ABSTRACT
It is because alternative and irreconcilable views of human order - one based on mutuality, the other on competition confronted each other between 1815 and 1850 that the historian today still feels the need to take sides. Debates between ‘materialists’ and ‘postmodernists’ or ‘new ethnographers’ are often infused with a sense of resentment that those in the other moiety are taking the moral high ground and proclaiming monopolistic and exclusionary rights to the determining of where an engaged anthropology might go in the new millennium, each side accusing the other of a disingenuous, overly gross, reading of its key texts. It is conventionally argued that a Marxist view of society is based upon the view that the social subject is formed by her/his position in the relations of production and division of labour. As left intellectuals, then, began to evolve a political strategy for and with the working class, that strategy directed their sociological methods toward institutions.
