ABSTRACT
If Durkheim and the Durkheimians temporarily won their Pyrrhic victory over their insistence upon the separation of theory and political and intellectual praxis in the social sciences in general and anthropology in particular, Marxist anthropology has often fallen foul of, or at least demonstrated a curious lethargy towards, the chasm which exists between the theoretically sophisticated manipulation of anthropological data on the one hand, and the theoretical status of the production of these ethnographic data on the other. A brief survey of selected fieldwork studies by Marxist anthropologists reveals either little interest in this question, or relatively unquestioned acceptance of “standard” anthropological fieldwork methods and assumptions characteristic of non-Marxist anthropology. And while relativism has played an important role in “de-ethno-centering” anthropology, one must remember that its intellectual pedigree goes back to Comte’s positivism and its inescapable “reverence for established authority”, the very obverse of Marxist praxis and theory.
