Pierre Clastres

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. The book collects the chapters of a work Clastres started writing before his death—the two last chapters of Archeology of Violence—and Clastres's last essays. Ranging from articles about ethnocide and shamanism to "primitive" power, economy and war, 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".

Considered his major work for introducing the concept of "Society against the State", La Société contre l'État. Recherches d'anthropologie politique was first published by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1974. 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. In 1989, Zone Books republished it as Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. 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".

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

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). 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. In the book, the author describes Guayaki culture with a focus on their cycle of life and their "daily struggles for survival." He describes their mores on rites of passage, marriage, hunting, warfare, and death, as well as their relation with non-Indian people and nature. In 1976 Paul Auster, then a "penniless unknown", translated the book into English but it was only published in 1998 by Zone Books. 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."

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. 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. 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. Later that year, Clastres, aged 43, died in Gabriac, Lozère, on 29 July, in a car accident.

"The Last Frontier" and "The Highpoint of the Cruise" were originally published in Les Temps modernes in 1971. "Savage Ethnography" and "Of Ethnocide" were published in L'Homme in 1969 and 1974 respectively. For Flammarion's Dictionnaire des mythologies et des religions (1981), Clastres wrote "Myths and Rites of South American Indians". Interrogations was the journal in which "Power in Primitive Societies" was released in 1976. "Freedom, Misfortune, the Unnameable" was written for a 1976 scholarly edition of Étienne de La Boétie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. "Primitive Economy" was the title given to the preface Clastres wrote for the French edition of Marshall Sahlins's Stone Age Economics. "The Return to Enlightenment" was released in Revue Française de Science politique in 1977. Both "Archeology of Violence: War in Primitive Societies" and "Sorrows of the Savage Warrior" were published in Libre in 1977, and "Marxists and Their Anthropology" was published on the same journal in 1978.

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. 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". Differently, Warren Breckman concluded Clastres's view on State helped the antitotalitarian current of 1970s French thought.

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". Clastres, however, argued that power does not imply either coercion or violence, and proposed a "Copernican revolution" 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."

In 1965 Clastres returned to Paraguay and he met the Guaraní—this encounter led him to write Le Grand Parler (1974). In 1966 and 1968 Clastres went into expeditions to the Gran Chaco region of Paraguay, where he studied groups of Chulupi people. This experience was used to produce the essays What Makes Indians Laugh and Sorrows of the Savage Warrior. In his fourth expedition Clastres travelled to Venezuela, where he observed the Yanomami people from 1970 to 1971, and wrote The Last Frontier. He briefly visited the Guaraní which migrated from Paraguay to Brazil in his last expedition in 1974.

Clastres's first published article was released in 1962, a year before Clastres went into an eight-month trip to a Guayaki community in Paraguay with the help of Métraux. The Guayaki's study served as base to an article for Journal de la Société des Américanistes, to his 1965 doctoral thesis in ethnology—Social Life of a Nomadic Tribe: The Guayaki Indians of Paraguay—, to "The Bow and the Basket", as well as to his first book, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (1972).

"Exchange and Power" was originally published in the journal L'Homme in 1962. In the same journal were published "Independence and Exogamy" in 1963, "The Bow and the Basket" in 1966, "Elements of Amerindian Demography" and "Of Torture in Primitive Societies" in 1973. "What Makes Indians Laugh" was originally published in Les Temps modernes in 1967, and "Copernicus and the Savages" was published in Critique in 1969. "Prophets in the Jungle" and "Of the One Without the Many" were both published in L'Éphémère in 1969 and 1972 respectively. In 1973, "The Duty to Speak" was released on Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse.

With Structuralism's crisis in the later 1960s, Marxist anthropology became an alternative to it. 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. 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." 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. 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. Clastres wrote,

Initially a member of the Union of Communist Students with influences from the libertarian socialist group Socialisme ou Barbarie, Clastres became disenchanted with Communism after the raising of Stalinism and abandoned the French Communist Party in 1956, seeking for a new point of view. 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." Although initially adept of Structuralism, Abensour wrote that "Clastres is neither Structuralist, nor Marxist." 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." For Clastres, in Viveiros de Castro's words, "both privileged economic rationality and suppressed political intentionality."

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).

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.

Clastres was born on 17 May 1934, in Paris, France. He studied at University of Sorbonne, obtaining a licence in Literature in 1957, and a Diplôme d'études supérieures spécialisées in Philosophy the following year. He began working in Anthropology after 1956 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. He was also a student of Alfred Métraux at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) in 1959.