Interview
with Dr. Andrew Vayda on the fifth of April 2008 in
The interview is approximately an hour in length and is comprised of two parts.
V = Dr. Andrew Vayda
KS = Dr. Patricia Kelly Spurles
Ks: Ok so this is Saturday, April 6? Saturday, April 5th we're in Sackville, New Brunswick with Doctor Andrew Vayda, Pete. I wonder if you can tell us a bit about your early education
V: Well, beginning with college or before. Uh, most of my early education was in New York City in public schools. There was one year in Budapest before I went with my mother from Hungary to United States and thereafter it was elementary school and high school in New York City, followed by Columbia College and then Columbia University. I received a bachelor's degree and PhD from Columbia University.
KS: In what fields?
V: Uh, I was a pre-law student in Columbia College and ah I went for one day to Columbia Law School and realized that it wasn't really what I wanted to do and then took a year of, actually it was my Senior Year of college because Columbia at that time had an option whereby you could do one year of professional school as your senior year and ah, when I tried law school I realized that I wasn't sure this was for me and took a lot of Anthropology courses and that decided me: I'm going into Anthropology.
KS: Mhm. What ideas or events were influential for you during that time?
V: During that period of my education? Well I think I was looking for some big ideas that would, you know, explain the world for me.
KS: And how did you come up with a dissertation topic? What did you decide to do in the end?
V: Well, let me jump back before that. The appeal was one teacher I had, Elman Service who was a follower of Leslie White who had a pretty comprehensive view of what makes the world tick and that had appeal because I was young and in some ways confused and didn't know what a career in law would hold for me. So this was a good alternative and, although that was an early influence, it didn't really stick with me very long. When I got into graduate school we had a fairly lively group of students who were challenging ideas we were getting from some of our teachers and the idea for my dissertation really came from a dissertation that Marshall Sahlins, who was one year ahead of me, had been working on -- which was relating Polynesian social structure to productivity and I had become interested in warfare by that time, so I thought a follow up to that, looking at Polynesian warfare in a comparative way and relating that to both social organization and productivity of food resources, would be interesting and I proposed to do dissertation research much as Sahlins had done and I secured a Fulbright scholarship to New Zealand to work on that and I knew that the Turnbull Library in Wellington had very good library resources. When I got the Fulbright scholarship, I went to New Zealand -- affiliated with the University of Auckland but working mostly in Wellington on what was originally supposed to be a comparative study of Polynesian warfare similar to the comparative study that Marshall Sahlins had done but I found the material on Maoris much superior to the material on other Polynesian societies; so I concentrated my efforts on getting data on Maori warfare and I pulled together a lot of material and brought that back to New York to my dissertation committee without anything much on other Polynesian societies and this was a great disappointment to them because it wasn't comparative and it wasn't sufficiently theoretical. And Columbia University at that time and probably most of the universities where anthropology was taught emphasized very much having a theoretical orientation. This was the case not only in anthropology but in most fields. So I think this was the beginning of something I laid aside afterwards but it was the beginning of a great respect for evidence and a concern with actual behavior rather than with more elaborate kinds of theoretical constructs. But I was sort of waylaid in subsequent years and got very involved with elaborate theoretical constructs and gained some reputation for doing so -- a favorable reputation! [Laughs]
[Small section edited out of video and left out of transcription at interviewee's request]
KS: Who was your dissertation advisor?
V: Well originally I was working with Elman Service who had impressed me with Leslie White's work but Service had also worked with Julian Steward and, in a way, combined the two and it was maybe indirectly through Service that I received the focus on environment in relation to people and culture that was very central to Julian Steward's work. Steward had been at Columbia but left the year before I became a graduate student; so he did have an indirect influence on me. But then Steward, rather Service, moved to the University of Michigan, and Morton Fried who was a China expert became my dissertation advisor. And then when I had difficulty with the dissertation I was proposing to do after returning from New Zealand (difficulty because I didn't have comparative material and didn't have sufficient theoretical focus) and after initial dissertation defense I was asked to rework the dissertation, Margaret Mead became central on the committee and I worked intensively with her and that was fruitful and subsequently, when I became a member of the Columbia faculty, all these people were colleagues.
KS: How would you describe the relationship of your work to Julian Steward's and Leslie White's?
V: Well, in the late 1960s Roy Rappaport and I wrote an article quite critical of Steward because he made culture the unit that he was trying to relate to environment and Rappaport, who'd been a student of mine at Columbia, and I had been reading a lot of the literature of ecology, in which (from which rather) we drew the notion that it would be better to talk about populations and ecosystems in relation to - well, the interrelations of populations and ecosystems as some biologists and ecologists were doing. But, instead of looking at animal or plant populations, we could look at human populations; so we were proposing to talk about human populations in relation to their environment and we wrote an article which had considerable impact at the time called “Ecology, Cultural or Non- Cultural” and we came out on the side of non-cultural ecology. But subsequently it was widely hailed as an important work in cultural ecology. [Laughs] Those things happen. For a long time I was called a cultural ecologist. But it's OK. Labels don't bother me now -- they used to bother me.
KS: Can I get you to talk a little bit about your early career after you graduated, I guess, with your PhD from Columbia?
