari s Anti Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus 67 68 His view that totalitarianism was a constant danger in modern societies makes the security of freedoms against the state the only realistic achievement in a politics without illusions On the other hand his effect on left thinkers was that it gave rise to the belief that democracy is primarily a matter of civil society and thus prompted a dichotomy between society and the state overshadowing the role of the state in the development of an active civil society While Moyn considered Clastres had an important role in the rise in contemporary theory of the importance of civil society his theory not only forced an excessive burden onto civil society alone as the locus of freedom it also neutralized a theory of the state condemned and feared in all its forms 69 Differently Warren Breckman concluded Clastres s view on State helped the antitotalitarian current of 1970s French thought 70 James C Scott s The Art of Not Being Governed proposes that Zomia inhabitants were intentionally using their culture farming practices egalitarian political structures prophet led rebellions and even their lack of writing systems to put distance between themselves and the states that wished to engulf them 71 His thesis sparked some controversy and although he affirmed he made bold claims none of them were totally original attributing some of them to Clastres 71 Scott commented on how Clastres influenced him The reason it was useful for me is that he was the first person to understand that modes of subsistence are not just grades on some evolutionary scale from hunting and gathering to swiddening foraging agriculture and so on but rather that the choice of a mode of subsistence is in part a political choice about how you want to relate to existing state systems 72 The influence of Clastres on the philosophers Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan in their philosophical and political writings has been noted 73 Dwivedi and Mohan have interpreted the political thought of M K Gandhi through the works of Pierre Clastres in their book Gandhi and Philosophy On Theological Anti politics They propose that Gandhi s concept of non violence requires the formation of the state as per Clastres We will need to make a detour through the great anarchist anthropologist himself Pierre Clastres in order to find the steps which will lead us unto the Gandhian temple of non violence 74 Permanence of war in primitive societies holds off the formation of the state and the appearance of the concept of violence Following Clastres they argue that it is the state that makes the distinction between good force and bad force Dwivedi and Mohan also note that for Clastres the state is the recording apparatus of memories which does not allow any deviation from the state s version of the past They say that new possibilities for politics are to be found behind the curtain of the state according to Clastres At the beginning in the days spent without records of memory lost behind the obscure curtain before which the state arrives lies an epoch without functional isolations the reign of pure polynomia which grants all possibilities with no realizations All homologies here remain revealed as nature is pure voluptuousness without any spans to reach it 74 Selected works EditChronicle of the Guayaki Indians Chronique des indiens Guayaki 1972 Society Against the State La Societe contre l Etat Recherches d anthropologie politique 1974 Le Grand Parler Mythes et chants sacres des Indiens Guarani 1974 Archeologie de la violence La guerre dans les societes primitives 1977 Archeology of Violence Recherches d anthropologie politique 1980See also EditEndemic warfareReferences EditNotes Edit The title used is the translation by Bowman in The Routledge Dictionary of Anthropologists Its original title is La vie social d une tribu nomade les Indiens Guayaki du Paraguay 4 Citations Edit a b c d Moyn 2004 p 57 a b BnF Dykes 2005 p 122 a b c d e Gaillard 2004 p 310 a b c d e Cartry 1978 p 44 Plot 2013 p 51 a b c d e Moyn 2004 p 61 Monnier 2003 p 22 a b Moyn 2004 p 58 a b c d e f g Abensour 2007 p 52 a b c Abensour 2007 p 53 Glowczewski 2008 p 87 a b Delacampagne 1997 p 103 Gaillard 2004 