Progressive contextualization: Methods for research in human ecology

Human Ecology, Vol. 11, No. 3, 1983
Progressive Contextualization: Methods
for Research in Human Ecology
A n d r e w P. V a y d a 1
Theoretically or practically significant research results concerning transitory as well as persistent phenomena can be obtained by human ecologists
while avoMing commitment to long-term, expensive projects, rigM
frameworks, traditional disciplinary goals, and unwarranted assumptions
about the stability and purposiveness of units or systems. The procedures to
be followed, as illustrated by research on people-forest interactions in East
Kalimantan, involve a focus on significant human activities or people-environment interactions and the explanation o f these by their placement
within progressively wider or denser contexts. Guides for progressively contextualizing activities or interactions include a rationality principle, comparative knowledge of contexts, and the principle of pursuing the surprising.
KEY WORDS: human ecologyresearch methods; systemsanalyses; people-forest interactions;
flux; stability; Man and the Biosphere (MAB) program; Kalimantan (Borneo).
INTRODUCTION
The main purpose o f this article is to argue for wider adoption of certain procedures that can be conveniently labeled progressive contextualization. Simply put, these procedures involve focusing on significant h u m a n
activities or people-environment interactions and then explaining these interactions by placing them within progressively wider or denser contexts.
For example, in a research project that will be referred to throughout this
tDepartment of Human Ecology, Cook College, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New
Jersey 08903.
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0300-7839/83/0900-0265503.00/0 @ 1983 Plenum Publishing Corporation
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article for purposes of illustration, a goal of the investigators was to understand the forces contributing to deforestation in the Indonesian province of
East Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. To achieve this goal, they started
by focusing on specific activities, such as timber cutting, performed by
specific people in specific places at specific times. They then traced the
causes and effects of these activities outwards. In doing so, they remained
committed to the holistic premise that adequate understanding of problems
can be gained only if they are seen as part of a complex of interacting causes
and effects. But the investigators avoided a priori definitions of the boundaries of such complexes-for example, that they correspond to the
boundaries of an ecosystem or of a human community (Kartawinata and
Vayda, in press).
More will be said later about how to do progressive contextualization,
but it may be noted here that one guide is a rationality principle whereby we
assume that those who are engaging in the activities or interactions of concern to us are rationally using their knowledge and available resources to
achieve whatever their aims are in the situations in which they find
themselves. With this assumption, we can perform the "thought experiments" of putting ourselves in the place of the actors and then asking
and looking for what there might be in their situations to make them do
what they do (see Hempel, 1965: 463-489; Homans, 1970: 317-318; Jarvie,
1964: 77, 216-221; and Popper, 1972: 179ff, on such experiments as applications of the rationality principle or rationality proposition).
No claims, it should be noted, are made for the novelty of any of this.
On the contrary, in advocating progressive contextualization, I am consciously making a plea to return from more strict academic (and
academically fashionable) methods, including some I myself have used, to
commonsense, practical ways of seeing what is happening in the world.
Of the various advantages that can be claimed for progressive contextualization, the following five will be discussed here: (a) resolution of the
research unit question; (b) avoidance of unwarranted assumptions about
the stability of units or systems; (c) latitude in the time, effort, and money
required for using progressive contextualization; (d) practical significance
of the results and their ready communicability to policy-makers; and (e)
possible theoretical significance of the results. Each of these advantages will
be considered in turn, some at greater length than others.
RESOLUTION OF THE RESEARCH UNIT QUESTION
The question of what are the appropriate units of research is an old and persistent one in human ecology and related fields. It can be illustrated here by
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referring to the Man and the Biosphere (MAB) program, which UNESCO
launched in 1971 as an international research and training program for providing information and methods for better resource management and land use.
The East Kalimantan project, which I directed from 1979 to 1982, was part
of this program.
The roots of the MAB program lie in International Biological
Program studies, in which ecosystems were the units of research.
