ABSTRACT
Five years ago, I somewhat aggressively concluded a critical study of Claude Meillassoux's Anthropologie économique des Gouro (1964) with the following statement:
Marxist researchers now face the task … of bringing the field so far reserved for social anthropology within the ambit of historical materialism, and thus demonstrating the universal validity of the concepts and methods developed by the latter. By doing this they should ensure that social anthropology becomes a particular section of historical materialism devoted to socioeconomic formations in which the capitalist mode of production is absent and in which ethnologists and historians collaborate (1972: 184).
