In Chapter 11 of Archeology of Violence, subtitled “War in Primitive Societies” – the term “primitive” has different connotations in French than it has in English: it means something like “original” or “primordial” in the Rousseauian sense, which is overtly non-evolutionist – Pierre Clastres begins by tracing a sharp contrast between two phenomena, namely, the way in which extra-modern commitment to war was straightforwardly perceived by the first European travellers to the American continent,(⦼) and the way in which such commitment has been downplayed in modern ethnography.(Δ) And he then goes on to discuss three theories that aim at variously explaining the reason for which extra-modern societies engage in warfare: (1) Leroi-Gourhan’s “naturalistic” theory, according to which hunters, through a “subtle assimilation” (an expression that Clastres criticises due to its “frivolity”),(⧀) gradually became warriors; (2) the “economicist” view (which dates back to the 19th century and Marxism upholds too) that war is the outcome of poverty in societies that, as Lizot and Sahlins conversely show, are “affluent” societies;(⧁) and (3) Lévi-Strauss’s “exchangist” theory that “martial conflicts and economic exchanges do not merely constitute two types of coexistent relations […] but rather two aspects, opposed and indissoluble, of a single and identical social process,”(⊕) in the sense that “[c]ommercial exchanges represent potential wars peacefully resolved, and wars are the outcome of unfortunate transactions.”(⊛)
Against these theories – yet coinciding with Lévi-Strauss in that “war is an activity of a strictly sociological order”(⊙) – Clastres finally makes the point that war in “primitive societies” responds to the need they have of remaining local and hence unassimilated to other groups.
Clastres wrote this in 1977. Some thirteen years before, Lévi-Strauss himself had noticed in this sense noticed the subtractive tendency of many extra-modern myths of origins.(*) War then, it could be argued following Clastres, is the instrument that extra-modern societies give themselves to maintain their own “difference”:
The locality of the local group is […] its territory, as a natural reserve of material resources, certainly, but especially as an exclusive space for the exercise of community rights. The exclusivity in the use of the territory implies a movement of exclusion, and here the properly political dimension of primitive society as a community including its essential relationship to the territory clearly appears: the existence of the Other is immediately posited in the act that excludes him; it is against the other communities that each society asserts its exclusive right to a determined territory. […](⊗)
And its irreducibility:
The primitive community is at once a totality and a unity. A totality in that it is a complete, autonomous, whole ensemble, ceaselessly attentive to preserving its autonomy: a society in the full sense of the word. A unity in that its homogeneous being continues to refuse social division, to exclude inequality, to forbid alienation. Primitive society is a single totality in that the principle of its unity is not exterior to it […]
[…] [It] assures control of its territory in the name of the Law guaranteeing its non-division. The territorial dimension already includes the political in that it excludes the Other. It is precisely the Other []… – the neighboring groups – who reflect back onto the community the image of its unity and totality. Faced with neighboring communities or bands, a particular community or band posits itself and thinks of itself as absolute difference, as irreducible freedom, as a body possessing the will to maintain its being as a single totality. Here then is how primitive society concretely appears: a multiplicity of separate communities, each watching over the integrity of its territory, a series of neo-monads each of which, in the face of others, asserts its difference. Each community, in that it is undivided, can think of itself as a We. This We in turn thinks of itself as a totality in the equal relationship that it maintains with the equivalent We’s that constitute other villages, tribes, bands, etc. The primitive community can posit itself as a totality because it institutes itself as a unity: it is a whole, because it is an undivided We.
[…] [T]he possibility of war is [therefore] inscribed in the being of primitive society. Indeed, the will of each community to assert its difference is strong enough so that the least incident quickly transforms the sought-after difference into a real dispute. The violation of territory, the assumed aggression of the neighbors’ shaman: this is all that is required for war to break out.(⦿)
With these lucid insights Pierre Clastres – who was also one of Lévi-Strauss’s best disciples – aspired to lay afresh the foundations of political anthropology.(⦷) He would have probably succeeded in it, had he not tragically died in a car accident that very year.
(⦼) “[T]he French or Portuguese missionaries’ opinion of the Tupi Indians of the Brazilian coast in the mid-16th century ,” writes Clastres, “anticipates and condenses all the discourses to come: were it not, they said, for the incessant war these tribes wage against each other, the country would be overpopulated” (Pierre Clastres, Archeology of Violence [translated by Jeanine Herman, with an Introduction by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro; Los Angeles: Semiotext(e): 2010], p. 239).
(Δ) “[I]f violence is dealt with (rarely), it is primarily to show how these societies work toward controlling it, codifying it, ritualizing it, in short, tend to reduce, if not abolish it. […] [V]iolence [is evoked], but mostly to demonstrate the horror that it inspires in primitive societies, to establish that they are, finally, societies against violence” (ibid., p. 237).
(⧀) Ibid., p. 244.
(⧁) Ibid., p. 250.
(⊕) Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Guerre et commerce chez les Indiens de l’Amerique du Sud” (Renaissance 1 [1943]: 122-139), p. 138.
(⊛) Ibid., p. 136.
(⊙) Clastres, Archeology of Violence, p. 251.
(*) Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology: 1 (trans. John and Doreen Weightman; New York and Evanston [IL]: Harper & Row, 1969), pp. 50-55.
(⊗) Clastres, Archeology of Violence, p. 258.
(⦿) Ibid., pp. 260-262.
(⦷) As he himself suggests in Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology (translated by Robert Hurley in collaboration with Abe Stein; New York: Zone Books, 1987), originally published in French in 1974. Cf. the concluding lines of “War in Primitive Societies”: “What does primitive society as a sociological space of permanent war tell us in counter point? It repeats Hobbes’s discourse by reversing it; it proclaims that the machine of dispersion functions against the machine of unification; it tells us that war is against the State” (Clastres, Archeology of Violence, p. 277).
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