the Basket
Abstract: The more single members of society hold themselves equal among each other, beyond the generalised classifications of sex and age, the more sapiens sapiens society comes closer to Kant’s utopian illuminism as the model of humanism. Conversely, the maximum of anti-humanism is achieved among patriarchal societies, in all of their expressions, organised around the principle of hierarchy in a decreasing fashion, from the idea of the female to male subordination onwards. Pierre Clastres’ great contribution to the understanding of humanistic social logic is the discovery that in primitive society the community, as a unit-totality, exercises its control over political power; a power embodied in the institutional figure of the leader, the One of La Boétie. Through the pages of L’Arc et le Panier, Pierre Clastres analyses the female-male relationship in the Amerindian tribe of the Southern Aché. Proceeding from his observations on food production, he brings out a sort of wild humanism, often contradicted later in many passages from his Chronique des Indiens Guayaki. This latter work presents the emergence of the practice of femicide within Southern Aché society. Proceeding from a cultural interdiction of Aché females to use the bow: the hunter’s tool, one that marginalizes women in food production, we will examine several studies on matrilineal societies stretching from Morgan to Malinowski. An iter that will be accentuated by war between communities, reaching all the way to patriarchal totalitarianism. In this framework, the local matrilineal choices of primitive society acquire a new humanistic sense of control over the politics of hierarchy as suggested by the ethnoarchaeological research of Marija Gimbutas and her school. In the light of Gimbutas’ studies, Kantian humanism becomes the cultural form of struggle against the patriarchal hierarchical degeneration of our historical Western societies, whose human regressive stabilisation is expressed by the imperialistic states and their monotheistic religion, confirming the fundamental affirmation of Pierre Clastres: “Avant d’être économique, l’aliénation est politique”.
