Pierre Clastres

Pierre Clastres (pjɛʁ klastʁ; 17 May 1934 – 29 July 1977) was a French anthropologist, ethnographer, 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 peoples of the Americas in which the power was not considered coercive and chieftains 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 was born on 17 May 1934, in Paris, France. He studied at University of Sorbonne, obtaining a licence in Literature in 1957, and a Diplôme d'études supérieures spécialisées in Philosophy the following year. He began working in Anthropology after 1956 as a student of Claude Lévi-Strauss, working at the Laboratory of Social Anthropology of the French National Centre for Scientific Research during the 1960s. He was also a student of Alfred Métraux at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) in 1959. Clastres's first published article was released in 1962, a year before Clastres went into an eight-month trip to a Guayaki 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).