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In this article, I return to my engagements with people in the field not only to address the specific circumstances and trajectories I encountered there, but to make a case for allowing our engagement with Others to determine the course of our thinking about them and to reflect more broadly upon the agonistic and reflexive relations between anthropology and philosophy. I do so in order to suggest that through ethnographic rendering, people's own theorizing of their conditions may leak into, animate, and challenge present-day regimes of veridiction, including philosophical universals and anthropological subjugation to philosophy. I am interested in how ethnographic realities find their way into theoretical work. Using the mutual influence between Pierre Clastres and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as a case study, I argue against reducing ethnography to proto-philosophy. The relationship, in fact, may be more productively seen as one of creative tension and cross-pollination. This sense of ethnography in the way of (instead of to) theory—like art—aims at keeping interielatedness, precariousness, curiosity, and unflnishedness in focus. In resisting synthetic ends and making openings rather than absolute truths, ethnographic practice allows for an emancipatory reflexivity and for a more empowering critique of the rationalities, interventions, and moral issues of our times. I conclude with a literal return to the field and reflect on how the story of lives continues.

The study of stateless social groups defies our conceptual imagination in several correlative ways: denominational (we tend to represent them thus, but are stateless formations what we call groups at all?), historical (we tend to assign a lower degree of social development in comparison to state societies, but should we?), and structural (apart from the negative definition as 'groups without state' we lack a social-theory model). Being unable to represent stateless social 'groups' as little more than a residue of the past we are therefore unable to (re)think them. This paper outlines some recent developments in post-structuralist Brazilian anthropology on sociality and gender and suggests that the work of Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009) and Pierre Clastres (1934-1977) offer a counterpoint to this discouraging picture and provide us with important conceptual tools that help us move beyond the mere description of 'immediate-return societies' and/or groups displaying a 'reverse dominance hierarchy'. Furthermore, I suggest that Levi-Strauss and Clastres invite us to re-conceptualise important aspects of social theory. Accordingly, I propose to distinguish between four social models (or models of sociality) in virtue of their contrasting arithmetic's and constitutive principles, as well as to determine their reciprocal relations in terms of historical transition, meta-logical disclosure, logical inference, and/or radical exteriority.

This essay involves a set of speculations concerning the role plant-granted visions play in the formation of the Shuar subject. It also reflects on the need for an ethnography of secrecy and the ineffable. In both these tasks I seek to engage psychoanalytic theory. Jacques Lacan’s distinction between the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic helps analyze the relationship between the discourse and the silence of the unconscious. His essay on the “mirror stage” is useful for thinking about bourgeois subjectivity. Nevertheless, I argue that premissionization Shuar did not go through the mirror stage. First, I argue that Shuar practices effected the colonization of the Symbolic by the Real, in contrast to bourgeois culture, in which the Symbolic colonizes the Real. Then I explore the role of desire, violence, and speech in the construction of different kinds of power. Pierre Clastres’ work helps to explore how these two cultures clash and articulate on the colonization frontier, while psychoanalytic theory adds to Clastres a theory of the subject. Ultimately, this article is an experiment in acknowledging the psychic unity of humanity—while at the same time illuminating the differences between the state and societies against the state.

No one yet has written about the relationship between the thought of the pre-Socratics, alleged to originate in smokey caverns, and the thought of Deleuze. In this essay, I risk venturing in this direction, as I underline the fact that both thoughts are non-exclusionary (they reject the spirit of exclusion), run through by a movement that is both continuous and contiguous and eager to destroy the spirit of war before war destroys life.

Pierre Clastres est un auteur qui a suscité des débats passionnés, sans doute parce qu’il ne s’est jamais interdit des affirmations tranchées, comme le note Eduardo Viveiros de Castro dans un petit livre où il présente sa propre lecture – fervente – de l’œuvre de l’ethnologue français (p. 28). Parmi ces affirmations, la plus célèbre est celle selon laquelle la « société primitive » en général, dont l’Amazonie offre les exemples les plus significatifs, est « contre l’État », c’est-à-dire qu’elle est caractérisée non par la simple absence du pouvoir coercitif mais par son refus, au moyen de mécanismes empêchant son émergence.Si Clastres a fait l’objet d’autant de commentaires, c’est aussi parce qu’en dépit d’« intuitions ethnographiques fulgurantes », ses assertions ont souvent été « excessives » (p. 30), et on pourrait même aller plus loin en disant qu’elles ont parfois été contradictoires : à l’opposé de toute prudence académique, Clastres aimait soutenir avec des formules emphatiqu...

Our inquiry advances a comparison of the anthropological content of Thorstein Veblen's evolutionary perspective with the foundations of the political anthropology drawn from selected works of Pierre Clastres. We seek to establish that what can be referred to as a clastrean reference can simultaneously offer new perspectives on institutionalism, while maintaining a radical and emancipatory understanding of Veblen's writings. In this sense, we seek to reconsider and reevaluate the role of economic surplus drawn from Veblen's anthropology, while also offering a general and critical perspective for understanding the emergence of coercive power within societies.

Este artigo apresenta um estudo sobre as flautas sagradas nas terras baixas da América do Sul, tomadas as xinguanas como objeto central de atenção. Também, é uma abordagem do que chamo antropologização do mundo, ou seja, a inversão da hegemonia dos espíritos mama´e face aos humanos. O artigo explora a ideia de Pierre Clastres de \"contra\" que me levou a uma visão dos xinguanos como sociedades disciplinares, de acordo com Foucault, mas ainda assim em uma perspectiva contra a modernidade, a partir das considerações de Bruno Latour.

Composed as a diderotien dialogue, this article task is to situate the political thought by asking, on the one hand, if a thought of the politics inevitably has to proceed from an anthropology and if, on the other hand, it must be conceived as a philosophical anthropology or a political anthropology. Straightaway, this double question situates our investigation within the legacies of Hannah Arendt and Pierre Clastres. And it is exactly in critically reading of the Occidentalism of Arendt's categories and of Clastres's limited conception of History - which still depends on the classical triad of Pre-historicity, A-historicity and Historicity - that we attempt to show that even the « general political anthropology » that Clastres envisioned must be founded on a philosophical anthropology. Such a « philosophical » anthropology would not serve to negate scientific anthropology and its discoveries, but rather would renew in them a thought that searches for the ontological dimensions of human existence. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT] Reprinted by permission of L'Harmattan