Pierre Clastres

Pierre Clastres was a French anthropologist and ethnographer, born in 1934, who conducted fieldwork among the Guayaki people of Paraguay and worked at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and later the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes in Paris. His major work, Society Against the State (1974), argued against the assumption that stateless societies are simply primitive precursors on the way to eventual state formation, proposing instead that many such societies actively organize themselves, through mechanisms including dispersed leadership and ritualized warfare, to prevent the concentration of coercive power. His earlier Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (1972) recorded his fieldwork in detail. He died in a car accident in 1977 at the age of forty three.