Society Against the State Essays In Political Anthropology

Can there be a society that is not divided into oppressors and oppressed, or that refuses coercive State apparatuses? In this landmark text in anthropology, Clastres offers examples of South American Indian groups that, though without hierarchical leadership, were both affluent and complex. In so doing, he refutes the usual negative definition of tribal society and poses its order as a radical critique of our own Western State power.