Pierre Clastres
Pierre Clastres 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. He mostly researched Indigenous peoples of the Americas in which the power was not considered coercive and chieftains were powerless.
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 and his bibliography also includes Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians, Le Grand Parler, and Archeology of Violence.
Life and career
Clastres was born on 17 May 1934, in Paris, France. He studied at the 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 in 1959.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.
In 1965 Clastres returned to Paraguay and he met the Guaraní—this encounter led him to write Le Grand Parler. 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.
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.
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. 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."File:Paul Auster Brooklyn 2010 Shankbone.jpg|thumb|left|180px|Chronicle of the Guayaki Indianss literary qualities attracted novelist Paul Auster; critics, however, qualified it as a "romantic" work.
Although its literary qualities have been what attracted Auster, the work has been criticized as "romantic". 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." 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."
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." 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."
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". 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".
''Society Against the State''
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".''Le Grand Parler''
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.In addition to his translation from Guarani, the exegesis Clastres offered of these texts was criticized in two ways: either he saw subtlety where there was none, or he missed the true political philosophy of the karai. In his analysis of the Great Speech, the Paraguayan anthropologist Ruiz Zubizarreta, a specialist in Guarani culture, highlights the place of this book within Pierre Clastres’ theoretical framework. He explains that it is the prophetic speech of the pre-Columbian era that drew the French anthropologist’s interest. In Society Against the State, Clastres states that in the 15th century, there were, on one side, the chiefs, and on the other, and opposed to them, the prophets — and that during this pre-Columbian period, 'the prophetic machine functioned perfectly.' However, the Paraguayan anthropologist points out that Clastres may have stripped the Guarani texts of all colonial and Christian influences in order to align them with his theories.
''Archeology of Violence''
Recherches d'anthropologie politique, posthumously published in France by Éditions du Seuil in 1980, was first translated into English by Semiotext 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"."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, 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.