After a long career as an anthropologist of Pacific and South East Asian peoples, Vayda specialized in methodology and explanation at the interface between social and ecological science and has directed and participated in numerous research projects on people’s interactions with forests in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Latterly he took part in a research project on causes of peat fires and their consequences in carbon emissions in the Indonesian province of Central Kalimantan. Among his methodological contributions was the development of progressive contextualization, an effects-to-causes approach to examining and explaining human-environment interactions that he subsequently rejected in part. In the 1990s, a brief critique of political ecology accuses that field of confirmation bias by virtue of prioritizing and searching out the effects of power relations on local land uses and cultures and of not being sufficiently open to other explanations through an abductive, effects-to-causes 'event ecology' approach. Event ecology has, in turn, been critiqued.
Work
He has published some hundred articles and several books, including Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Changes, a selection of his essays on explanation and explanation-oriented research in the social sciences and human ecology, published by AltaMira Press in 2009, and Causal Explanation for Social Scientists: A Reader, co-edited by him and Bradley Walters, published by AltaMira Press in 2011. A festschrift in his honor, Against the Grain: The Vayda Tradition in Human Ecology and Ecological Anthropology, with a concluding chapter by him on “Causal Explanation as a Research Goal,” was published in 2008 by AltaMira Press. His works include:
Causal Explanation for Social Scientists: A Reader, Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. 2011
Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Changes, Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. 2009
War in Ecological Perspective, New York: Plenum Press. 1976.
Environment and Cultural Behavior, Garden City, NY: The Natural History Press. 1969
Peoples and Cultures of the Pacific, Garden City, NY: The Natural History Press. 1968
Iwan Tjitradjaja, Head, Department of Anthropology, University of Indonesia.
Bradley B. Walters, Professor of Geography & Environment at Mount Allison University, lead editor of Against the Grain and co-editor of Causal Explanation for Social Scientists: A Reader
