Andrew P. "Pete" Vayda (December 7, 1931 – January 15, 2022) was a Hungarian-born American anthropologist and ecologist who was a distinguished professor emeritus of anthropology and ecology at Rutgers University.
Biographical background Vayda was born in Budapest, Hungary, on December 7, 1931. He came to the United States in 1939 with his mother. He grew up in New York City. He attended Columbia University, obtaining his B.A. in 1952 and his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1956. His dissertation, based on library research he had done in New Zealand in 1954–1955, was a detailed description and analysis of Maori warfare.
A distinguished professor of anthropology and ecology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, from 1972 until his retirement in 2002, he had also been a professor at Columbia University (1960–1972) and a lecturer at the University of British Columbia (1958–1960). Beginning in the 1960s and continuing into his retirement years, he taught also at various European, American, Australian, and Indonesian universities for periods of a year or less.Andrew P. Vayda homepage , Rutgers University.
Social and ecological field research was conducted and/or directed by Vayda in the coral atolls of the Northern Cook Islands in 1956–57, in Papua New Guinea during the 1960s, and in Indonesia at various times and on various islands since the 1970s until 2017. He founded the journal Human Ecology in 1972 and served on the editorial boards of this and other journals through the years. From 2002, he was an independent scholar with a home base in New York City and also an adjunct professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and at the University of Indonesia in Depok, Indonesia, and a senior research associate of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in Bogor, Indonesia.Andrew P. Vayda homepage , Rutgers University. A festschrift in his honor was published in 2008.Walters, B.B., McCay, B.J., West, P., and Lees, S., eds., 2008. Against the Grain: The Vayda Tradition in Human Ecology and Ecological Anthropology, Lanham, MD: Altamira Press In December 2021, Human Ecology published a tribute to Vayda in celebration of his 90th birthday.A Tribute to Andrew P. Vayda on his 90th Birthday this December. Hum Ecol 49, 669–670 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-021-00292-3
Vayda died on January 15, 2022, at the age of 90. A virtual obituary, with pictures from Vayda's various excursions and of him and his loved ones, was created in his honor.
Contributions Vayda's long and varied career featured historical, anthropological, ecological, philosophical, and interdisciplinary research. He is known also for his criticisms of the work of others for failures of causal reasoning and explanation and for undue generalizing and theorizing in the absence of adequate supporting evidence. His published works include some hundred articles and three books. He has also edited or co-edited four books.
Maori Warfare, the book based on Vayda's Ph.D. dissertation, was first published in 1960.Vayda, A.P., 1960. Maori Warfare. Polynesian Society Maori Monographs, No. 2, Wellington: Polynesian Society (reprinted 1970). Now a classic, it has been regarded as the authoritative work on the subject of Maori warfare in its last stage of evolution before being greatly altered by European weapons and ways. As such, it continues to guide archaeological research in New Zealand and has been important also for anthropological and ecological studies of war.McCoy, M.D., and Ladefoged, T.N., 2019. In pursuit of Māori warfare: New archaeological research on conflict in pre-European contact New Zealand. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 56 (December); Scaglion, R., 2008. Maori Warfare: Prefiguring contemporary directions in ecological science. In: Walters, B.B., McCay, B.J., West, P., and Lees, S., eds., Against the Grain: The Vayda Tradition in Human Ecology and Ecological Anthropology, Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, pp. 27–39. It should, however, be noted that some of Vayda's interpretations have been questioned in some fairly recent studies of Maori warfare (e.g., Ballara, A. 2003, Taua: ‘Musket wars’, ‘land wars’ or tikanga? Warfare in Maori society in the early nineteenth century, Auckland: Penguin Books). In the 1960s, Vayda extended his studies of intergroup fighting to societies in Borneo and New Guinea.Vayda, A.P., 1976. War in Ecological Perspective. New York: Plenum Press. His New Guinea findings have special value as products of field research carried out among groups contacted and pacified by outsiders only a few years earlier. The findings figure prominently in an important 1989 article, “Explaining Why Marings Fought.” In this, Vayda admitted to certain errors of reification and fallacies of functional explanation in some of his own earlier work and he showed how avoidable ambiguities in the meaning of questions about why people fight have led to long, unproductive, and acrimonious debates among scholars.Vayda, A.P., 1989. Explaining why Marings fought. Journal of Anthropological Research 45:159–177. This last theme was taken up again in a 1992 review article on the anthropology of war.Vayda, A.P., 1992. Review, The Anthropology of War, J. Haas, ed. Anthropos 87:268–272. Both articles are included in Vayda's 2009 essay collection, Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Changes. The 1989 article is noteworthy also as an extended illustration of Vayda's abiding interest in analyzing and explaining explanation itself and in engaging with the philosophical literature on explanation.
Vayda's year (1956–57) in the coral atolls of the Northern Cook Islands failed to produce the ethnographic monograph expected at the time from extended anthropological fieldwork. However, it did result in a number of articles, including some on such unconventional topics as the relation of island size to sexual activity and to openness to cultural innovations.Vayda, A.P., 1961. Love in Polynesian atolls. Man 61:204–205.Vayda, A.P., 1959. Polynesian cultural distributions in new perspective. American Anthropologist 61:817–828. Throughout his career, Vayda's efforts have been directed mainly towards the production of critical, analytic articles on various topics rather than big books with overarching themes.
