Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians

Author:   Pierre Clastres ,  Paul Auster ,  Paul Auster
Publisher:   Zone Books
ISBN:  

9780942299779


Pages:   352
Publication Date:   05 August 1998
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
Limited stock is available. It will be ordered for you and shipped pending supplier's limited stock.

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Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians


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Overview

Pierre Clastres (1934-1979) was one of the most respected political anthropologists of our time. Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians is an account of his first fieldwork in the early 1960s--an encounter with a small, unique, and now vanished Paraguayan tribe. From Birth to The End, Clastres follows the Guayakis in their everyday lives, determined to record every detail of their history, ritual, myths, and culture in order to answer the many questions prompted by his personal experiences. Now available for the first time in English in a beautiful translation by the novelist Paul Auster, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians will alter radically not only the Western academic conventions in which other cultures are thought but also the discipline of political anthropology itself.

Full Product Details

Author:   Pierre Clastres ,  Paul Auster ,  Paul Auster
Publisher:   Zone Books
Imprint:   Zone Books
Dimensions:   Width: 15.90cm , Height: 3.20cm , Length: 23.40cm
Weight:   0.682kg
ISBN:  

9780942299779


ISBN 10:   0942299779
Pages:   352
Publication Date:   05 August 1998
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Out of Print
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
Limited stock is available. It will be ordered for you and shipped pending supplier's limited stock.

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Reviews

It is, I believe, nearly impossible not to lovethis book. The care and patience with which it is written, theincisiveness of its observations, its humor, its intellectual rigor,its compassion--all these qualities reinforce one another to make itan important, memorable work... It is the true story of a man'sexperiences, and it asks nothing but the most essential questions: howis information communicated to an anthropologist, what kinds oftransactions take place between one culture and another, under whatcircumstances might secrets be kept? In delineating this unknowncivilization for us, Clastres writes with the cunning of a goodnovelist. From Paul Auster's Foreword


In an account that is both living history and historical document, a now-vanished tribe of Paraguayan Indians is described as it lives out its last few years of existence. This document was unearthed some 20 years after novelist Auster translated it from the French, through a serendipitous encounter with one of his fans who had purchased a bound galley from a used bookstore. Clastres, who died before the translation was to have been published, lived with this tribe for two years in 1963 and 1964 in a compound that was under the protection of a white Paraguayan. The arrangement for the Indians was through necessity; their numbers had diminished from constant harassment by white sealers. Although their benefactor siphoned off food and other supplies given by the government, this last remnant was at least safe from the encroaching 20th century. As Clastres gained their confidence, he began piecing together the rituals of their daily lives. The Guayaki permitted him to witness birth, which to the Indians was a dangerous cosmic imbalance; the father is sentenced to death by his child's birth and can only escape his immediate fate by killing an animal in the forest. Clastres observed the physically painful initiation rites for young men, after which they were permitted to have sexual relations with women. The anthropologist also followed the tribe into the forest where it searched for honey and grubs or hunted monkeys or coati. Forest existence was precarious: The Guayaki faced danger from jaguars (an old woman was taken by one during Clastres's stay) and in earlier days from neighboring but related tribes, whose long-simmering feuds would lead to periodic violence. But Clastres saves the best for last: The Guayaki were cannibals, eating not only the bodies of enemy warriors but also their own dead. The account is anything but dry and didactic; Clastres wrote a vibrant but inescapably poignant study about one more doomed tribe of indigenous people. (Kirkus Reviews)


This is an extraordinary anthropological document, a riveting account of a year spent living with a so-called 'savage' tribe of Indians in Paraguay in 1963. With a directness and humanity exceptionally free of Western assumptions, Clastres gives a portrait of the character and daily life of a people once hunted by white men, and now virtually extinct. This is a society in which unimaginable freedoms exist alongside the strictest of taboos. Infanticide is practised for personal convenience when a second baby is born before the first one is weaned, but the courtesy of a song must be shown to the carcass of a hunted animal which must never be viewed simply as a neutral piece of food. It is also a society where a woman has several husbands and her children treat them all equally as their fathers, while at the same time, the men sleep in precisely designated configurations alongside the woman in order of their status. Only at the very end of this time with the Indians does he make the discovery, strenuously denied during his stay, that the tribe are in fact cannibals. In seeking an understanding of these things, in an unsentimental yet sympathetic way, Clastres unravels the rich mythology of the tribe that underpins the complex structure of their lives. He stands in the great tradition of French anthropology of Durkheim and Levi-Strauss, his singular work cut short only by his early death in a car accident at the age of 43. Originally translated in the 1970s, this highly readable account testifies not only to a vanished people but also to the work of a man whose death was a great loss to anthropology. (Kirkus UK)


It is, I believe, nearly impossible not to love this book. The care and patience with which it is written, the incisiveness of its observations, its humor, its intellectual rigor, its compassion--all these qualities reinforce one another to make it an important, memorable work... It is the true story of a man's experiences, and it asks nothing but the most essential questions: how is information communicated to an anthropologist, what kinds of transactions take place between one culture and another, under what circumstances might secrets be kept? In delineating this unknown civilization for us, Clastres writes with the cunning of a good novelist. --From Paul Auster's Foreword


Author Information

Pierre Clastres (1934-1977) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist who in the wake of the events of May '68, helped overturn anthropological orthodoxy in the 1970s. His books include Society Against the State (1974) and Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (1972). Eduardo Viveiros de Castro is a Brazilian anthropologist and a professor at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

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