page_title: Pierre Clastres
section_title: Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians
hierarchical_section_title: Pierre Clastres / Works / Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians
caption_attribution_description: English: Paul Auster at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival.
context_page_description: Pierre Clastres was a French anthropologist 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 people in which the power was not considered coercive and chiefs 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 and his bibliography also includes Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians, Le Grand Parler, and Archeology of Violence.
context_section_description: Clastres's first book was originally published in France by Plon in 1972 under the title Chronique des indiens Guayaki: ce que que savent les Aché, chasseurs nomades du Paraguay (Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians: The Knowledge of the Aché Hunter Nomads of Paraguay). He was interested in Guayaki because there was little research on them since Alfredo Stroessner's dictatorship forced them to live under territorial restriction and launched a pacifying campaign between 1959 and 1962. In the book, the author describes Guayaki culture with a focus on their cycle of life and their "daily struggles for survival." He describes their mores on rites of passage, marriage, hunting, warfare, and death, as well as their relation with non-Indian people and nature. In 1976 Paul Auster, then a "penniless unknown", translated the book into English but it was only published in 1998 by Zone Books. Auster translated the work because he was fascinated by Clastres's prose, which "seemed to combine a poet's temperament with a philosopher's depth of mind."
  Although its literary qualities have been what attracted Auster, the work has been criticized as "romantic". Anthropologist Clifford Geertz said Clastres had a "Rousseauian primitivism, the view that 'savages' are radically different from us, more authentic than us, morally superior to us, and need only to be protected, presumably by us, from our greed and cruelty." Bartholomew Dean, writing for the journal Anthropology Today, declared, "Clastres' ahistoricism, rhetorical romanticism, and museumification sadly obscures the ongoing challenges facing indigenous peoples like the Guayaki."
  In opposition to Geertz and Dean, David Rains Wallace said it was an "unsettling" work because it "is not quite the nostalgic view of primitive life that now prevails in literary circles." Wallace asserted Clastres's "might have misinterpreted" the Guayaki's relation with nature because "he was predisposed to see stronger oppositions between culture and nature" as a Structuralist. However, he wrote "Whatever the validity ... of Clastres' interpretation of Guayaki thought, his evocation of their lost lives has great charm, an attraction that arises automatically from our civilized fascination with wild people who seem so strange at first, dodging naked through the forest, but who prove to be so much like us in feelings if not in thought and habits."
  In Anthropology Today, Jon Abbink explained the historical context in which Clastres wrote the book and argued, "in presenting them as 'indigenes' with specific cultural values and identity, he has also tried to ground their presence and their historical rights". Abbink also refused the idea it had not a critical perspective; Clastres's focus on the problems Western society could bring to the Guayaki is against "the arrogant idea ... that they should be reformed in our image and respond to our models of social and economic life".
caption: Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians's literary qualities attracted novelist Paul Auster; critics, however, qualified it as a "romantic" work.
exif: {"Image Make": "OLYMPUS IMAGING CORP.", "Image Model": "E-500", "Image XResolution": "314", "Image YResolution": "314", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "PhotoScape", "Image DateTime": "0000:00:00 00:00:00", "Image WhitePoint": "[0, 0]", "Image PrimaryChromaticities": "[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]", "Image YCbCrCoefficients": "[0, 0, 0]", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "0", "Image ReferenceBlackWhite": "[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]", "Image ExifOffset": "394", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/160", "EXIF FNumber": "9/2", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Manual", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "[100, 100]", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "0000:00:00 00:00:00", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "0000:00:00 00:00:00", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "0", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "0", "EXIF ApertureValue": "0", "EXIF BrightnessValue": "0", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "3613281/1000000", "EXIF SubjectDistance": "0", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Spot", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "8", "EXIF FocalLength": "104", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "0", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2504", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3340", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "0", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "0", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "0", "EXIF ExposureIndex": "0", "EXIF SensingMethod": "0", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "0"}