Pierre Clastres, "Archeology of Violence"

(Semiotext(e), 2010)

In 1977, at the time of his death by road accident, Clastres was compiling materials for his third book. Only 43, he had by then inaugurated a groundbreaking political anthropology in the wake of his fieldwork in South America. Having studied under Claude Levi-Strauss and, later, Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari, Clastres went on to severely if respectfully critique the structuralism of his early master and influence the authors of Capitalism and Schizophrenia considerably. He is now an essential reference for ethnologists as well as more radical French theory kids. He is also somewhat erroneously considered an exemplary "anarchist" anthropologist. Not in any obvious way concerned to put forth specific political programs (though his sympathies may certainly be detected), Clastres devoted his career to rigorously describing and theorizing what he termed "societies against the State".

Semiotext(e) has reissued Clastres's posthumous volume, Archeology of Violence, originally published in France in 1980. The essays collected expand upon his central argument, which defines "primitive" societies by their refusal of the State. Taking such societies seriously, for Clastres, means recognizing that they are not embryonic or proto-societies, but rather full-blown political totalities which have constituted themselves in a very conscious and deliberate way so as to prevent the rise of inequality, (non-sexual) division of labour and, ultimately, since these are its very substance, the State. In brief, since the State is a permanent possibility in human society, primitive societies constitute themselves as elaborate machines for warding it off. Accordingly, Clastres roundly rejects Marxist anthropology and other historicizing / economizing discourses (cf. his polemical essay "Marxists and their Anthropology"). It is the political, rather than the economic or the biological, which constitutes the horizon of primitive social life. According to Clastres, so-called "primitives" are actually very shrewd politicians. Even where one detects exoticizing tendencies in his turns of speech, Clastres is genuinely trying to take the people he is studying seriously.

While the general line of his argument is already trotted out in his earlier works Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians and Society Against the State, the main contribution of Archeology of Violence is to have examined "primitive" war as a tactic for keeping the State at bay. The almost universal bellicosity of tribal populations in the ethnographic record is thought by Clastres to reflect a centrifugal / atomizing tendency which at once asserts the group as a unified totality, and ensures maximum political dispersion between groups. Of particular interest is the final essay, in which Clastres examines the role of the warrior class in such societies. Since they serve the greater social interest of warding off the State, but also risk inaugurating the State via the quasi-monopoly of violence they engender, warriors become trapped in a social logic whereby their glory can only be secured by ever grander and more individualistic military exploits - thus rendering the warrior a being doomed to die. "Primitive" society is evidently sufficiently complex and canny to recognize and regulate tendencies within tendencies, machines within machines. Very Deuleuzo-Guattarian.

This brings me to my last point. Since Clastres's writing is wonderfully clear, and since he reiterates his positions in the book a great many times, the long introduction by de Castro really puts the cart before the horse. True, Clastres was influenced by and influenced Deleuze and Guattari. This is a very crucial and fascinating aspect of his work. Starting things off with D&G speak risks clouding things, however. Interested readers would do well to read the introduction last, since it does offer some great insights but ultimately gets bogged down in segmentarity, lines of flight and other such concepts.

Miscegenation in the Colonial Context: Defying Imperial Inclusion and Exclusion

I recently bought a used set of English flashcards published in the late 1970s. The reverse side for the word “Miscegenation” reads “Marriage between people of widely differing races” and the example sentence “Miscegenation has never been favorably regarded in the United States.” Pondering over the harmful cultural implications of such a definition I thought of a book I recently read by Ann Stoler. She shows that interracial relations are not limited to the cultural sphere and in fact have played a central role in colonialism and political power. In Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Power, published by the University of California Press in 2002, Ann Stoler demonstrates the importance interracial relationships played in the development of colonial structures of power.

This work advances several arguments and employs excellent and revealing photos. Within these she notes that many colonial cultures structured access to power and privilege through the construction of racial dichotomies. What happens when the racial hierarchies are complicated by a grey zone of biologically and culturally mixed people? Stoler indicates that, for one, the distribution of the wealth developed by the colonial enterprise becomes knotty, which catalyzes a change in the social construction of identities. Stoler’s contention is that in the colonial context of the Javanese heartland of Indonesia, the categories of inclusion and exclusion became untenable as they had previously been defined and that those in possession of power and wealth sought to stem the tide of miscegenation.

