Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Changes by Andrew P. Vayda

by Andrew P. Vayda

In this collection of recent essays, Andrew P. Vayda argues for a pragmatic approach to explanation and explanation-oriented research in social and environmental sciences. He supports his arguments with causal analyses of both human actions, such as cutting down trees and fighting over resources, and environmental changes, such as forest fires; and he voices his opposition to methodological and ethnographic holism and the notion that explanation can be achieved by deploying theories rather than by obtaining evidence of the causal histories of concrete actions and events. Vayda is critical of much recent scholarship_in such areas as political ecology, local knowledge studies, discourse studies, and evolutionary human behavioral ecology_for its indifference to questions of evidence and methodology and its failure to give proper consideration to multiple and alternative possible causes of whatever is being explained. He also discusses the use and misuse of evidence and generalizations, the payoffs and pitfalls of moving from one level of analysis to another, the dos and don'ts in interdisciplinary research, the uses of statistics, and the importance of being clear about objects of explanation. This original and challenging work makes sense of the future of ecological anthropology and will be of interest to researchers in the social and environmental sciences in general.

Genres: Anthropology

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Andrew P. Vayda is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Ecology, Rutgers University, USA; Senior Research Associate, Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Indonesia; and Adjunct Professor, Monash University (Australia) and the University of Indonesia. Formerly a professor at Columbia University, he has also taught for extended periods at the University of Indonesia and other Indonesian universities and at the University of British Columbia. He specializes 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. Since 2010, he has been taking part in interdisciplinary research on causes of the peat fires that may be one of the main sources of Indonesia's greenhouse gas emissions and he has been teaching two- to seven-week seminar courses on methodology and explanation at various universities, including the University of Arizona, University of Indonesia, Oxford University, Australian National University, and Monash University. The journal, Human Ecology, was founded by him, and he was its editor for five years. He is also a founding board member of the Association for Fire Ecology of the Tropics and serves at present on the editorial boards of Anthropological Theory, Borneo Research Council publications, Forests, Human Ecology, and International Journal of Indonesian Studies. Among his publications are some hundred articles and several books, including Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Changes (2009), a selection of his essays on explanation and explanation-oriented research in the social sciences and human ecology, and Causal Explanation for Social Scientists (2011), a reader co-edited with Bradley Walters. 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.