One detects an ethnocentric bias in this approach; more often than not it is unconscious, and so the more firmly anchored. Its immediate, spontaneous… - Pierre Clastres
" "One detects an ethnocentric bias in this approach; more often than not it is unconscious, and so the more firmly anchored. Its immediate, spontaneous reference, while perhaps not the best known, is in any case the most familiar. In effect, each one of us carries within himself, internalized like the believer’s faith, the certitude that society exists for the State. How, then, can one conceive of the very existence of primitive societies if not as the rejects of universal history, anachronistic relics of a remote stage that everywhere else has been transcended?
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About Pierre Clastres
Pierre Clastres (17 May 1934 – 29 July 1977) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist. He is best known for his contributions to the field of political anthropology, with his fieldwork among the Guayaki in Paraguay and his theory of stateless societies. An anarchist seeking an alternative to the hierarchized Western societies, he mostly researched indigenous people in which the power was not considered coercive and chiefs were powerless.
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Additional quotes by Pierre Clastres
Here one recognizes ethnocentrism’s other face, the complementary conviction that history is a one-way progression, that every society is condemned to enter into that history and pass through the stages which lead from savagery to civilization. “All civilized peoples were once savages,” wrote Raynal. But the assertion of an obvious evolution cannot justify a doctrine which, arbitrarily tying the state of civilization to the civilization of the State, designates the latter as the necessary end result assigned to all societies. One may ask what has kept the last of the primitive peoples as they are.
The social sciences ... believe they can insure their scientific status by breaking all links to what they call philosophy. ... It is to be feared that, under the alias of philosophy, it is simply thought itself they are trying to expel. Does this mean, then, that science and thought are mutually exclusive: that science is constructed from non-thought, or even anti-thought? The nonsense — sometimes mild, sometimes abrasive — uttered from all sides by the militants of “science” seems to lean in that direction. But in this instance one must be able to recognize where this frantic inclination to anti-thought leads: under the cover of “science,” of epigonal platitudes, or less simple-minded endeavors, it leads straight to obscurantism.
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If one understands by technics the set of procedures men acquire not to ensure the absolute mastery of nature (that obtains only for our world and its insane Cartesian project, whose ecological consequences are just beginning to be measured), but to ensure a mastery of the natural environment suited and relative to their needs, then there is no longer any reason whatever to impute a technical inferiority to primitive societies: they demonstrate an ability to satisfy their needs which is at least equal to that of which industrial and technological society is so proud.
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