Definitely. I think it perhaps demarcates the Great Left Rift. On the one hand, there are the idealists, the adherents of the Great Satan in the North/West theory, the Noble Savage, the "populist-paradise-lost-to-capitalist-modernization" crowd, the if-it's-local-culture-it-can-do-no-wrong believers, the "we-can-change-the-world-by-speaking-the-magic-words" crowd, and the "anybody-but-western-white-and-developed" folk.
On the other hand, there are the materialists, the comparative historians and sociologists, the "bread-and-butter-first" left, the universalist-and-objectvist crowd that the pomo gurus warned you about.
This is, indeed, a sectarian debate that plagued the Left since the times of the Bearded Ones. It is not about changing the world or even explaining it, but about ideology, faith and dogma, about whose stories are god-given-truths and whose are man-made-spin.
Wojtek