Early in the history of MAB, however, it was realized that the continuing use
of these units might impede rather than facilitate research contributing to
improved management of natural resources and better or more sustainable
relationships between people and their environments. The main difficulty
that was seen was expressed by di Castri (1976):
Human uses of the environment are not confined within ecosystems. Economic
systems are specifically organized around the exchange of material, of energy, and
even of people between ecosystems; they cut across ecosystems in order to take advantage of the complementarities and contrasts of different ecological zones. (p.
245)
Confronted with this difficulty, researchers and research planners appear to
have concluded that identifiable units other than ecosystems had to be
found. A 1974 MAB task force put forward the concept of the "human use
system" (UNESCO, 1974), which was seized upon as the unit needed to
meet this difficulty. Although definitions have not been consistent about
whether these systems "through and by which resources are managed" (di
Castri, 1976: 245) are such social units as households, tribes, nation-states,
and multinational corporations (UNESCO, 1974: 10) or such spatial units
as villages, watersheds, islands, and archipelagoes (Brook field, in press; di
Castri, 1976: 245: di Castri et ai., 1981: 56), the unit-minded were satisfied.
How to proceed seemed to be clearly enough indicated: identify the social
or spatial system through and by which resources are managed and then
study that system. There even are some projects in which this procedure is
said to have been followed, such as the Fiji and Caribbean MAB projects
described by Brookfield (in press). A recent assessment suggests, however,
that the concept of the human use system has not yet been applied at a specific
enough level to "take us very far forward" (Whyte, in press).
Rather than waiting for these more specific applications, I would
argue for progressive contextualization as an alternative to having to have
such units of research as tribes or islands, which have their entitavity
already defined or their boundaries already demarcated before the research
actually begins. Our approach resolves the research unit question by showing it to be avoidable. In using the approach, we need to make no assumption that the people-environment interactions that interest us are necessarily
the components or expressions of some previously defined system. Instead,
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we are free to gain understanding by proceeding empirically to put the interactions in question into context-sometimes by going far beyond the
boundaries of a nation-state or island (e.g., in looking at the movement of
forest products from the interior of Kalimantan to buyers in Hong Kong,
Japan, North America, and Western Europe), sometimes by being satisfied
without going beyond even the boundaries of a single Dayak village and its
land (e.g., in looking at the villagers' collection of forest products for local
use in building, cooking, and medicine).
A V O I D A N C E OF U N W A R R A N T E D A S S U M P T I O N S A B O U T THE
STABILITY OF UNITS OR SYSTEMS
Giving salience in human ecology research to finding supraindividual,
identifiable units or systems by which resources are managed or certain
people-environment interactions are effected involves assumptions about
the stability or persistence of these systems and of their roles in resource
management and use of the environment. In some cases, the assumptions
may turn out to be not wrong, but the point is that whether they are wrong
or not has to be empirically determined. In previous publications I have
discussed how the units responding to environmental problems and opportunities may shift from individuals to various forms (and degree of inclusiveness) of groups and perhaps back to individuals in accord with the
nature and magnitude of the problems or opportunities at hand (Vayda and
McCay, 1978; Vayda et al., 1980). Also, I have referred to the rapidly forming, transient, and problem-specific groups sometimes called a new
"adhocracy" (Bennis, 1966; Toffler, 1970: Chap. 7)~and have noted that
these "may represent especially effective strategies in the modern world insofar as the number, novelty, complexity, and unpredictability of the problems faced by individuals and by the business and political organizations
to which they belong may be greater than ever before and may preclude
effective collective responses by members of permanent social units" (Vayda
and McCay, 1978: 44; see also Hine, 1977, and Bohannan, 1980: 520-523,
on the nonbureaucratic networks that they see as the predominant organizational forms of the modern world). In view of such possibilities, it did not
make sense in our project in East Kalimantan (where environmental and
social changes have been especially rapid since the timber boom that began
in the late 1960s) to specify in advance certain social units, like ethnic
groupings, communities, or tribes, as our research units on the assumption that they necessarily have key roles in managing resources or effecting people-environment interactions. Indeed the research eventually
disclosed significant fluidity in the aggregation and disaggregation of
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people as they went about exploiting opportunities presented to them by a
changing environment. There were some ethnically distinct networks
operating-for example, in the case of the Bugis migrants who cleared
logged-over forests in the vicinity of the city of Samarinda to make pepper
plantations-but there were also ad hoc coalitions of urbanites and rural
people from various ethnic groups for the purpose of making quick profits
from cutting and selling timber (Kartawinata and Vayda, in press; Vayda,
1981). Progressive contextualization, starting, as noted earlier, with specific
activities such as timber cutting, performed by specific people in specific
places at specific times, enabled us to see and understand the activities and
impacts of such coalitions and did not require us to make any assumptions
about their performance or stability. This is not likely to have been the case if
we had followed the procedure of specifying in advance our research unit
or, in anthropological parlance, specifying in advance the tribe, the community, or the ethnic group that would be the subject of our study.
