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

The late French anthropologist Pierre Clastres describes in novelistic detail his encounter with a now vanished Paraguayan tribe. Pierre Clastres (1934-1979) was one of the most respected political anthropologists of our time. Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians is an account of his first fieldwork in the early 1960s--an encounter with a small, unique, and now vanished Paraguayan tribe. From "Birth" to "The End," Clastres follows the Guayakis in their everyday lives, determined to record every detail of their history, ritual, myths, and culture in order to answer the many questions prompted by his personal experiences. Now available for the first time in English in a beautiful translation by the novelist Paul Auster, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians will alter radically not only the Western academic conventions in which other cultures are thought but also the discipline of political anthropology itself.

Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians

pesquisas de antropologia política

A sociedade contra o estado

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.

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

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.

O poder nem sempre é exercido numa relação hierárquica de dominação e submissão – esta é a tese desenvolvida por Pierre Clastres neste que é um dos mais importantes trabalhos de antropologia política do século XX. Os onze artigos, publicados entre 1962 e 1974, fazem uso do arcabouço teórico desenvolvido por autores franceses como Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault. O autor se baseia em estudos etnológicos e em sua vivência com populações indígenas da América do Sul para formular um novo conceito de política. O livro foi uma referência importante no argumento de Mil platôs, de Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari. De acordo com a visão corrente na época, as sociedades primitivas seriam desprovidas de uma esfera política por não apresentarem formas de exercício de poder iguais às ocidentais – isto é, as relações hierarquizadas e autoritárias de comando-obediência que normalmente são associadas ao Estado. O autor reivindica uma revolução copérnica que liberte a antropologia desta postura etnocêntrica e possibilite uma interpretação mais ampla das relações de poder, abrindo o caminho para o estudo da política nesses povos. Ao analisar as características da posição do chefe, Clastres defende que a ausência de Estado não é casual. Ao contrário, as sociedades primitivas fazem um esforço ativo de regular as interações do chefe com o grupo, estabelecendo os parâmetros segundo os quais as trocas ocorrerão. Clastres propõe uma inversão da lógica marxista segundo a qual o poder de poucos sobre muitos deriva da desigualdade social; defende, ao contrário, que a desigualdade é uma consequência da atribuição de um poder autoritário a um grupo dominante. Assim, em oposição ao conceito de sociedade sem Estado, ele propõe o de sociedade contra o Estado: sociedades que atuam impedindo a conversão do poder do chefe em autoritarismo. A coleção Argonautas traça uma linhagem do pensamento antropológico que tem como centro de força o estruturalismo de Claude Lévi-Strauss.

A sociedade contra o Estado

lo que saben los Aché, cazadores nómadas del Paraguay

Crónica de los indios Guayaquís

Ao narrar seu encontro com os Aché ou Guayaki, um dos poucos grupos indígenas isolados da América do Sul, Pierre Clastres - mais conhecido por sua radical reflexão política a partir do marco teórico do estruturalismo - produziu uma obra singular, que se lê como um precioso romance filosófico.

o que sabem os Aché

In this seminal, founding work of political anthropology, Pierre Clastres takes on some of the most abiding and essential questions of human civilization: What is power? What is society? How, among all the possible modes of political organization, did we come to choose the monolithic State model and its accompanying regimes of coercion? As Clastres shows, other and different regimes do indeed exist, and they existed long before ours — regimes in which power, though it manifests itself everywhere, is nonetheless noncoercive. In such societies, political culture, and cultural practices generally, are not only not submissive to the State model, but they actively avert it, rendering impossible the very conditions in which coercive power and the State could arise. How then could our own “societies of the State” ever have arisen from these rich and complex stateless societies, and why? Clastres brilliantly and imaginatively addresses these questions, meditating on the peculiar shape and dynamics of so-called “primitive societies,” and especially on the discourses with which “civilized” (i.e., political, economic, literate) peoples have not ceased to reduce and contain them. He refutes outright the idea that the State is the ultimate and logical density of all societies. On the contrary, Clastres develops a whole alternate and always affirmative political technology based on values such as leisure, prestige, and generosity. Through individual essays he explores and deftly situates the anarchistic political and social roles of storytelling, homosexuality, jokes, ruinous gift-giving, and the torturous ritual marking of the body, placing them within an economy of power and desire very different from our own, one whose most fundamental goal is to celebrate life while rendering the rise of despotic power impossible. Though power itself is shown to be inseparable from the richest and most complex forms of social life, the State is seen as a specific but grotesque aberration peculiar only to certain societies, not least of which is our own. Not for sale in the U.K. and British Commonwealth, South Africa, Burma, Jordan, and Iraq.

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

Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians is Pierre Clastres’s account of his 1963–64 encounter with this small Paraguayan tribe, a precise and detailed recording of the history, ritual, myths, and culture of this remarkably unique, and now vanished, people. “Determined not to let the slightest detail” escape him or to leave unanswered the many questions prompted by his personal experiences, Clastres follows the Guayaki in their everyday lives. Now available for the first time in a stunningly beautiful translation by Paul Auster, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians radically alters not only the Western academic conventions in which other cultures are thought but also the discipline of political anthropology itself. Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians was awarded the Alta Prize in nonfiction by the American Literary Translators Association.

Mark A. Miller

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