Pierre Clastres
| Pierre Clastres | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
11 May 1934 Paris, France |
| Died |
29 July 1977 (aged 43) Gabriac, France |
| Fields | Anthropology |
| Institutions |
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| Alma mater | University of Sorbonne |
| Thesis | La vie social d'une tribu nomade: les Indiens Guayaki du Paraguay (1965) |
| Known for |
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| Influences | |
| Influenced | Miguel Abensour · Gilles Deleuze · Marcel Gauchet · David Graeber · Félix Guattari · James C. Scott |
Pierre Clastres (French pronunciation: [klastʁ]; 17 May 1934 – 29 July 1977) 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. 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 since 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 (1974) and his bibliography also includes Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (1972), Le Grand Parler (1974), and Archeology of Violence (1980).
Clastres was born on 17 May 1934, in Paris, France. He studied at University of Sorbonne, obtaining a licence in Literature in 1957, and a Diplôme d'études supérieures spécialisées in Philosophy in the following year. He went into working with Anthropology after 1956 as student of Claude Lévi-Strauss, working at the Laboratory of Social Anthropology of the French National Centre for Scientific Research during the 1960s. He was also a student of Alfred Métraux at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) in 1959.
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