Having become involved in UNESCO's Man and Biosphere Program, Vayda directed or co-directed in the 1970s and 1980s a series of interdisciplinary projects on the causes of deforestation in the Indonesian province of East Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. The projects resulted in useful data on how, why, and to what extent did specific activities such as legal and illegal logging, pepper farming by migrants from another island, and shifting cultivation, contribute to deforestation.Kartawinata, K., and Vayda, A.P., 1984. Forest conversion in East Kalimantan, Indonesia: The activities and impact of timber companies, shifting cultivators, migrant pepper farmers, and others. In: Di Castri, F., Baker, F.W.G., and Hadley, M., eds., Ecology in Practice, Pt. I, Dublin, Tycooly, pp. 98–126. In addition, the projects are notable for certain conceptual and methodological innovations. Thus, breaking with the anthropological tradition of conducting holistic studies of communities or societies within which the activities of interest occurred, the projects concentrated on explaining the activities by relating them to the specific contexts in which they were occurring and by making the contexts themselves the objects of research to make them broader or denser in explanation-relevant ways. This is what Bonnie McCay has referred to as “progressive vs. a priori contextualization.”McCay, B.J., 2008. An intellectual history of ecological anthropology. In: Walters, B.B., McCay, B.J., West, P., and Lees, S., eds., Against the Grain: The Vayda Tradition in Human Ecology and Ecological Anthropology, Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, pp. 11–26. The methodology, as set forth in Vayda's article, “Progressive Contextualization; Methods for Research in Human Ecology,” has been adopted by many anthropologists, geographers, and others doing applied research, and the article has been and continues to be widely cited.Vayda, A.P., 1983. Progressive contextualization: Methods for research in human ecology. Human Ecology 11:265–281; see also Vayda, A.P., Colfer, C.J.P., and Brotokusomo, M., 1980. Interactions between people and forests in East Kalimantan. Impact of Science on Society 30:179–199. Following the 1980s research related to deforestation, Vayda engaged in or directed other research in Indonesia in projects related to such subjects as integrated pest management, possibilities for relocation of settlers from a national park, and possibilities for control of forest and peat fires.Vayda, A.P., and Sahur. A., 1996. Bugis Settlers in East Kalimantan's Kutai National Park: Their Past and Present and Some Possibilities for Their Future. A CIFOR Special Publication. Jakarta: Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).54 pp.
Vayda's critiques of views and approaches accepted by and popular among colleagues in the social sciences and human ecology are numerous and varied. They have been described as “creative destruction” resulting in influential intellectual innovation.Walters, B.B., and McCay, B.J., 2008. Introduction. In: Walters, B.B., McCay, B.J., West, P., and Lees, S., eds., Against the Grain: The Vayda Tradition in Human Ecology and Ecological Anthropology, Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, pp. 1–7. Included in the approaches critiqued were some Vayda himself had previously been partial to. The criticisms have pertained, inter alia, to the following for being based on theories, assumptions, and/or methodologies whereby broad conclusions either poorly supported or actually contradicted by evidence are drawn and/or practical conclusions fail to be drawn:
Earlier anthropologists’ emphasis on the social and/or ceremonial character of such institutions as potlatches in North America and pig feasts in Melanesia, with no recognition and not even consideration of their significance for subsistence.Vayda, A.P., Leeds, A., and Smith, D.B., 1961. The place of pigs in Melanesian subsistence. In: Proceedings of the 1961 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, pp. 69–77; Vayda, A.P., 1961. A re-examination of Northwest Coast economic systems. Transactions of the New York Academy of Science, 2d ser., 23: 618—624; Vayda, A.P., 1967. Pomo trade feasts. In: Dalton, G., ed., Tribal and Peasant Economies, Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, pp. 494–500. Julian Steward's cultural ecology and Charles Frake's ethno-ecology.Vayda, A.P., and Rappaport, R.A., 1968. Ecology: cultural and noncultural. In: Clifton, J.A., ed., Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. pp. 476–497. The “calorific obsession” and equilibrium bias of some ecologists and ecological anthropologists.Vayda, A. P., and McCay, B.J., 1975. New directions in ecology and ecological anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 4:293–306. Roy Rappaport's metaphysical holism.Vayda, A.P., 1986. Holism and individualism in ecological anthropology. Reviews in Anthropology 13: 295–313; also, Vayda, A.P., 1996. Methods and Explanations in the Study of Human Actions and Their Environmental Effects. A CIFOR/WWF Special Publication. Jakarta: Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). 44 pp. Marvin Harris's cultural materialism.Vayda, A.P., 1987. Explaining what people eat: A review article. Human Ecology 15: 493–510. Marshall Sahlins's essentialist structuralism.Vayda, A.P., 1994. Actions, variations, and change: The emerging anti-essentialist view in anthropology. In: Borofsky, R., ed., Assessing Cultural Anthropology, New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 320–329.