Saturday, August 23, 2008

Cultural Practices and Sustainable Rural Livelihoods



Situating cultural practices of marginal communities in India



"A radical demystification of the framework for culture necessitates asking questions like what constitutes and reinvigorates creativity as a community practice, how is it related not only to enhancing incomes and opening market opportunities but equally to notions of well being, dignity and happiness; what are the processes that need to be followed for integrating the voices of the rural creators in constituting decentralized and self sustaining cultural / creative industries that situate their existence not as subservient to the logics of elite perspectives and market but toperspectives of realization of self rooted in local tradition and community; what is the potential and legitimacy of the meanings inherent in the cultural practices of the rural creators in not only generating knowledge from below but embodying it to constitute and represent empowering processes and institutions; advocating for the inclusion of oral testimony and voices of the marginal in understanding and constituting development practices and policies; how can the reality of multiple options of the livelihoods cycle of the marginal communities in the rural areas be understood in a holistic manner to facilitate planning of interventions that have an integrative rather than a dissipative logic, trying to move away from simplistic ways of seeing reality of the marginal as divided into on farm and non-farm categories; how can the concepts of resilience, interdependence and diversity inherent in the holism of sustainable livelihoods approach be integrated into our development practice with reference to the marginal communities."

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