Pierre Clastres | |
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| Born | 17 May 1934 Paris, France |
| Died | 29 July 1977 (aged 43) Gabriac, France |
| Alma mater | University of Sorbonne |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Anthropology |
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| Thesis | La vie social d'une tribu nomade: les Indiens Guayaki du Paraguay (1965) |
Pierre Clastres (French pronunciation: [pjɛʁ klastʁ]; 17 May 1934 – 29 July 1977) was a French anthropologist, ethnographer, 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 peoples of the Americas in which the power was not considered coercive and chieftains 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 (1974) and his bibliography also includes Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (1972), Le Grand Parler (1974), and Archeology of Violence (1980).