Product Code Database
Pierre Clastres (; 17 May 1934 – 29 July 1977) was a French Anthropology, Ethnography, and Ethnology. He is best known for his contributions to the field of political anthropology, with his fieldwork among the Guayakis 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 Tribal chief 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 (1974) and his bibliography also includes Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (1972), Le Grand Parler (1974), and Archeology of Violence (1980).
Clastres's first published article was released in 1962, a year before Clastres went into an eight-month trip to a Guayakis 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).
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.
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.
Although its literary qualities have been what attracted Auster, the work has been criticized as "romanticism". Anthropologist Clifford Geertz said Clastres had a "Rousseauian primitivism, the view that 'noble savage' 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 Structuralism. 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".
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 (i.e., the prophets). 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.
"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 Samuel Moyn, Clastres's first article, Exchange and Power, "exhibited a vestigial structuralism" that he would abandon on subsequent essays. On "Marxists and Their Anthropology" Clastres criticised structuralist perspective on myth and kinship because it ignores their place of production—the society. 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 Urgesellschaft as such, that is, an undivided society made up of equals: kinship, society, equality, even combat." 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."
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,
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." Because of his analysis of power and the State, several commentators say Clastres posites an "anthropological anarchism" or exhibits anarchist influences.
In another essay, Exchange and Power, he argued that South American Indigenous Tribal chief are powerless chiefs; they are chosen on the basis of their oratorical talent. And while they have the exclusive right to be Polygyny, they have to be generous and offer gifts to their people. 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." 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." 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.
On a similar fashion, Clastres argued that war could not be seen as a problem but that it had a political reason. He pointed it was not a constant state of war like the Thomas Hobbes but that it occurred only between different groups. He argued that internal war was purposeful and kept the group segmented, non-hierarchized; 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." Clastres stated:
On the other hand, his vision of tribal societies without conflict was deemed "romantic" by critics such as Marcus Colchester and Samuel Moyn. 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."
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.
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". 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. 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".
The influence of Clastres on the philosophers Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan in their philosophical and political writings has been noted. 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". 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."
|
|
