On the War Machine

Summary

This paper takes up the writings of Clastres, Deleuze and Guattari on the core premise that war is a driving sociological principle in societies that have successfully opposed the development of state organization. My first goal is an attempt at clarification: if predatory military exploits are involved in the consolidation of most, if not all, states, what did Clastres mean when, in contrast, he wrote about the centrifugal logic of the war machine in non-state societies? My second goal is to extend this analysis to the case of equestrian warrior society of the Comanche during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Anarchy and Archaeology: Contesting Hierarchy, Power, and Authority in the Past and Today

Keywords

Spatial Coverage