There is a heuristic principle according to which every argument is opposed to something previously established, and that, therefore, identifying against whom or what a certain argument refers to is the best strategy to understand it. That is to say: first of all, it is necessary to situate things. Taking that into account,  Marshall Sahlins' Islands of History may have no opponent other than the synchronic rigidity, the self-referential ties of structuralism, from its theoretical origins in Durkheim, Mauss and Saussure to great ethnographic exponents of this doctrine, such as Radcliff-Brown and Lévi-Strauss.
About three decades earlier, albeit more timidly, such a conception had already touched Leach in his famous dialectic  gunsa-gunlao, and Sahlins himself recognizes prototypes of his theory in Fernand Braudel and Raymond Firth. What, however, makes  History Islands  a milestone for anthropological epistemology is its step forward – and wide, by the way. Bold, Sahlins couldn't help being confident and direct, but also lucid and good-natured. 
To some extent it can be concluded that the dynamics that Sahlins attributes to the subjects' actions, although encrypted by the culture, attest that yes, that we can manage a certain degree of freedom (obviously this was not even remotely the author's concern, but not it fails to refer us to the liberation of ethnographic interpretation), which, although unconscious, from a social structure as something experienced and as if subject to interaction by people in their particularities. In other words, culture, this elastic enigma – this origin and scourge of our discipline – lives in a becoming of the history of the facts themselves, of the individual's relations within them, in the filigrees of their ontogenetic recesses. 
Concepts such as  systemic change, which opposes the structure to the event; the of  symbolic risk  or  empirical  (the threat to which symbols and meanings are subjected during the process of events); his notion of phenomenon; its distinction between performative and prescriptive acts; finally, everything converges to try to show what he called the “structure of the conjuncture”.
Though he fought it, Sahlins distilled his thinking under the paradigm of structuralism; therefore, its jargon and metaphors, perhaps unwillingly, dealt with the structuralist terminology of the time. But she emulated the way Strauss illustrated her arguments with texts that revived interest in anthropology from the boring flatness that had plagued it since the end of the evolutionary phase. Sahlins, however, imprinted an intellectual lucidity and an argumentative literary skill far more palatable than the  mythological, and offered us a redemption against the nihilism of French thought that dominated and perhaps still dominates intellectualism  Indo-European.
And just that term "Indo-European",  adopted by Marshall Sahlins (instead of  western,  capitalist  or  market economy societies) was one of the clues that led many of his detractors to stamp him as a “bourgeois anthropologist” (as they had previously said of Max Weber's sociology), which, although he blunted his reputation, was not able to to overcome the controversy launched by the incisive realism of his theory. 
Sahlins' intellectual trajectory is well known. The early break with neo-evolutionism and, consequently, with Marxist economic theory, since the perception of its inapplicability to tribal societies. Renewal in the works of its maturity. Finally, the erudite way in which it alarmed us against the obsolete past that we lived in our discipline.
Given to witty jokes, Sahlins dared to allow himself, amid the explanation of intricate epistemological arguments, to come up with tirades that reveal his anti-fascination and optimism such as, eg: "culture is a gamble made with nature" , “the social communication is as big a risk as the material references” or “ [...] through means as random as love”. 
Isolating the application of his doctrine to forgotten island communities in the South Pacific seas, he perhaps deserves the condemning sentence that he forgot that those societies were precisely at the height of the British-Melanesian acculturation, which, swept away by dubious and anti-scientific convictions, premeditated the selection of specific historical dates and events within deviant cultural specimens to corroborate his justifications and give vent to his enthusiastic historicist streak. 
But he himself would say, perhaps not without irony, if we can understand his lesson, that this speculation is but a rebuttal in favor of his arguments, a clear example of his theory of  myth-praxis. This smart and cheeky sarcasm, this rupture, this quest for the Copernican revolution, this faith in professing what one truly believes, are valuable legacies that we can inherit from Marshall Sahlins.