Pierre Clastres and the Amazonian War Machine

Abstract

In addressing the relation between Deleuze’s philosophy and anarchism, no discussion would be complete without considering Pierre Clastres’ ethnographic research on the stateless peoples of the Amazon basin, which forms a key source for the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. This chapter focuses on Clastres’ analysis of political power in primitive societies—particularly its regulation through collective levelling mechanisms which avert social division by means of a systematic dispersal of power.