It may be that unit-mindedness in human ecology is a legacy from a
world that could be regarded as more stable, perhaps the world of 19thcentury science in which the specificity, integrity, and separateness of
phenomena constituted, as Thomas (1975: 147) has suggested, a fundamental myth. But the appeals for the identification of units that not only include
but also somehow control the people-environment interactions of concern
to us (see the examples described in Brookfield, in press, and Golley, in
press) reflect also the kind of system thinking that was at its apogee in the
1960s. This is the kind of thinking that led ecologists, as I have discussed
elsewhere (Vayda and McCay, 1978: 42), to view ecosystems as "selfregulating and self-determining systems with goals such as maximizing
energetic efficiency or productivity, the efficiency of nutrient cycling,
biomass, or, through an increase in species diversity and food web complexity, maximizing organization ('information' content) and stability." The anthropologists now labeled "neofunctional ecological anthropologists" (e.g.,
in Orlove, 1980) went even further than the ecologists and argued that the
self-organizing, self-regulating properties of ecosystems were expressed not
only in various plant-plant and plant-animal interactions studied by
biologists but also in a gamut of human activities and sociocultural institutions, ranging from mundane methods of food production to elaborate
rituals or ceremonies involving the purportedly ecosystem-maintaining
sacrifice of cattle, pigs, or people (see Vayda, 1969, for examples of
neofunctional studies in ecological anthropology, and Orlove, 1980:
240-245, for a critical review of such studies).
Contrary to what some critics (e.g., those referred to in Vayda and
McCay, 1978: 35) have alleged, the proponents of such systems analyses or
interpretations were, for the most part, not guilty of a panglossian
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obliviousness to ecosystem disruptions and nonhomeostatic changes. On
the contrary, these were the main processes analyzed in some studies by the
proponents (see the references in Vayda and McCay, 1978: 36). The important point to note, however, is that attention to these processes-or, more
specifically, to the changes in people-environment interactions they comprised-was paid within a framework of systems thinking whereby the
changes were of interest only insofar as they could be seen and interpreted
as changes in or to a bounded, identifiable system presumed to have (or, at
least, to have had) mechanisms to maintain itself.
