Pierre Clastres

Robert Hurley

"The thesis is radical," writes Marshall Sahlins of this landmark text in anthropology and political science. "We conventionally define the state as the regulation of violence; it may be the origin of it. Clastres's thesis is that economic expropriation and political coercion are inconsistent with the character of tribal society - which is to say, with the greater part of human history."Can there be a society that is not divided into oppressors and oppressed, or that refuses coercive state apparatuses? In this beautifully written book, Pierre Clastres offers examples of South American Indian groups that, although without hierarchical leadership, were both affluent and complex. In so doing he refutes the usual negative definition of tribal society and poses its order as a radical critique of our own Western state of power.Born in 1934, Pierre Clastres was educated at the Sorbonne; throughout the 1960s he lived with Indian groups in Paraguay and Venezuela. From 1971 until his death in 1979 he was Director of Studies at the fifth section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris and held the Chair of Religion and Societies of the South American Indians there.Robert Hurley is the translator of the History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault and cotranslator of Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

Essays in Political Anthropology

Society Against the State

Archeology of Violence

Pierre Clastres (1934-1977) é um dos mais brilhantes intelectuais do século XX, discípulo de Lévi-Strauss e autor da fundamental coletânea de ensaios A sociedade contra o Estado (1974), obra que revolucionou os estudos de antropologia ao tomar a perspectiva indígena como foco para se constituir uma nova filosofia política.
No início de 1963, após aprender durante quatro meses a língua dos índios Guayaki, ou Aché, em Paris, Pierre Clastres partiu para sua primeira missão etnológica, uma permanência de quase um ano entre a tribo dos Aché Gatu no Paraguai, misteriosos indígenas caçadores e nômades que habitavam as florestas a oeste do rio Paraná, desconheciam a agricultura, eram adversários dos Guarani e, dizia-se, poderiam ser canibais.
O resultado dessa viagem de pesquisa é este Crônica dos índios Guayaki, primeiro livro do autor, lançado em 1972, em que estão as bases do pensamento de Clastres. Da narrativa do nascimento de um bebê até a virtual morte da tribo, é um estudo profundo e afetuoso da vida cotidiana, dos costumes e da visão de mundo desse povo, com uma tal qualidade literária que levou o escritor Paul Auster, tradutor do volume para o inglês, a registrar: “É impossível não gostar deste livro”.

O que sabem os Aché, caçadores nômades do Paraguai

Crônica dos índios Guayaki

pesquisas de antropologia política

A sociedade contra o estado

مجتمع اللادولة

Manuel João Gomes

Júlio Henriques

Étienne de La Boétie

Brueghel

La Boétie atinge os segredos políticos dos séculos vindouros (Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau), fazendo-o porém com uma maior lucidez, que o leva a recusar qualquer visão ideal das relações entre o Estado e o cidadão. O Discurso extravasa dos moldes duma leitura política tradicional. O repetido fascínio que exerce provém de igualmente lançar os fundamentos dum estudo das relações entre o domínio e a servidão nas relações íntimas, interpessoais. Deste Discurso não extraímos uma simples lição política, extraímos igualmente uma lição ética, moral, como um apelo a rejeitar das nossas próprias entranhas a figura ameaçadora, e cruel, e adorada, do tirano.

Discurso sobre a servidão voluntária

Pierre Clastres (1934-1979) was one of the most respected political anthropologistsof our time. Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians is an account of his first fieldwork in the early1960s--an encounter with a small, unique, and now vanished Paraguayan tribe. From "Birth" to "TheEnd," Clastres follows the Guayakis in their everyday lives, determined to record every detail oftheir history, ritual, myths, and culture in order to answer the many questions prompted by hispersonal experiences. Now available for the first time in English in a beautiful translation by thenovelist Paul Auster, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians will alter radically not only the Westernacademic conventions in which other cultures are thought but also the discipline of politicalanthropology itself.

Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians

lo que saben los Aché, cazadores nómadas del Paraguay

Crónica de los indios Guayaquís

The posthumous publication in French of Archeology of Violence in 1980 gathered together Clastres's final groundbreaking essays and the opening chapters of the book he had begun before his death in 1977. Elaborating upon the conclusions of such earlier works as Society Against the State, Clastres turns around the analysis of power among South American Indians and rehabilitates violence as an affirmative act meant to protect the integrity of their societies and presents us with a generalogy of power in a native state. For him, tribal societies are not Rousseauist in essence; to the contrary, they practice systematic violence in order to prevent the rise in their midst of this "cold monster": the state. Only by waging war with other tribes can they maintain the dispersion and autonomy of each group. In the same way, tribal chiefs are not all-powerful; to the contrary, they are rendered weak in order to remain dependent on the community. In a series of groundbreaking essays, Clastres turns around the analysis of power among South American Indians and rehabilitates violence as an affirmative act meant to protect the integrity of their societies. These "savages" are shrewd political minds who resist in advance any attempt at "globalization".

Archeology of Violence, New Edition

La sociedad contra el Estado

Pierre Clastres

About

Books

Join the club