Archeology of Violence (review)

I came across the work of Pierre Clastres quite by chance several years ago at a large bookstore affiliated with an uptown university in New York. The title drew my interest and when I saw that the novelist Paul Auster had provided the translation, I grew more intrigued. Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians was a revelation of sorts that Clastres's previous book in English, Society against the State, framed. Here was an anthropologist whose research had convinced him that much of his predecessors' works on primitive societies had missed the point, some by a large degree, some by a small degree. Simply, despite the ethnographic evidence, anthropology was not immune from the ideological distortions that Western culture commonly made when considering primitive societies. Knowing how they lived did not ensure that we understood why they lived as they did. And at the heart of that distortion was the power of the state; a monumental presence that we, if only for the sake of clarity, struggle to engage and disengage.

Archeology of Violence, now in a new edition, carries a similar potency, if in more discrete, self-contained chapters—twelve, in fact, which focus on seminal issues dealing with the state and alterity, which Europe met in Native America.

By his insights, Clastres revives the question of what alterity is and what it implies. His vigor in questioning has also served to instill a political context within anthropology precise to the culture and what we bring to it. From his docu-satire on tourism to his discussions of ethnocide, myths and rituals, primitive power and economy, the forms of submission so essential to states, the ethnocentrism of Marxist anthropology, the abstractions of structuralism, and war and the warrior in primitive societies, we are left with an evolving view that was cut off by his sudden death in 1977, at the age of 43.

How much of this has anthropology taken to heart since then, and refined or refuted, is not for me to say. I am no expert. But when reading Clastres I am compelled by his thought, the evidence he presents, and his capacity for a kind of interpretation that raises issues that strike home because of their immanence. Primary among them is our need for alterity, our expectation, however problematic, that it is still present, and the growing impoverishment of our world, whose diverse reflections may very well congeal to a single covalent image mediated by commodity exchange and hierarchical structures of governance.

Is this the legacy that we will leave to future generations? For Clastres, as I believe for most of us, it seems so. And yet, because he uses science well, and knows the difference between qualities of logic, which theory all too often appeals to, and experience, which vitiates theory of its abstractions, his views open a glimpse on alterity that may yet prompt us to discern ways to nourish it as we can—a vivacity that Clastres seeks even as his—and our—time constrains it. With the stunning image that flashed across our screens in May 2008 of a "last uncontacted tribe" in the Amazon jungle near the Peruvian border, in an aptly named "ethno-environmental protected area," there is little question that the road ahead is opaque.

Most important, I think, is Clastres' insistence that our failures of interpretation, when faced with primitive hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies, close the door on their worth as human organizations within the context of their needs and desires; for those societies, as he often reiterates, are based not on subsistence but affluence, not in unity but differentiation, not in subservience but freedom (albeit a type of freedom that we find difficult to accept), and not in ignorance but with knowledge. Alienated individuality, as we know it in the West, is certainly not the point here.

War is also a central theme for Clastres. And why shouldn't it be? In primitive societies war is a global phenomenon, with very few exceptions. It is also...