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TSR Wiki > Study Help > Subjects and Revision > Revision Notes > Anthropology > Pierre Clastres and Political Anthropology

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Pierre Clastres has criticised traditional political anthropology for universalising Weber's definition of the state. Weber's definition of the state runs along the lines that the state has a monopology over the legitimate use of force in a given territory. Clastres states that in some societies political power does not exist.

It is not that these societies are "too primitive" to have developed a state : these societies have rejected the state and the concomitant dichotomy between oppressed and oppressor, as well as the coercion of political power.

As such, Clastres' critique is to political anthropology what Sahlins' Stone-Age Economics is to economic anthropology : a critique of modern society and an assertion that those societies who do not adhere to occidental western societal forms are not necessarily the worse off for it. The "primitive" society is actually one that rejects the divisive and alienating political forms found in the west.

The very phrase "stateless" reveals, Clastres says, the ethnocentrism and ignorance behind conventional anthropological thinking. It posits that "stateless" societies are missing something that is essential to them. As a result, they are not quite "true" societies. They are not quite civilised, and must always bear the pain of being "stateless". It implies that the state is the destiny of every society. We may think that we have overcome evolutionism - but still it appears to persist.

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