Although the persistence of such thinking in human ecology is part of
what prompts my advocacy of progressive contextualization here, it must be
noted that recent years have been marked by significant movement away
from the kinds of systems approaches indicated earlier. This, as Orlove
(1980: 246-249) has observed, has been happening in both biology/
biological ecology and human ecology/ecological anthropology. Among
the biologists there has been increasing recognition that the ecosystem is an
analytic, not a biological, entity; that natural selection acts not upon it but
rather upon individual living things; and that the interactions that some
systems analysts regarded as expressing self-organizing properties of
ecosystems could be understood instead as the products of the various and
variable adaptive strategies of individual organisms that live together in
restricted spaces and are subjected there to various external stresses or
disturbances (Vayda and McCay, 1978:42 and passim). Similarly in human
ecology and in anthropology in general (including ecological anthropology)
there has been increasing recognition of the questionability of attributing
purposiveness and self-maintaining properties to such higher-level units as
societies and cultures; there has accordingly been increased attention to the
behavioral rather than normative aspects of social life and to the ways in
which responses to changing circumstances are made by particular human
beings, acting either together or separately and making use of whatever
technological, organizational, and cultural means are available to them
(Bennett, 1976; McCay, 1978; Murdock, 1972; Orlove, 1980; Peoples, 1982;
Richerson, 1977; Vayda et al., 1980; Vayda and McCay, 1978; for suggestive earlier statements, see Jarvie, 1964, and von Mises, 1960).
Progressive contextualization is of course consistent with these new
directions in ecology, human ecology, and related fields. In using it, we can
start with the actions or interactions of individual living things and can proceed to put these into contexts that make the actions or interactions intelligible by showing their place within complexes of causes and effects. No a
priori assumptions need to be made, however, about the permanence of
these complexes or their correspondence with units previously defined or
identified for purposes of systems analysis. Thus progressive contextualiza-
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tion provides us with a way to gain holistic understanding without recourse
to procrustean systems frameworks and their attendant and arguable
assumptions about the stability of systems and about the mechanisms
whereby such stability is achieved.
LATITUDE IN THE TIME, EFFORT, AND MONEY REQUIRED
FOR USING PROGRESSIVE CONTEXTUALIZATION
Money is less available now for research than it was in the 1960s, and
there is more recognition that the kinds of models generated by the comprehensive biome studies of the International Biological Program (IBP)
have only very limited utility for dealing with urgent local and regional
problems related to land use and the environment. Accordingly, as noted by
di Castri et al. (1980, 1981), the epoch of big projects in ecology has passed.
There are some who are carrying on by trying to do on a much smaller scale
in the new epoch much the same things that were being done in the o l d recruiting scientists from various social and biological disciplines and subdisciplines and organizing them into teams assigned specific data-collecting
and/or analytic tasks for the purpose of developing sophisticated computer
models of the processes operating within an area or system. The contrast to
the IBP work is that the areas or systems selected for these efforts are small,
such as a single Alpine village and its environs in the case of the Obergurgl
MAB project. This project, notwithstanding the reduction of scale from
the projects of IBP days, required the services of 80 scientists organized into
15 teams (Moser and Peterson, 1981).
An alternative approach for the new epoch of small, modestly funded
projects is progressive contextualization. In the case of our East Kalimantan
project, we started with a handful of investigators and no commitment
either to dealing comprehensively with the processes operating in some
small a r e a - a single village and its environs, for example-or to confining
our studies within such an area. Contrary to what some in MAB (e.g., di
Castri, 1978: 262) have advocated, we also did not feel that the quantitative
precision and experimental designs of the so-called hard sciences were a sine
q u a n o n . Rather we felt we needed methods with a fluidity or flexibility to
match that of the things and processes we were trying to understand (see
Glaser and Strauss, 1967: 235). Accordingly, for the purpose of discovering
variable complexes of interacting causes and effects within which the
people-environment interactions of primary concern to us occur, we opted
for ad hoc combinations of qualitative and quantitative methods-such
qualitative ones as informal interviewing and anthropological techniques of
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participant observation and such quantitative ones as surveys of household
composition, time allocation, and land use. In deciding about methods, we
assumed, along with Chambers (1980) who has argued in favor of what he
calls "quick-and-clean" research methods, that important insights and
understanding are often obtainable in more timely fashion and with greater
cost effectiveness if the investigators are free to rely on their experiential
judgment without the constraints of having to follow routines set for them
for the sake of compliance with the rigorous methods of the experimental
sciences. Having this freedom, the investigators in the project could, for example, start by noting such activities as tree cutting or forest clearing by
migrant farmers and Dayak tribesmen in East Kalimantan; they could then,
in contextualizing the activities, proceed to relate them to factors as various
as the operations of one or another of the hundred or so timber concessionaires in East Kalimantan, the demand for aloe wood (gaharu) and other
forest products in such distant places as Hong Kong, and the previous
migrations whereby relatives and friends who could help ne',vcomers from
other islands had become settled in frontier areas where there still was forest
to be cleared and land to be farmed.
