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The Archeology of Violence
| If there is indeed
a profound relationship between the multiplicity of sociopolitical
entities and violence, one can only understand this link
by reversing the habitual order of their presentation: it
is not war that is the effect of segmentation, it is segmentation
that is the effect of war. It is not only the effect, but
the goal: war is at once the cause of and the means to a
sought-after effect and end, the segmentation of primitive
society. In its being, primitive society wants dispersion. |
In a series
of groundbreaking essays, Clastres turns around the analysis
of power among South American Indians and rehabilitates
violence as an affirmative act meant to protect the integrity
of their societies. These “savages” are shrewd
political minds who resist in advance any attempt at “globalization."
Pierre Clastres broke up with his
mentor Claude Levi-Strauss to collaborate with Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari on their Anti-Oedipus.
He is the rare breed of political anthropologist—a
Nietzschean—and his work presents us with a genealogy
of power in a native state. For him, tribal societies
are not Rousseauist in essence; to the contrary, they
practice systematic violence in order to prevent the
rise in their midst of this “cold monster”:
the state. Only by waging war with other tribes can they
maintain the dispersion and autonomy of each group. In
the same way, tribal chiefs are not all-powerful; to
the contrary, they are rendered weak in order to remain
dependent on the community.
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