Pierre Clastres, anthropologist and anarchist, was born in Paris in 1934. He was director of research at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in Paris, and member of the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale of the Collège de France. For more than ten years, between 1963 and 1974, he carried out ethnographic fieldwork among various indigenous peoples of South America. Between 1963 and 1964 he lived with the Guayaquil Indians, nomadic hunters from eastern Paraguay. From this experience he would elaborate his thesis in 1965, La vie sociale d'une tribu nomade: les Indiens Guayaki du Paraguay, and the subsequent monograph Crónica de los indios guayaquís (1972). In 1965 he spends a season with the Guarani Indians of Paraguay. Between 1966 and 1968 he did fieldwork among the chulupi of that same country and continued his scientific and intellectual production. Between 1970 and 1971 he again spent a season with the Yanomami of Venezuela, which Temps modernes magazine describes as "the last free primitive society, surely in South America, and without a doubt also in the whole world." His last expedition was in 1974, to visit the Yanomami in the Sao Paolo state of Brazil. In the seventies is when he publishes most of his work. In 1974 two very influential books came to light: Society against the State, and The Luminous Word: Myths and Sacred Songs of the Guarani. In 1977 a car accident ended his life.