20 Facts About Pierre Clastres

Pierre Clastres was a French anthropologist, ethnographer, and ethnologist.

Pierre Clastres 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.

Pierre Clastres mostly published essays and, because of his premature death, his work was unfinished and scattered.

Pierre Clastres was born on 17 May 1934, in Paris, France.

Pierre Clastres studied at University of Sorbonne, obtaining a licence in Literature in 1957, and a Diplome d'etudes superieures specialisees in Philosophy the following year.

Pierre Clastres began working in Anthropology after 1956 as a student of Claude Levi-Strauss, working at the Laboratory of Social Anthropology of the French National Centre for Scientific Research during the 1960s.

Pierre Clastres was a student of Alfred Metraux at the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes in 1959.

Pierre Clastres's first published article was released in 1962, a year before Pierre Clastres went into an eight-month trip to a Guayaki community in Paraguay with the help of Metraux.

In 1966 and 1968 Pierre Clastres went into expeditions to the Gran Chaco region of Paraguay, where he studied groups of Chulupi people.

Pierre Clastres briefly visited the Guarani which migrated from Paraguay to Brazil in his last expedition in 1974.

Pierre Clastres 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.

Pierre Clastres had the help of Paraguayan ethnologist Leon Cadogan to come in contact with the Guarani and to translate his ethnographic material.

For Flammarion's Dictionnaire des mythologies et des religions, Pierre Clastres wrote "Myths and Rites of South American Indians".

Pierre Clastres said that, for structuralism, kinship only has the function to prohibit incest.

Pierre Clastres was critical of it because Marxism was developed on the context of capitalist societies and anthropologists were using it to analyse non-capitalist societies.

In opposition to Marxist's economic determinism, for Pierre Clastres, politics was not superstructure; instead it was sui generis, which enabled Amerindian societies to refuse power and statehood.

Pierre Clastres pointed it was not a constant state of war like the Hobbesian proposition but that it occurred only between different groups.

War keeps opposing the State, but the crucial difference for Pierre Clastres is that sociality is on the side of war, not of the sovereign.

Pierre Clastres was a major influence for French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.

Pierre Clastres's thesis sparked some controversy and although he affirmed he made "bold claims" none of them were totally original, attributing some of them to Clastres.