tion:The social and cultural aspects of every society evolve in the context of certain interacting ecological, demographic, technological and economic characteristics particular to it. The ecological and related resource determinants are characteristics that tend to exhibit a fair degree of stability since they are significantly nature-determined. The demographic, technological and economic variables seem to undergo a greater degree of change, as they are products of human enterprise. The social and cultural aspects, which arise from this HISTORICAL nature-human interaction, take effect within a workday routine of livelihood and provide the element of specificity to the society. They accumulate over time and form a corpus of certain BEHAVIOURAL facets of a people. In the more ancient societies, such as those in Asia, these socio-cultural traits have been handed down largely through learning-by-doing and oral traditions of songs, stories and sayings. They evolve to REPRESENT a "WORLD view" of the COMMUNITIES and represent in succinct fashion a coherent "practice-knowledge-belief" system (Gadgil et al., 1993).