Les élections contre l’État ? Clientélisme et « logique du centrifuge » dans le Delta Amacuro (Venezuela)
At the beginning of the xxist century, the indigenous peoples of Venezuela underwent a brutal change in their political status : in the context of the new “Bolivarian Republic” founded by Hugo Chávez, the majority of them began to vote and to receive a great deal of public aid. Can we still say, fol...
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Język: | Français |
| Wydane: |
2025
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| Hasła przedmiotowe: | |
| Dostęp online: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Streszczenie: | At the beginning of the xxist century, the indigenous peoples of Venezuela underwent a brutal change in their political status : in the context of the new “Bolivarian Republic” founded by Hugo Chávez, the majority of them began to vote and to receive a great deal of public aid. Can we still say, following Pierre Clastres, that they were “against the State”, when State institutions were becoming omnipresent and indigenous peoples were even asking for them ? Based on a theoretical clarification of Clastres’s theses and on ethnographic surveys conducted among the Warao of the Delta Amacuro state, I argue that electoral competition and clientelism paradoxically worked against the state by encouraging a “centrifugal logic” and fragmentation comparable to that which Clastres revealed in his analysis of war. However, such a dynamic not only prevented the stabilisation of a power separate from society, but also the constitution of society as a totality distinct from its members : Clastres, who primarily conceives of the State as a separation between those who govern and those who are governed, was less sensitive to this second dimension, which in fact refers to the State as a political community (in whose name power can be exercised). By drawing on other anthropological approaches to the state, particularly those that conceive it as a dual reality, we can extend certain Clastrian analyses to understand contemporary transformations in political life in Amazonia. |
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