Recognizing that as more is known of their contexts the better are any
activities of concern to us understood (see Berlin, 1953: 73-75, on
.Tolstoy's conception of what constitutes superior understanding of human
actions), the investigators recognized also that they could not go on indefinitely in enlarging and densifying the contexts they were observing and
reporting. Decisions about how far to go or how long to continue were accordingly made on the basis of such considerations as the resources (time as
well as tools and money) available for research and the thoroughness or
detail that the investigators felt to be useful or necessary for explaining the
occurrence of certain activities to themselves, to their colleagues, and to
policy-makers. Determining admittedly partial contexts was regarded sufficient by the investigators, and indeed it is a question whether "total" contexts can ever be known.
The fact remains, however, that there were no rigid frameworks,
either spatial or temporal, within which our contextualization had to proceed. Given the kaleidoscopic nature of the contexts in which many
people-environment interactions in East Kalimantan were happening, insistence on the rigorous methods of the experimental sciences would have
been counterheuristic. This point, it might be noted, is essentially the same
as that put forward some years ago by sociologists Glaser and Strauss (1967:
235) in arguing that an emphasis on precise demonstration and being "scientific" is "simply not reasonable" when there is a need for discovery and exploration amid subject matter that is undergoing continuous change.
What is reasonable and what is not depend of course on the context.
Other things being equal, it is better to use the rigorous methods of the ex-
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perimental sciences than not to use them. Indeed, in a new project, Shifting
Cultivation and Patch Dynamics in an Upland Forest in East Kalimantan (a
follow-up to our original East Kalimantan project), we are using more
rigorous quantitative methods. In order to compare the effects of natural
disturbances and certain man-made ones on the forest, we are systematically sampling plots and measuring forest gaps and trees (Jessup with Vayda et
al., 1981; Vayda with Jessup, 1980). The decision to proceed in this way
(and to seek funding for doing so) was, however, made only after our earlier
investigations in the particular study a r e a - S a i Barang village and its environs in the Apo Kayan, a remote interior plateau along the East Kalimantan-Sarawak b o r d e r - h a d disclosed the presence of both primary forest
and numerous patches of secondary forest varying in age from 10 to more
than 100 years and had thus shown the area to be well suited for systematic
research on the effects of traditional methods of shifting cultivation on the
distribution, structure, and composition of so-called primary forest
ecosystems (see Kartawinata and Vayda, in press, for elaboration of this
point). Research opportunities such as this should be exploited, but we must
recognize that we would end with a distorted view of the world and its
changes if we were to do research only when such opportunities presented
themselves and when the rigorous methods could be effectively used.
My emphasis on the latitude that progressive contextualization affords
may raise questions about whether there can be any guides, besides the
broad rationality principle mentioned earlier, for putting the activities or interactions of concern to us into context. It may therefore be worth
saying that there can indeed. An important guide is of course whatever knowledge we have of the contexts in which apparently similar interactions take place elsewhere. Thus our research on forest conversion by
shifting cultivators in the vicinity of Samarinda was guided at the outset by
our knowledge that such conversion was proceeding in other parts of the
world at the hands of "rootless, landless p e o p l e . . , squeezed from their
homelands by unequal land tenure or population growth [and] struggling
to make what living they can amidst unfamiliar ecological conditions"
(Eckholm, 1979: 18; see also Ewel, 1978; Raven, 1981: 30). Therefore we
undertook to see whether the shifting cultivators near Samarinda were
operating in similarly straitened circumstances. Likewise, our attempts to
put forest clearing by Bugis migrants in East Kalimantan into context were
guided by our knowledge of the historical contexts in which Bugis migrants
in other provinces of Indonesia have cleared forests in order to grow perennial commercial crops (Lineton, 1975a, 1975b; Vayda, 1980).
