As an anthropologist, Clastres spent a year with a forest-dwelling Indian tribe in Paraguay in 1963. His account is quite free from noble-savage rhetoric or back-to-nature cant, but he liked these primitive people and shared their increasingly endangered lifestyle. The men spent most of their time hunting, partly to vary a monotonous diet, partly to prove their manhood, and partly because they enjoyed it; the meat a man kills is mostly shared out with neighbours, since he is not allowed to eat it himself. Marriage and courtship rituals were simple and direct, with the old ceremony of mock abduction.
Sickness was largely attributed to evil spirits, and medicine was predictably primitive, involving the painting of the patient. Since his first visit, Clastres has not had the heart to revisit this small tribe again: sickness, white hostility and other factors are steadily reducing its numbers. B.F.