Pierre Clastres

Pierre Clastres (17 May 1934 – 29 July 1977) was a French anthropologist 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. An anarchist seeking an alternative to the hierarchized Western societies, he mostly researched indigenous people in which the power was not considered coercive and chiefs were powerless.

Quotes

Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology

La Société contre l’état, Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1974, as translated by Robert Hurley in collaboration with Abe Stein, Zone Books, 1989.

• Negation does not signify nothingness. ... When the mirror does not reflect our own likeness, it does not prove there is nothing to perceive.
  • "Copernicus and the Savages," p. 20

• The social sciences ... believe they can insure their scientific status by breaking all links to what they call philosophy. ... It is to be feared that, under the alias of philosophy, it is simply thought itself they are trying to expel. Does this mean, then, that science and thought are mutually exclusive: that science is constructed from non-thought, or even anti-thought? The nonsense — sometimes mild, sometimes abrasive — uttered from all sides by the militants of “science” seems to lean in that direction. But in this instance one must be able to recognize where this frantic inclination to anti-thought leads: under the cover of “science,” of epigonal platitudes, or less simple-minded endeavors, it leads straight to obscurantism.
  • "Copernicus and the Savages," p. 26

• Primitive societies are societies without a State. This factual judgment, accurate in itself, actually hides an opinion, a value judgment that immediately throws doubt on the possibility of constituting political anthropology as a strict science. What the statement says, in fact, is that primitive societies are missing something — the State — that is essential to them, as it is to any other society: our own, for instance.
  • "Society Against the State," p. 189

• Consequently, those societies are incomplete; they are not quite true societies — they are not civilized — their existence continues to suffer the painful experience of a lack — the lack of a State — which, try as they may, they will never make up. Whether clearly stated or not, that is what comes through in the explorers’ chronicles and the work of researchers alike: society is inconceivable without the State; the State is the destiny of every society.
  • "Society Against the State," p. 189

• One detects an ethnocentric bias in this approach; more often than not it is unconscious, and so the more firmly anchored. Its immediate, spontaneous reference, while perhaps not the best known, is in any case the most familiar. In effect, each one of us carries within himself, internalized like the believer’s faith, the certitude that society exists for the State. How, then, can one conceive of the very existence of primitive societies if not as the rejects of universal history, anachronistic relics of a remote stage that everywhere else has been transcended?
  • "Society Against the State," p. 189

• Here one recognizes ethnocentrism’s other face, the complementary conviction that history is a one-way progression, that every society is condemned to enter into that history and pass through the stages which lead from savagery to civilization. “All civilized peoples were once savages,” wrote Raynal. But the assertion of an obvious evolution cannot justify a doctrine which, arbitrarily tying the state of civilization to the civilization of the State, designates the latter as the necessary end result assigned to all societies. One may ask what has kept the last of the primitive peoples as they are.
  • "Society Against the State," p. 190

• If one understands by technics the set of procedures men acquire not to ensure the absolute mastery of nature (that obtains only for our world and its insane Cartesian project, whose ecological consequences are just beginning to be measured), but to ensure a mastery of the natural environment suited and relative to their needs, then there is no longer any reason whatever to impute a technical inferiority to primitive societies: they demonstrate an ability to satisfy their needs which is at least equal to that of which industrial and technological society is so proud.
  • "Society Against the State," p. 191

External links

• Full text of Society Against the State