Comparative knowledge of contexts is of course not an infallible
guide. In the case of the research among Bugis migrants, it did lead us to
documentary research and the collection of life histories whereby the
movements of the forest-clearing pepper farmers could be seen not as
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discrete, individual migrations but rather as part of a well-organized longterm colonization process with the potential for moving Bugis to almost all
accessible areas of East Kalimantan where pepper can be profitably grown
(Kartawinata and Vayda, in press, summarizing research by A. Sahur).
However, in the case of the research on forest conversion by shifting
cultivators, we were misled by our comparative knowledge: we did not find
the contexts of desperation that it had made us look for. We found instead
that much of the timber cutting attributed to shifting cultivators in the
Samarinda vicinity was being done not by poor farmers short of land for
growing their crops but rather by (or for) better-off, enterprising rural and
urban residents interested more in making profits from land speculation
and from cutting and selling timber than in farming. Forest clearance in
similar contexts has occurred and is occurring in many other frontier
areas-e.g., in the United States in the 19th century (see the summary in
Vogeler, 1981: Chap. 3) and in Mexico today (Nations and Nigh,
1978)-and it could therefore be argued that comparative knowledge could
have guided us in contextualizing timber cutting in the Samarinda vicinity.
The fact is, however, that we were initially so intent on finding straitened
circumstances as the context of the timber cutting that we were taken by surprise when we found Samarinda merchants and civil servants engaged in the
activity. In this case, the very fact of our surprise was an important impetus
for pushing inquiries in the direction of these persons and their situations.
The case thus indicates that surprise itself may be a guide in using the
method of progressive contextualization. Much the same point has been
made by Hill (1970) in discussing her research on West African rural
economies (see also Barton and Lazarsfeld, 1955:323 ff):
But if one cannot plan one's work in advance, how should it be directed? For myself
I depend very much on my naive feelings of surprise-holding that the most surprising "events" are most worth pursuit. To do research is search anew for ideas one
missed last time when formulating the packet of conscious, pre-conscious and unconscious assumptions one carries to the field. (p. xiv)
One more point concerning surprise deserves mention, and that is that
progressive contextualization affords the latitude needed to make it
e a s y - m u c h more easy than would be the case in projects with prescribed
rigorous methods and carefully formulated experimental designs-for the
surprising to be pursued.
A related point is that those using progressive contextualization need
not be bound in their research by disciplinary norms about questions to be
asked or topics to be treated. In the case of our East Kalimantan project,
the Indonesian investigators included those whose disciplinary training has
been in botany, silviculture, anthropology, and administrative science. But
the botanists and silviculturists, in their research on timber cutting, were
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paying as much attention to who was doing the c u t t i n g - a n d why and
h o w - as to the species being cut and the effects of the activity on the forest
ecosystems. And the social scientists looking at timber cutting and other
people-environment interactions were doing so not in pursuit o f such
traditional disciplinary goals as analyzing and explaining culture of social
systems but rather in order to understand better the interactions themselves.
Progressive contextualization involved these investigators in taking into account certain cultural and social factors, but they felt no disciplinary obligation to determine dominant cultural or social values or to deal with cultures
as wholes or with total social systems. Thus an anthropologist in our project
became concerned with Bugis marriage not because he saw it as a key institution o f Bugis culture but rather because a reason that his Bugis informants gave for having come to East Kalimantan to clear forests and grow
pepper was to advance themselves economically so they could afford the
bride price necessary for contracting better marriages than would have been
possible for the men if they had remained in their Sulawesi homelands (A.
