THE VILLAGE AS A UNIT OF INVESTIGATION $3 in understanding the characteristic pattern of relations between tbo micro and macro processes of development in the rural economy. In-conceiving village for the study of development, it should not ^e characterised merely as a micro spatial unit of rural settlements or households, having agriculture as the main source of occupation and livelihood. It should be defined as a unit of the system of social relations in material production. The content of the system of social relations in production lies in disclosing the 'interconnected-ness" of social relations among the village people in the proems oS production. The characteristic pattern or form of such' 'inters connectedness' following from the characteristic form of property relations discloses how village settlements or households arc interdependent as well as differentiable. The existing characteristic pattern bf social relations in production mediates all those characteristics of the village as a space and as a society which are generally described separately by geographical, caste-oriented religious and cultural characteristics. Take the dase of a tribal village or community. "The spontaneously evolved tribal community or, if you will, the herd— common ties of blood, language, custom, etc—is the first precondition of the appropriation of the objective conditions of life, and of the activity which reproduces and gives tnaterial expression to, or objco^ tifics (vergegenstandlicbenden) it (activity as herdsmen, hunters, agriculturalists, etc). The earth is the great laboratory, the arsenal which provides both the me^ns and the materials of labour, and also the location, the basis of the community. Men's relation to it is naiyos they regard themselves as its communal proprietors, and as those of the community which produces and reproduces itself by living labour, In reality appropriation by means of labour takes place under theae preconditions, which are, not the product of labour but appear as its natural or divine preconditions."3 If the case of a tribal village involved in shifting cultivation is taken into account, it refers to^a form of social relations in agricultural production in which the existing geographical and ecological conditions of th^ village are mediated* Ancient Village Communities Let us take another example of the ancient village copimunities where there was a communal landowndrship and the caste-bound occupational functions Were the basis of division of labour. "The small and extremely ancient Indian communities, some of which have continued down to this day, are based on possession in comnlon of the land, on the blending of agriculture and handicrafts, and on axi unalterable division of labour. ...The chief part of the products is destined for direct use by the community itself, and does not take the form of a commodity. Hence, production here is independent of that division of labour brought about, in Indian? society as a whole, by