Pierre Clastres (1934 to 1977) was a French anthropologist who lived with peoples of the South American forests and argued that their lack of rulers was not a failure to develop, but a choice. These were, in the title of his best-known book, societies against the state, whose chiefs had prestige but no power to command, and where the whole society worked to stop power from ever separating from the people and turning into coercion. Therapeutic Shamanism shares his picture of leadership without domination, whilst drawing its line between hunter-gatherer and farming peoples where Clastres did not.
Who was Pierre Clastres? #
An anthropologist who came to the subject from philosophy. Born in Paris in 1934, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and then anthropology, as a student of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Alfred Métraux. From 1963 he made five journeys to South America, living first for about eight months in 1963 with the Guayaki, now usually called the Aché, in Paraguay, and later with the Guaraní, with peoples of the Gran Chaco, and with the Yanomami in Venezuela. He worked at France’s national research centre, the CNRS, and in 1975 became director of studies in the religion and societies of South American Indigenous peoples at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. He died in a car accident in 1977, aged forty-three.
His books include Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (1972), Society Against the State (1974), Le Grand Parler (1974), a collection of sacred Guaraní texts, and Archeology of Violence, published after his death in 1980.1
What is “society against the state”? #
A reversal of the usual way of seeing peoples without rulers. Europeans had long described them by what they lacked, as societies ‘without’ a state, writing or history, as if they were early versions of ourselves, stuck at an earlier stage. Clastres argued that they were complete societies that kept the state at bay, structurally and, he thought, knowingly.
All societies have political power, he wrote, but it comes in two forms, coercive and non-coercive, and command and obedience are only one particular case.2 In the peoples he studied, the chief had none of it. “The chief is not a commander; the people of the tribe are under no obligation to obey.” He was a peacemaker, a generous giver and a speaker, whose prestige was never allowed to become power. If a chief tried to act like a ruler, he was simply abandoned, because “the society itself, and not the chief, is the real locus of power.”3 Even a war chief held real authority only for the length of an expedition. A chief who tried to make the tribe serve his own ends, instead of serving the tribe, was deserted: “But it never works.”4
The book closes with its most famous line, “the history of peoples without history is the history of their struggle against the State.”5
Why did the chief have to speak? #
Because speaking was his duty, not his right. Every day the chief addressed his people, at daybreak and at dusk, repeating the ways of the ancestors, whilst everyone went on with what they were doing and seemed hardly to listen. “The tribe demands to hear him: a silent chief is no longer a chief.” In a state, Clastres wrote, speech is the right of power; in a society without one, it is power’s obligation, and the chief’s empty, ritual words keep him in the world of words, far from the world of orders.6
How did these societies keep everyone equal? #
By teaching it, sometimes harshly, and by refusing to produce more than they needed. In his essay on initiation, Clastres read the painful marks that some peoples cut into the bodies of their young as the law of the group written where it could not be forgotten, a law that says to everyone, “You are worth no more than anyone else; you are worth no less than anyone else.”7
He saw the same refusal in how they worked. Drawing on the time-budget studies of the day, he held that such peoples met their needs in a few hours a day and had no wish to do more. “Men work more than their needs require only when forced to.” Their surplus was eaten in feasts and given away, and with the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins he called theirs “the first society of abundance”.8 For Clastres the decisive break in human history came when some people began to work for others, to repay a debt that never ends. “Alienation is political before it is economic”, and the state comes first, before classes and before the exploitation of labour.9 See Who was Marshall Sahlins, and what is “the original affluent society”?
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Closely, on leadership and power. Hunter-gatherer tribes governed themselves without rulers. “There was no leader who imposed their decisions on the rest of the group”, and the order the way of life needed “was achieved by respectful discussion, and then by reaching consensus.” This is anarchism, “order without top-down government”, and the idea that tribes must have had chiefs is the “wonky thought that hierarchy is the only way of organising societies.”10 Equality was not a happy accident but something people defended, and hunter-gatherers “fiercely protected it, too”, teasing anyone who tried to dominate or grew too full of themselves.11
Clastres’s powerless chief, abandoned the moment he tries to command, is that same defence of equality seen from the other side. So is his picture of societies that refused to pile up more than they needed, close to the Leaver cultures that “took what they needed at any given time, and left the rest”, set against a Taker cultureTaker culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the totalitarian agricultural, owning, surplus-driven way of life that takes everything and leaves nothing, and calls itself ‘civilisation’. Cultural, not innate, which is why it can be changed. Used interchangeably with ‘Fallen culture’. Read the full answer “wholly orientated towards building up a surplus.”12 See How does animism understand power and hierarchy? and How did hunter-gatherers keep their societies equal?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
In two ways. First, Clastres’s peoples were mostly farmers. The Tupi-Guarani, at the heart of his argument, grew their crops in forest gardens, as do the Yanomami, and Clastres argued that changing from hunting to farming, or back again, did not change a people’s politics. The Guayaki were nomadic forest hunters, but by his own account they had given up growing maize in the late sixteenth century.13 Therapeutic Shamanism holds that agricultural tribes and hunter-gatherer bands are “in reality very different” and that “it is a common mistake to lump them together.”14 Read that way, Clastres shows how long even farming peoples could hold out against the state, and his Tupi-Guarani, whose chiefs he saw gaining power as their numbers grew, look like peoples already beginning to fall.
Second, Clastres put politics first. For him the state is the cause, and the economic changes follow. Therapeutic Shamanism gives a larger part to material change, to farming, surplus and growing populations, and to a change in consciousness, as people stopped seeing themselves as part of the land and began to think they owned it.15 Both accounts refuse a single neat cause, and both leave the deepest question, why it happened at all, partly open. See What is the Fall?
What do critics say? #
He has had sharp critics. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz, reviewing Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians, saw in it “Rousseauian primitivism”, the view that peoples like the Guayaki are radically different from us, and the historian Samuel Moyn set his vision within a long French tradition of primitivism, noting that many readers took his own words as proof of it.16 The anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow argued that Clastres followed the earlier anthropologist Robert Lowie’s account of the powerless chief without citing it, and left out what Lowie had noticed, that many such societies changed their politics with the seasons, living with real authority at one time of year and none at another.17
On the other side, the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, introducing Clastres’s last book, answers his critics at length. To the charge, drawing on recent archaeology in Amazonia, that the stateless peoples Clastres met were the remnants of societies broken by conquest and disease from the sixteenth century onwards, he replies that that collapse, catastrophic as it was, cannot explain everything about these societies, and that Clastres himself recognised the chiefdoms and the forces pulling towards unity in the region.18 Clastres had also answered the charge of romanticism. Like an astronomer who does not ask anyone to envy the stars, he was describing these societies, not campaigning for a return to them.19
