Society Against the State ─ Essays in Political Anthropology

Can there be a society that is not divided into oppressors and oppressed, or thatrefuses coercive state apparatuses? In this landmark text in anthropology and political science,Pierre Clastres offers examples of South American Indian groups that, though without hierarchicalleadership, were both affluent and complex. In so doing, he refutes the usual negative definition oftribal society and poses its order as a radical critique of our own Western state of power.Born in1934, Pierre Clastres was educated at the Sorbonne. Through out the 1960s he lived with Indiangroups in Paraguay and Venezuela. From 1971 to his death in 1979 he was a Director of Studies at theA?cole Pratique des Hautes A?tudes in Paris, where he held the chair of Religionand Societies of the South American Indians.

Thomas S. Stroik is Professor of English and Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is the author of Syntactic Controversies; Minimalism, Scope, and VP Structure; Path Theory and Argument Structure; and The Pragmatics of Metaphor.