Translated from the French.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 333-335).

"The War machine is the motor of the social machine; the primitive s ocial being relies entirely on war, primitive society cannot survive wi thout war. The more war there is, the less unification there is, and th e best enemy of the State is war. Primitive society is society against the State in that it is society-for-war." "Anthropologist and ethnograp her Pierre Clastres was a major influence on Gilles Deleuze and Felix G uattari's Anti-Oedipus, and his writings formed an essential chapter in the discipline of political anthropology. The posthumous publication i n French of Archeology of Violence in 1980 gathered together Clastres's final groundbreaking essays and the opening chapters of the book he ha d begun before his death in 1977 at the age 43. Elaborating upon the co nclusions of such earlier works as Society Against the State, in these essays Clastres critiques his former mentor, Claude Levi-Strauss, and d evastatingly rejects the orthodoxy of Marxist anthropology and other We stern interpretive models of "primitive societies." Discarding the trad itional anthropological understanding of war among South American India ns as arising from a scarcity of resources, Clastres instead identifies violence among these peoples as a deliberate means to territorial segm entatin and the avoidance of a State formation. In their refusal to sep arate the political from the social, and in their careful control of th eir tribal chiefs--who are rendered weak so as to remain dependent on t he communities they represent--the "savages" Clastres presents prove to be shrewd political minds who resist in advance any attempt at "global ization."".

"The essays in this, Clastres's final book, cover subjects ranging f rom ethnocide and shamanism to "primitive" power and economy, and are a s vibrant and engaging as they were thirty years ago. This new edition- -which includes an introduction by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro--holds ev en more relevance for readers in today's era of malaise and globalizati on."--BOOK JACKET.