num_pages: 352
description: <p><P>Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians is an account of Clastres's first fieldwork in the early 1960s&mdash;an encounter with a small, unique, and now vanished Paraguayan tribe.</p> <h3>The Jersusalem Post September 9, 1998 - Meir Ronnen</h3> <p>This extraordinary book, about the life and death of a band of Indians who lived in the Paraguyan jungle exactly as their forebears did for tens of thousands of years, is a stunning reminder that the hunter-gatherers of this planet were, in fact, just like us (in some ways they were smarter: how many of us can design and weave a basket for carrying herbs and fruit?)... The survival of the book is a saga in itself. It was translated into English by a then-impecunious Paul Auster back in 1976, rejected by a string of publishers and finally taken up by one who tried to swindle the translator; when the publishing firm folded, the sole copy of Auster's translation vanished with it. Twenty years later, at one of Auster's book signings in San Francisco, a young collector presented a flabbergasted Auster with the uncorrected proofs of his long&#151;lost manuscript. He told the astonished Auster that he had found them in a remaindered bin at a secondhand bookstore and paid $5 for them, solely because Auster's name was on the cover. Auster still sees the publication of the book (which contains some of Clastre's photographs) as not just an important contribution to anthropology, but as a small triumph against the crushing odds of fate.</p>
language: en
title: Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians
publisher: Zone Books