{"title":"Pierre Clastres","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"chronicle-of-the-guayaki-indians-book-pierre-clastres-9780571193981","title":"Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians","description":"In the 1960s the anthropologist Pierre Clastres spent a year with a so-called \"savage\" tribe of Indians in Paraguay. This is his account of that experience, describing the tribe's daily life and habits, ritual and cosmology - and the anger which caused them to start murdering their own children.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49534827266321,"sku":"GOR003113163","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50787591160081,"sku":"GOR004640996","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0571193986.jpg?v=1750742101"},{"product_id":"society-against-the-state-essays-in-political-anthropology-book-pierre-clastres-9780942299014","title":"Society Against the State  Essays in Political Anthropology","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e 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?\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eNot for sale in the U.K. and British Commonwealth, South Africa, Burma, Jordan, and Iraq.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49675102388497,"sku":"CIN0942299019VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49731168633105,"sku":"NGR9780942299014","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49872953671953,"sku":"CIN0942299019G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51009532657937,"sku":"NIN9780942299014","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0942299019.jpg?v=1751266611"},{"product_id":"archeology-of-violence-book-pierre-clastres-9781584350934","title":"Archeology of Violence","description":"\u003cb\u003eClastres's final, posthumous book on the affirmative role of violence in \"primitive societies.\"\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe 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 \u003ci\u003eArcheology of Violence\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAnthropologist and ethnographer Pierre Clastres was a major influence on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, and his writings formed an essential chapter in the discipline of political anthropology. The posthumous publication in French of \u003ci\u003eArcheology of Violence\u003c\/i\u003e 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 Levi-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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49733836308753,"sku":"NGR9781584350934","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50195620266257,"sku":"GOR010675011","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51693206176017,"sku":"CIN1584350938G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53203979338001,"sku":"NLS9781584350934","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1584350938.jpg?v=1751309968"},{"product_id":"chronicle-of-the-guayaki-indians-book-pierre-clastres-9780942299786","title":"Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe late French anthropologist Pierre Clastres describes in novelistic detail his encounter with a now vanished Paraguayan tribe.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePierre Clastres (1934-1979) was one of the most respected political anthropologists of our time. \u003ci\u003eChronicle of the Guayaki Indians\u003c\/i\u003e 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, \u003ci\u003eChronicle of the Guayaki Indians\u003c\/i\u003e will alter radically not only the Western academic conventions in which other cultures are thought but also the discipline of political anthropology itself.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50702070710545,"sku":"CIN0942299787VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51009471447313,"sku":"NIN9780942299786","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52492464161041,"sku":"CIN0942299787G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0942299787.jpg?v=1750747506"},{"product_id":"chronicle-of-the-guayaki-indians-book-pierre-clastres-9780942299779","title":"Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe late French anthropologist Pierre Clastres describes in novelistic detail his encounter with a now vanished Paraguayan tribe.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePierre Clastres (1934-1979) was one of the most respected political anthropologists of our time. \u003ci\u003eChronicle of the Guayaki Indians\u003c\/i\u003e 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, \u003ci\u003eChronicle of the Guayaki Indians\u003c\/i\u003e will alter radically not only the Western academic conventions in which other cultures are thought but also the discipline of political anthropology itself.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50763557306641,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50763560321297,"sku":"CIN0942299779VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0942299779.jpg?v=1750916755"},{"product_id":"society-against-the-state-essays-in-political-anthropology-book-pierre-clastres-9780942299007","title":"Society Against the State - Essays in Political Anthropology","description":"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. \u003cp\u003eBorn 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\u0026gt;\u003ci\u003eHistory of Sexuality\u003c\/i\u003e by Michel Foucault and cotranslator of\u0026gt;\u003ci\u003eAnti-Oedipus\u003c\/i\u003e by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53098794483985,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53098794549521,"sku":"CIN0942299000G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780942299007.jpg?v=1770223449"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-pierre-clastres.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}