p 310 311 a b Dean 1999 p 9 a b c d Geertz 1998 p 69 a b c Wallace 1998 p 1 a b Dean 1999 p 10 Wallace 1998 p 2 a b Abbink 1999 a b c d e f Moyn 2004 p 62 a b c Gaillard 2004 p 311 a b Viveiros de Castro 2010 p 10 Plot 2013 p 67 Geertz 1998 p 72 Clastres 1989 Clastres 1989 Contents Abensour 2007 p 90 a b c d e f g h i Cartry 1978 p 45 a b c Moyn 2004 p 67 Clastres 2010 Clastres 2010 p 326 a b MIT Press Clastres 2010 Contents Abensour 2007 p 318 a b Abensour 2007 p 319 Plot 2013 p 22 Curtis 2000 p XV a b c Moyn 2004 p 63 Gottraux 1997 p 205 a b c d Viveiros de Castro 2010 p 12 Abensour 2007 p 54 Clastres 2010 p 223 Clastres 2010 p 224 Abensour 2007 p 54 56 Clastres 1989 p 195 a b c Parkin 2010 p 237 Clastres 1989 p 198 Viveiros de Castro 2010 p 15 Parkin 2010 p 236 Graham 2009 p 372 a b Moyn 2004 p 64 Moyn 2004 p 65 a b Moyn 2004 p 59 a b c d Moyn 2004 p 60 Moyn 2004 p 66 67 Moyn 2004 p 68 a b c Viveiros de Castro 2010 p 13 Moyn 2004 p 77 a b Clastres 2010 p 167 168 Moyn 2004 p 69 70 a b Moyn 2004 p 70 Clastres 2010 p 277 Dosse 2010 p 261 a b c Moyn 2004 p 78 Plot 2013 p 56 Viveiros de Castro 2010 p 34 Bogue 2007 p 149 Moyn 2004 p 79 Breckman 2013 p 168 a b Hammond 2011 Gilman amp Guilhot 2014 p 111 Reghu 2019 a b Mohan amp Dwivedi 2018 Sources Edit Abbink Jon August 1999 Letters Doing justice to Clastres PDF Anthropology Today London Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 15 4 21 doi 10 2307 2678149 JSTOR 2678149 Abensour Miguel ed 2007 El espiritu de las leyes salvajes Pierre Clastres o una nueva antropologia politica in Spanish Carina C Battaglia translator Buenos Aires Del Sol ISBN 978 950 9413 08 5 Bibliotheque nationale de France Clastres Pierre 1934 1977 in French Retrieved 4 April 2015 Bogue Ronald 2007 Deleuze s Way Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics Farnham Ashgate Publishing ISBN 9780754660323 Breckman Warren 2013 Adventures of the Symbolic Post marxism and Radical Democracy New York Columbia University Press ISBN 9780231512893 Cartry Michel 1978 Pierre Clastres 1934 1977 Annuaire de la Ve Section de Ecole Pratique des Hautes etudes Ecole pratique des hautes etudes 89 85 35 45 doi 10 3406 ephe 1976 17149 Clastres Pierre 2010 Archeology of Violence Jeanine Herman translator Los Angeles Semiotext e ISBN 978 1 58435 093 4 Clastres Pierre 1989 Society Against the State Essays in Political Anthropology Robert Hurley Abe Stein translators New York Zone Books ISBN 0 942299 01 9 Curtis David Ames 2000 Translator s Foreword In Lefort Claude ed Writing the Political Test Durham Duke University Press pp VII XXXVIII ISBN 9780822325208 Dean Bartholomew April 1999 Critical Re Vision Clastres Chronicle and the Optic of Primitivism Anthropology Today London Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 15 2 9 11 doi 10 2307 2678262 JSTOR 2678262 Delacampagne Christian 1997 Un ethnologue contre l Etat L anti autoritarisme en ethnologie actes du colloque du 13 avril 1995 in French Bordeaux Bordeaux Segalen University pp 103 108 ISBN 9782906691070 Dosse Francois 2010 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Intersecting Lives New York Columbia University Press ISBN 978 0 231 51867 3 Dykes Nicholas 2005 The Facts of Reality Logic and History in Objectivist Debates About Government The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies Penn State University Press 7 13 79 140 ISSN 1526 1018 Gaillard Gerald 2004 The Routledge Dictionary of Anthropologists PDF Peter James Bowman translator London and New York Routledge pp 310 311 ISBN 0 415 22825 5 Archived from the original PDF on 2018 02 19 Retrieved 2015 04 26 Geertz Clifford 22 October 1998 Deep Hanging Out The New York Review of Books XLV 16 69 72 Gilman Nils Guilhot Nicolas 1 April 2014 Transforming the Nature of the Struggle An Interview with James C Scott Humanity 5 1 111 122 doi 10 1353 hum 2014 0001 Glowczewski Barbara 2008 Guattari et l anthropologie aborigenes et territoires existentiels Multitudes in French 3 34 84 94 doi 10 3917 mult 034 0084 Gottraux Philippe 1997 Socialisme ou Barbarie un engagement politique et intellectuel dans la France de l apres guerre in French Paris Payot Lausanne ISBN 9782601032192 Graham Robert 2009 Society Against The State PDF Anarchism