Having read Clastres´ later [b:Archeology of Violence|927436|Archeology of Violence|Pierre Clastres|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179520452s/927436.jpg|912438], I was prepared to be blown away by this one (after all, the production/jacket is much higher end stuff, which means it's better, right?). But I was instead disappointed. He says essentially similar things, but in more theoretical ways than he does in the other book. This made it harder for me to stay interested. Additionally, there were a couple of spots where he seemed to romanticize the indigenous people, giving them way more credit for creating a sophisticated political safeguard than they must have deserved. Theirs struck me as a system that surely evolved much more organically than he continuously intimated. For example, from page 44:

. . . it is as though these societies formed their political sphere in terms of an intuition which for them would take the place of a rule: namely, that power is essentially coercion. . . these societies astonish us by the subtlety with which they have posed and settled the question. They had a very early premonition that power's transcendence conceals a mortal risk for the group, that the principle of an authority which is external and the creator of its own legality is a challenge to culture itself. It is the intuition of this threat that determined the depth of their political philosophy.

Now, call me cynical and "culture-ist" if you will, but to refer to the organization of primitive societies and tribes as a deep political philosophy seems a little ridiculous.

Clastres' preaching aside, he continues to raise some good points about the common modern view of "primitives." He points out the paradox of the stereotype that the primitive lived in a subsistence economy, but is also invariably considered lazy. Either he worked all day for his food, or he didn't work it all, it can't be both. Also, there is a brilliant essay ("Elements of Amerindian Demography") where he neatly debunks the low estimates for pre-Columbian population in the Americas, convincingly arriving at a significantly higher estimate, including a shocking 90% mortality rate in the 100 years after the white arrival.

Ultimately, though, Clastres left me wanting more. In the titular essay at the end of the book, he poses some fascinating questions: All civilized people were first primitives, and the State is impossible in primitive society, so what made the State cease to be impossible? Why did some people cease to be primitives? What event allowed the Despot to emerge? "Where does political power come from?" These are all the questions that I expected to get answered when I picked up the book. Instead, Clastres immediately follows them with a disclaimer about the impossibility of answering, followed by a weak hypothesis about the emergence of spiritual prophets who could have provided the seed for political power.

For those who haven´t read "Archaeology" and already have this one instead, I would definitely recommend it as an introduction to Clastres. Otherwise, "Archaeology" is far more interesting -- an anthropological masterpiece. ( )

I came to this through Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. For early human politics, I'd say, go there, which builds on Clastres, and had told me Clastres' main message, about how early-style societies defend themselves against that perceived evil power - how they prevent power. Boehm dives into primate behaviour too to link up with our species (he's a primatologist turned anthropologist).

Still, I'm glad I read this. It's a set of essays. Once his age did betray him (I say with charity) when he used a smatter of pejorative terms for a cross-sexed person, whom he admits was happily ensconced in his society. He rises to heights of eloquence - in the chapters on religion, I found. There is one religion that holds the fort against any corruption by Christianty, and he talks poetry about it. In fact he gives a swathe of poetry from it, that wrenches your guts. It's a sad religion, of profundities he tries to speculatively construct from bits and pieces, and this hymn is... sorry; the Bible at least has great writing; it's like Lamentations or Jeremiah, or Job.

The text points out that things are evil. Men inhabit an imperfect, evil earth. It has always been so. The Guarani are used to misfortune. It is neither new nor surprising to them. They knew about it long before the arrival of the Westerners, who taught them nothing on the subject... They were a people relentlessly obsessed by the belief that they were not created for misfortune, and the certainty that they would one day reach the Land Without Evil. And their sages, ceaselessly meditating on the means of reaching it, would reflect on the problem of their origin. How does it happen that we inhabit an imperfect earth? The grandeur of the question is matched by the heroism of the reply: Men are not to blame if existence is unjust. We need not beat our breasts because we exist in a state of imperfection.

He makes you deeply sorry that the species has lost this religion, these ideas on evil and the human condition, other than fragments and a few faithful who call themselves The Last Men. And that's his whole campaign, though he writes on different subjects: to treat these Savages seriously... quote. Which perhaps is the language of 1974 (even with irony) but the prejudices are embedded in our heads and are structural in anthropology, and I'm sure he isn't obsolete. He wasn't to me. ( )