Full bibliography

Although Marxist social historians have proclaimed that anthropology provides an analytical framework for modem social history, they have not specified which specific schools of anthropology should be sustained nor which anthropological theories have been validated by historical investigation. Contemporary debates in anthropology and historical anthropology reveal that historical materialism and anthropology use different methods of abstraction and that any marriage of anthropology and historical materialism will produce only conceptual confusion unless these basic differences are taken into account. The problem is seen in its most acute form in the uncritical adoption by social historians of the concept of "culture," which has brought contemporary social history to a theoretical impasse.