Sahur, personal communication; see also Lineton, 1975b: 195, and Vayda,
1980: 84, on the similar motivation o f some Bugis migrants in Sumatra).
PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE RESULTS A N D THEIR
READY COMMUNICABILITY TO POLICY-MAKERS
That disciplinary orientations and progressive contextualization lead
in different directions can be seen also with respect to the question o f
making research results useful and readily communicable to policy-makers.
An obvious point is that the policy-makers and the discipline-oriented
scientists are likely to be seeking answers to different problems and to have
very different notions about what is interesting and significant. Thus the
mythological association and spiritual functions that certain forest tracts
have for some indigenous people (e.g., as discussed in Clarke, 1976: 252,
citing Malinowski, 1935: I, 278; II, 80) may be exciting discoveries to an
anthropologist but, rightly or wrongly, matters o f little concern to
government land-use planners. Or consider the questions with which
Ashton (1977) begins an article on ecological research in tropical forests:
How old are tropical tree species? How niche specificare they? Is evolution continuing within these forests? Are these communitiesin evolutionaryequilibrium, following a long period of gradual stabilization.., or does species diversitycontinue to increase? (p. 703)
These are hardly the questions to which policy-makers are pressing for
answers, notwithstanding that we may agree with Ashton that research
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generated by such questions may have important policy implications. As
Ashton himself argues in his article, there is a need for research to be addressed more directly to policy-makers' concerns.
In the case of the results of discipline-oriented anthropological
research, a problem is that what is policy-relevant is often embedded in a
forbidding mass of what either isn't policy-relevant or else cannot be readily be
communicated as such. The problem stems from the continuing disciplinary
commitment in anthropology to the production of holistic ethnographies,
long reports or monographs aiming to present all the pieces of the total
lifeway of a community or society. The rationale for this includes the
debatable assumption that together the pieces necessarily constitute a "functional, sense-making, logical whole" (Foster, 1962: 14) and a related premise rejected in earlier sections of this article: that superior understanding
can be gained if we use the boundaries of a human community or society as
the boundaries of the complex of interacting causes and effects within
which the activities of concern to us are viewed (see, for example, Foster,
1962, 1969; Torry, 1979; for an account of a thriving people without a total
lifeway that can be seen as a "functional, sense-making, logical whole," see
Wilson, 1977, on the Tsimihety of Madagascar). However much those
holding these assumptions may think that their voluminous reports have
policy relevance, this is not likely to be apparent to the policy-makers
themselves. As noted by Mulhauser (1975), such reports are too long and
not sufficiently focused to meet the need of policy-makers to "define some
piece of the human predicament on which to act" (cited in Trend, 1980; see
also Vayda et al., 1980: 188).
By contrast, in using progressive contextualization we can put our
focus directly on questions of concern to the policy-makers and keep it there.
The questions that we share with them may be relatively broad ones initially, such as how to reduce deforestation or how to make forest management
in East Kalimantan more effective and environmentally and
socioeconomically more sound. We can, however, readily break such questions down into more specific ones about timber cutting and other activities
or interactions that must be looked at if the broader questions are to be
answered. It is these activities or interactions that become the objects of
progressive contextualization. The approach leads to concrete findings
about who is doing what, why they are doing it, and with what effects, and
the very concreteness of the findings means that the policy implications are
quite concrete too and readily communicable to the policy-makers. Various
findings in our East Kalimantan project illustrate this, and have been or are
being published elsewhere (e.g., Colfer, 1981; Jessup, 1981; Kartawinata
and Vayda, in press; Vayda, 1981). To close, I summarize a few of the
findings with clear implications for policy-making in regard to forest
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management, the resettlement of people, and road building in East
Kalimantan.
