Abstract
Historiography reveals many visible and latent facts and opinions about how the history of communities and regions and the evolution of their social, environmental, economic, and political systems (SEEPS) are constructed according to the historian's perspective. This paper provides a content analysis of how the historical construction of SEEPS discourse addresses these issues, focusing on the textual and historical construction in a historical text titled The Cultural Roots of the Pesalai Society, authored by S.A. Miranda. The book narrates the arrival and operations of Western colonisers, resulting in socio-political transformation in the local community, changes in religious, cultural, and national identities, and the ultimate emergence of new changes in the SEEPS. This content analysis establishes relationships among the social, political, and environmental systems in the book's historical discourse and assesses the historiographical representation of the SEEPS and the factors shaping the history of Pesalai village and the Mannar District. The text integrates SEEPS, offering governance-centric, anthropocentric, and eco-centric perspectives, while theocentric discourse dominates. The book presents the information chronologically and thematically. This paper assesses the author's historical construction to examine the impacts of the human-nature interface and natural and human-made changes in the village system, comparable to the whole district. It reveals the challenges of creating hybrid, multi-use social and environmental systems, the interaction between societal relationships and nature, and village systems aligned with political and social systems. The discourse reveals an attempt to reconcile a perennial conflict or competition between sustainable SEEPS.
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