Socio-cultural Processes and Livelihood Patterns at Tirurangadi - CDS

as built environment by some geographers, as well as the nature of social
relations built by them. The environment and social relations constructed
by human beings can be called culture, in order to distinguish these forms
from natural resources. Hence, the mode of production of material life and
the socio-cultural relations are intertwined in a complex and yet, dynamic
way, and history provides us with the tools for unraveling such
relationships.
e) The stress on social and cultural need not result in another variety of
‘sociologist’ reductionism. The effort of the historian is not to treat social
and cultural aspects as fixed categories, the so-called ‘bedrocks’ of
analysis , but try to unravel the relations among various factors and
processes. This ‘relational’ approach will investigate the trajectories of
human practice across space and time and treat development itself as a
representation of human practice.
There may be questions as to what all these have to do with the immediate
task at hand, that of the locating the reasons for the problem of
underutilization of agricultural land, as well as the lack of industrialization of
the region. It can be shown that the problem exists all over Kerala, where
people have been withdrawing from agriculture, and the state has also not
been in the forefront of industrialization. It is possible to explain these trends
in terms of the existing multifactor approaches
, without going into the intricacies pf historical reasoning. But the problem
appears different when perceived from the point of view of local development,
when you have to tackle not a general problem that affects the entire nation or
a province, but answer the specific needs of the people living in a region,