The culture of colonialism that Stoler describes in her first five chapters is one which develops to suit the needs of a European body of profiteers. This is convoluted by the reality that, for various reasons, the early period of colonialism forbade the migration of European women to the focal points of resource development and extraction. The corporate bodies in these spaces instead preferred their European subordinates to take on concubines to serve as domestic servants, sexual objects, and cultural instructors. One consequence of this was the development of mixed raced progeny. This complicated not just the distribution of wealth through the construction of self and other in the periphery but also the categories or ‘units of analysis’ in the colonial encounter, which brings us to Stoler’s theoretical argument.

Ann Stoler, an anthropologist, produced this text as a history but also one which attempts to advance the theory of history through a thorough going analysis of its methods. By aptly describing the unique position of ethnically and or culturally mixed persons in the periphery she showed how certain units of analysis are in and of themselves insufficient for describing the particulars which develop in any particular encounter. She insists though that she is not interested in merely throwing out the categories of description developed thus far. Instead she argues that it is through the process of examining the dichotomies and theoretical demarcations of postcolonial theory against and within the archive that new insights can be gained. She takes the construction of the European self, juxtaposed with the attempts to mutually construct a colonial other, as one example, and complicates it by pursuing those individuals who don’t fit entirely in either category. Moreover, she looks at the effect of the sites of intimacy on the macro-culture and the implications for the maintenance of a system of gross exploitation: the imperial project.

By reexamining certain categories, such as the self and other, or ‘white prestige’ over time and up close in the archive she is able to produce new ways of seeing the development of social, cultural, and economic systems. She shows that instead of these categories revealing the realities of the cultural encounter they reinforce what we as researchers expect to find and thus reproduce the same levels of description. Her discussion of the complexity of racial inclusion and exclusion in the colony further enhances her own theoretical position of the grey zone in mobilizing theory. Her approach seeks to re-energize theory by reconfiguring the way we approach them: critically.

RIP Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)

Pioneering French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has died. He was 100 years old.

Lévi-Strauss was arguably one of the most influential and important thinkers of the 20th century in terms of Western understandings of culture. Born to an artistic Franco-Jewish family, Lévi-Strauss studied philosophy before bringing a musician's touch to the subject of cultural anthropology. Cultures and cultural artifacts, for Lévi-Strauss, were like musical pieces. They were interpreted by him as unfolding objects displaying and betraying deep, in many cases cross-cultural harmonies in the juxtaposition of their basic elements.

Another, perhaps more pertinent way of putting it is that Lévi-Strauss read cultures as languages. Profoundly influenced by the structural linguistics of Saussure and Jakobson, the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan, and the sociology and ideology-critique of Marx and Engels, Lévi-Strauss interpreted cultures and cultural artifacts, such as myths, as displaying syntaxes tied to underlying paradigmatic structures. A given myth, on his view, is an unfolding in time of basic binary oppositions constituting nothing less than a worldview.

Lévi-Strauss viewed the heart and soul of archaic or so-called "primitive" cultures as a collective, perpetual activity of bricolage; a gluing-together of environmentally ready elements, much as a craftsperson or artist uses readily available materials in his or her studio. Myths will contain local animals and weather patterns; however, what the bricoleur builds out of these elements ultimately betrays something of the most basic, universal structures of the human mind. Myths from vastly separated cultures, on this view, can be compared with a view to distilling universals. To study myths and other cultural artifacts is, in other words, to study some of the structural properties human cognition.

Modern societies are also considered to be largely constituted via bricolage; however, Lévi-Strauss posited that another type of thinker/practitioner, the engineer - one who formulates and proceeds from rational/rationalized methods - emerges in such societies. It did not follow from this distinction, on Lévi-Strauss's view, that modern societies are superior; rather, he maintained a deep pessimism about the prospects of modernity. Among other things, the workable ecological sensibility he discovered in his fieldwork in Brazil and in reading ethnographies is distorted or almost nonexistent in our own society.

Much is made of Lévi-Strauss's "structuralism", and the arguably anti-humanist vision that emanates therefrom. Seeing him interviewed or reading his texts, however, one gets the impression of an essential, animating love of humanity. My own experience with his texts and ideas as an undergraduate was immensely gratifying; I got the impression that at bottom, he wished to include the whole variety of ways of human being in the same family.

A profound pessimist who cherished the radical hope of being proven wrong: perhaps this is a good way to remember Claude Lévi-Strauss.