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2026 - Volume 10 - Number 1

Weaving Social Memory: A Revisit of Alappuzha’s Coir Labor Heritage

Padath Pratheesh * ORCID: 0000-0003-3976-5978
St. Michael's College, Department of History, Alappuzha, INDIA

Open Journal for Sociological Studies, 2026, 10(1), 13-26 * https://doi.org/10.32591/coas.ojss.1001.02013p
Received: 19 January 2026 ▪ Revised: 22 March 2026 ▪ Accepted: 22 April 2026

LICENCE: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

ARTICLE (Full Text - PDF)

ABSTRACT:
This article re-examines the coir industry of Alappuzha not merely as an economic activity or declining traditional sector, but as a living archive of labor, identity, and collective experience. Drawing on field narratives, archival traces, and institutional histories, the study explores how coir work has shaped everyday life, social relations, and cultural meanings within coastal communities. It argues that coir functions as a form of social memory through which work practices, gendered divisions of labor, skills transmission, and community solidarities have been historically constituted and remembered. At the same time, processes of mechanization, market restructuring, and policy-driven modernization have disrupted these memory-bearing practices, producing dislocation, occupational erasure, and the gradual invisibilization of labor heritage. By analyzing how workers remember, reinterpret, and negotiate the loss and transformation of coir work, the article demonstrates that industrial decline is not only an economic phenomenon but also a cultural and social rupture. The study contends that the fading of coir labor in Alappuzha represents a broader crisis of recognition for traditional working communities, where technological change and development discourse marginalize embodied knowledge, everyday histories, and locally grounded identities. Reframing coir as social memory enables a critical understanding of labor heritage beyond nostalgia, revealing its continuing relevance for debates on work, dignity, and community in post-industrial contexts.

KEY WORDS: social memory, labour heritage, coir industry, Alappuzha, working communities, industrial transformation, occupational identity, traditional knowledge.

CORRESPONDING AUTHOR:

Padath Pratheesh, St. Michael's College, Department of History, Alappuzha, INDIA.

REFERENCES:

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