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Ethnohistory 47.3-4 (2000) 818-821



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Book Review

Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians


Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians. By Pierre Clastres. Translated and with a foreword by Paul Auster. (New York: Zone Books, 1998. 349 pp., 57 illustrations, translator’s note. $22.50 cloth).

If anachronism can be used as a device for highlighting contrasting eras, this volume may become important for its shock value. The style harkens back to a period of ethnographic writing and crude construction of a primitive “other” from which most present-day anthropologists take care to distance themselves. Published in 1998, three decades after the original fieldwork was done and twenty-six years after its initial French publication, this book is divorced from the context in which it was originally conceived and written. Because of its controversial narrative style, the absence of an editorial introduction or preface to this volume will likely inhibit its acceptance in academic circles.

Pierre Clastres, his wife Hélène, and Lucien Sebag spent eight months between February and September 1963 in Paraguay among a small group of recently settled Ache (variously spelled Atchei, Aché, and Axe). They collected information on the people of the “colony” with particular interest in rituals, motivated by a desire to document a culture that they felt was destined to oblivion: “The news spread in ethnological circles: at last this enigmatic tribe, which had been in hiding for centuries, could be studied” (76). [End Page 818] Both the author and the translator make frequent references to the inevitability of the disappearance of this group. For Clastres, “It was the weary, confused, and empty face that told me the end of the Atchei had come” (343). In the introduction, written in 1997, translator Paul Auster writes, “No matter that the world described in [the book] has long since vanished” (13).

The material presented describes the important moments in the Ache life cycle, including birth, initiation rites, marriage, and death. Clastres also focuses on the intimate relationship between the Ache and the environment, gender relations and the division of labor, and the social and political structure of the bands. Much of this information is detailed and reported with a notable sympathy for the Ache. In a chapter on homosexuality, for example, Clastres relates the life story of two men who strayed from that which Clastres has presented as rigidly constructed male and female genders. Clastres also provides details of cannibalism, a theme to which he alludes throughout the text, and which allegedly distinguishes one group of Ache from the others. When the original French edition was published, the chapter on cannibalism had been published separately; it subsequently appeared in English in a compilation of articles on South American natives. Clastres clearly felt that this was his most exciting finding: “Here it was: the Atchei Gatu were indeed cannibals, and I did not have the slightest doubt that this creased and wrinkled little old woman was telling me the truth” as he endeavored to disguise from her “the value of the treasure she had laid in my lap” (319).

Arguably the most significant and devastating experience for the Ache at the time of Clastres’s visit was the circumscription of their hunting grounds, their confinement to colonies and reserves, and the sustained brutal acts of aggression to which they had been subjected for several decades. The Beeru, or whites, had penetrated the forest to establish farms, and Clastres describes them as empowered by the official system to systematically kill, capture, and enslave the Ache. “Throughout the region of San Juan Nepomuceno, the Guayaki were highly valued, their average price being one cow or one good horse apiece” (69). Clastres undertook his study in a camp, Arroyo Moroti, which had been established to settle the Ache by a Paraguayan who had “gained great prestige throughout the region for having succeeded in pacifying the Guayaki” (80). This man had also become the “tribal chieftain,” according to Clastres (69). From that encampment the surrounding area was penetrated, and other bands of Ache were encouraged to relent and join the settlement. One such group joined...

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