Clastres's final, posthumous book on the affirmative role of violence
in "primitive societies."
The war machine is the motor of the social machine; the primitive social
being relies entirely on war, primitive society cannot survive without
war. The more war there is, the less unification there is, and the best
enemy of the State is war. Primitive society is society against the
State in that it is society-for-war.--from the Archeology of Violence
Anthropologist and ethnographer Pierre Clastres was a major influence on
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, and his writings
formed an essential chapter in the discipline of political anthropology.
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 at the age of
43. Elaborating upon the conclusions of such earlier works as Society
Against the State, in these essays Clastres critiques his former mentor,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, and devastatingly rejects the orthodoxy of Marxist
anthropology and other Western interpretive models of "primitive
societies." Discarding the traditional anthropological understanding of
war among South American Indians as arising from a scarcity of
resources, Clastres instead identifies violence among these peoples as a
deliberate means to territorial segmentation and the avoidance of a
State formation. In their refusal to separate the political from the
social, and in their careful control of their tribal chiefs--who are
rendered weak so as to remain dependent on the communities they
represent--the "savages" Clastres presents prove to be shrewd political
minds who resist in advance any attempt at "globalization."The essays in
this, Clastres's final book, cover subjects ranging from ethnocide and
shamanism to "primitive" power and economy, and are as vibrant and
engaging as they were thirty years ago. This new edition--which includes
an introduction by Eduardo Viverios de Castro--holds even more relevance
for readers in today's an era of malaise and globalization.