A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas Volume Two The Emergence of the New Anarchism 1939 1977 Montreal Black Rose Books pp 372 385 ISBN 978 1 55164 311 3 Hammond Ruth 4 September 2011 The Battle Over Zomia The Chronicle of Higher Education Retrieved 17 May 2016 MIT Press Archeology of Violence new edition Retrieved 27 April 2015 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint ref duplicates default link Mohan Shaj Dwivedi Divya 2018 Gandhi and Philosophy On Theological Anti Politics Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN 9781474221733 via Google Books Monnier Alain 2003 Nostalgie du neolithique de Lausanne a Las Lomitas documents sur Alfred Metraux ethnologue Geneva Labor et Fides ISBN 9782830911237 Moyn Samuel 2004 Of Savagery and Civil Society Pierre Clastres and the Transformation of French Political Thought Modern Intellectual History 1 55 80 doi 10 1017 S1479244303000076 S2CID 145643749 Parkin Robert 2010 The French speaking Countries In Barth Frederik Gingrich Andre Parkin Robert Silverman Sydel eds One Discipline Four Ways British German French and American Anthropology Chicago University of Chicago Press ISBN 978 0 226 03827 8 Plot Martin ed 2013 Claude Lefort Thinker of the Political Basingstoke Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 9780230375581 Reghu J 14 April 2019 Gandhi as Chrysalis for a New Philosophy The Wire Viveiros de Castro Eduardo 2010 The Untimely Again Archeology of Violence Ashley Lebner translator Los Angeles Semiotext e pp 9 52 ISBN 978 1 58435 093 4 Wallace David Rains 29 March 1998 Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians By Pierre Clastres Translated from the French by Paul Auster Zone Books 352 pp 25 50 Los Angeles Times 3 Further reading Edit Abensour Miguel 2011 The Counter Hobbes of Pierre Clastres In Breaugh Martin Holman Christopher Magnusson Rachel Mazzocchi Paul Penner Devin eds Thinking Radical Democracy The Return to Politics in Post War France Martin Breaugh Devin Penner translators Tornto University of Toronto Press ISBN 9781442650046 Abensour Miguel 2011 Democracy Against the State Marx and the Machiavellian Movement Max Blechman Martin Breaugh translators Cambridge Polity ISBN 9780745650098 Clastres Helene 1995 The Land without Evil Tupi Guarani Prophetism Urbana University of Illinois Press Clastres Pierre 1975 Entretien avec P Clastres PDF L Anti mythes in French 9 Coulon Christian 1997 La pensee en contre pente de Pierre Clastres L anti autoritarisme en ethnologie actes du colloque du 13 avril 1995 in French Bordeaux pp 109 117 ISBN 9782906691070 Lefort Claude 2000 Dialogue with Pierre Clastres Writing the Political Test Durham Duke University Press pp 207 235 ISBN 9780822325208 Leirner Piero de Camargo Toledo Luiz Henrique de 2003 Lembrancas e reflexoes sobre Pierre Clastres entrevista com Bento Prado Junior Revista de Antropologia in Portuguese University of Sao Paulo 46 2 doi 10 1590 S0034 77012003000200011 Schachter Marc D 2008 Voluntary Servitude and the Erotics of Friendship From Classical Antiquity to Early Modern France Farnham Ashgate Publishing p 69 ISBN 9780754664598 Silvero Jose Manuel 2010 La Unidad es el Mal El legado de Pierre Clastres PDF In Zanardini Jose de Bosio Beatriz Gonzalez eds Ensenanzas del Bicentenario ante los desafios globales de hoy in Spanish Vol 58 Asuncion Universidad Catolica Nuestra Senora de la Asuncion pp 599 608 ISBN 9789995376338 Silvero Jose Manuel Apuntes en torno a la nocion de Poder en Pierre Clastres PDF In Secretaria Nacional de Cultura Org ed Paraguay Ideas Representaciones e Imaginarios in Spanish Asuncion Secretaria Nacional de Cultura pp 55 74 ISBN 9789996767210 Tiqqun 2011 Sorrows of the Civilised Warrior This Is Not a Program Los Angeles Semiotext e ISBN 978 1 58435 097 2 External links Edit Wikiquote has quotations related to Pierre Clastres Full text of Society Against the State An Excerpt from Society Against the State in English A page from the Librairie Libertaire describing Clastres and linking to some of his essays in French Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Pierre Clastres amp oldid 1141874417, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, 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