1. Contrary to government hopes and expectations, the farming practiced by some Dayak shifting cultivators "resettled" in the Telen River
lowland area with the aid of government subsidies is not less but more extensive than it had been in the watershed area of their Apo Kayan
homelands (where chainsaws, outboard motors, and buyers for surplus rice
are not readily available) and does more damage to the forest.
2. Contrary to the previously prevailing assumptions of East Kalimantan development planners, the Dayak people still in the Apo Kayan, rather
than uniformly being dangerously nomadic destroyers of the forest, vary in
their mobility from time to time and from village group to village group and
make most of their ladangs (swiddens) in previously farmed sites left in
fallow long enough for forest regeneration.
3. Bugis migrations, forest clearance, and land opening are not
haphazard processes but well-organized ones whereby lands along new
roads can quickly get at least temporarily settled (and environmental
damage can result) if pepper or other commercial crops can profitably be
grown there.
4. The woodcutting being done by more than 150 unlicensed small
teams (usually four men in each) in the Samarinda vicinity has some
characteristics of appropriate technology for forest use and management insofar as it brings some economic benefit to people in rural areas, makes use
of their existing organizational and technological capabilities, and causes
much less damage to the forest than the more highly mechanized operations
of the timber companies.
POSSIBLE THEORETICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE RESULTS
As noted earlier, progressive contextualization is not restricted to dealing with phenomena that are, or are assumed to be, stable and persistent. It
contrasts in this respect with such still-favored natural and social science approaches as the systems and neofunctional approaches mentioned earlier.
No doubt there is much to study in the world by means of such approaches.
However, difficulties have arisen in two important ways because of reliance
on them. On the one hand, as 1 have already argued, there have been
misguided attempts to apply them to subject matter to which they are not
appropriate. On the other hand, in the absence of clear, academically sanctioned alternatives to these approaches, investigators have been seeking out
subject matter to which the approaches could be applied and have been
278
Vayda
scanting subject matter to which they could not. This has been the case both
among biologists (see, for example, Pickett, 1980, on the predilection of
ecologists for "equilibrium communities") and among social scientists (see,
for example, Wilson, 1977, on the attraction of anthropologists to tribes
with "highly structured institutions").
Possible theoretical significanc6 of the results of progressive contextualization can be seen thus to derive from the fact that it is suited to studying
unstable and transitory phenomena as well as stable and persistent ones. By
contributing to giving flux and process more of their due, its use can lead to
a better-balanced view of life and the world. This is something that must be
discussed elsewhere at greater length and can be done so in relation to
philosophical controversies that go back at least to such Greek thinkers as
Heraclitus and Parmenides in the 5tli century B.C. and are still with us (see,
for example, Gould, 1982: 383; Turner, 1977). Suffice it to say that this
possible theoretical significance constitutes one more reason for wider
adoption of progressive contextualization for research in human ecology.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
An earlier version of this paper was presented in January 1982 at the
Workshop on Ecological Bases for Rational Resource Utilization in the
Humid Tropics, Faculty of Forestry, Universiti Pertanian Malaysia, Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia, and is being published with a different subtitle in
the proceedings of that workshop. In revised form, the paper was presented
in September 1982 at a seminar sponsored by the Program on Environmental Science and Management (PESAM) at the University of the Philippines
at Los Bafios and in November 1982 at a seminar sponsored by the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University.
The Indonesian-United States project that I directed on interactions
between people and forests in East Kalimantan, Indonesia began in 1979
and ended in 1982 and was funded by the United States Forest Service
through a grant awarded to the East-West Center in Honolulu by the
United States MAB program's Consortium for the Study of Man's Relationship with the Global Environment. The project was carried out in association with the Indonesian MAB program and with the cooperation of
Mulawarman University, the Provincial Government of East Kalimantan,
the Indonesian Institute of Science (LIPI), and UNESCO. For preliminary
reports on the project as a whole, Kartawinata and Vayda (in press), Vadya
(1981), and Vayda et al. (1980) should be consulted.
Progressive Contextualization
279
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