Socio-cultural Processes and Livelihood Patterns at Tirurangadi - CDS

way seems to be to take the hard, bumpy road of unraveling the complex
interrelationships between world history and regional history.
Methodological Issues
The methodological devices used for a micro-historical study addressing the problems
outlined above will have to be necessarily complex. The standard methodological devices
for historical writing insist that the historian makes use of what he calls as primary and
secondary sources, and collects actual artifacts, in the form of material objects, written or
inscribed materials, or actual narratives that are produced in the period under study. This
would involve the collection of all the materials, available in the archives and private
collections, examination of material remains, and information available from secondary
materials. This would at best give a chronological account of events, dependent on the
nature of the sources and possibly some insight into the general patterns that can be
demonstrated from the sources. But how can we get to the central issues under study, the
livelihood patterns and the socio-cultural milieu in which people lived and shaped their
material life? This would require a re-reading of the existing sources, by not treating
them simply as data that are subject to classification, codification and quantification, but
also as information that have a qualitative bearing. Moreover, information had to be
generated from other sources also. That is, every artifact left by human beings in a
particular area, including human memories and varieties of human practice had to be
treated as sources. Moreover, interrelations between different type of sources, including
memories and practice have to be delineated, which would mean that a hitherto
unexplored terrain, such as a place-name or the practice of naming family members,
emerge as a ‘source’. Keeping these considerations in mind, the project proposal
suggested the following methodology:
1. Collection of data. This included