V: Well, I did believe in field work. I also believed that library research was a good way of moving on with one's career because the hope was that I would be able to complete a dissertation in a year or so and then get out into the field. It took me two years, but still I received a PhD at a very early age. I was twenty-four at the time I got the PhD. And I was pleased by that because I wanted to get away from the university. So, I got a grant to do fieldwork in the Cook Islands, with the initial idea of comparing society and culture and environment in two closely related atolls, Manihiki and Rakahanga; and, in the course of the fieldwork, when I felt the need for more comparative material, I moved off to the atoll of Pukapuka and I spent a year in those three atolls and produced, I think, three or four articles on them -- which some of my teachers and mentors, including ones I met not directly as teachers (for example, Raymond Firth whom I spent a summer with at London School of Economics), felt that there should have been a full-scale monograph on those people. But I didn't find the material justified that and I've been criticized for it.
KS: How did you find the experience of fieldwork itself? Did you enjoy it?
V: Oh, tremendously, yes.
KS: Can you tell me a little bit about what you did?
V: There in those three atolls? I'd rather talk about a subsequent fieldwork.
KS: Tell me about that one then.
V: The problem with that fieldwork was I was trying to follow the model in vogue at the time where you pick a society and describe it -- you do an ethnography of it. And that's the kind of fieldwork I didn't enjoy then and I don't think I'd ever enjoyed or ever could enjoy because I needed more of a specific focus. Then I moved on to fieldwork where I was trying to get answers to specific questions. That I found much more satisfactory. The earlier experience -- that I found satisfactory from a living standpoint. I enjoyed living on the coral atolls and interacting with the people and learning various things about them, eating fish, going out in canoes to fish with them, and so forth. But I wasn't excited by anything I was finding out about them. It may have been just a poor choice of society. I remember talking with Douglas Oliver, an anthropologist who was long at Harvard and at the University of Hawaii. He had been doing fieldwork on the Polynesian Islands and particularly in Tahiti and produced some important works on Tahiti. But I remember him saying there isn't the kind of thrill of ethnographic discovery that one gets from working in societies which had been not as long in contact with western civilization. When one is trying to do complete ethnographies, there would be this kind of thrill of ethnographic discovery (as he called it), where you were finding out things that nobody knew, that nobody had expected. And we had some of that subsequently when we did research in New Guinea in societies or with groups that had just been contacted a few years before I and my colleagues had arrived there. And then we also had a focus on warfare and land use and so forth.
KS: I think that's an interesting idea: that working in a society that has had relatively little contact with the west gives you this, you know, real intellectual drive and curiosity to find out something that nobody else knows. And it sounds like that's what you were talking about when, in your later fieldwork, you were looking at a specific topic that gave you that same drive and intellectual curiosity.
V: But in the later fieldwork I wasn't trying to do an ethnography of a society. There I was trying to answer much more specific questions. But it was a satisfaction of curiosity as a drive, yeah.
KS: Can you talk about the different themes that have interested you over your career?
V: Well the theme of relations between people and their environment which I first got as a graduate student at Columbia indirectly through Julian Steward's influence but through a lot of my own reading on the subject and interactions with other teachers and students, that's remained but it's taken different forms at different stages of my career. Initially, when there were battles going on in anthropology about how to account for cultural similarities and differences, one faction -- one school -- held that environmental or ecological influences were important and I suppose I'm more or less inclined to that view. I tried to refine it in various ways. In the sixties I was involved in developing what subsequently came to be called neo-functional ecological anthropology where it wasn't a simple matter of environmental determinism or ecological determinism but more a matter of looking at systems which included human and non-human components working together to maintain some kind of long-term stability in how the system as a whole related to the environment. So that was interesting to me at the time but is in line with the general people-environment theme. Some of the work that came out of that period was influential at the time. I've disowned most of it -- I mean all of it really -- but the interest in asking questions about the relation between people and the environment has continued. But it has taken different form in my more recent work.
KS: Why do you say that you've disowned that work?
V: Why did I disown it or why do I say I disowned it?
KS: Both.
V: I say I disowned it because I did [laughs]. I've written articles recanting it, but if you google my name you'll still find that I'm given credit for views that I haven't held for about forty years. I think it just didn't work, they didn't work, it was wishful thinking, flights of theoretical fancy, and so on. When I looked more closely at data -- but not only that, when I considered more closely the logic of analysis and so on -- I think those views didn't hold up. Much more can be said about that, but it was a long time ago. But I'm happy to go on record saying that I no longer believe a lot of that and I haven't believed it for about forty years - yeah, about forty. I brought out some articles in the 1970s -- for example, I collaborated with Bonnie McCay who was then a student of mine and subsequently became a colleague of mine at Rutgers on an article called “New Directions in Ecology and Ecological Anthropology” which came out in, I think, 1974 in Annual Reviews of Anthropology and it was maybe the first publication in which we were indicating, or I was indicating, my disenchantment with some of the ideas to which I'd subscribed earlier.
KS: Can you talk a little bit then about the relationship between, I guess, theory and fieldwork in your mind?
V: Um, I could but may I say I'd rather not?
KS: [Laughs] Sure.
V: I'd rather talk about theory and
methodology in fieldwork. I think too much has been made of theory per se
and along with that there was making too much of the relation between theory
and fieldwork. I think there has to be much more attention to methodology in
the philosopher's sense of analysis of the concepts and practices and logic
underlying research in a particular field rather than just tools and techniques
which, for many anthropologists and people in other fields, is what methodology
means. But I'm using it more in this other sense. I think there are very
important relations between fieldwork, or library research for that matter, and
getting questions answered but you have to get sort of straightened out in your
methodology in order to do that properly. Theory indicates -- in often
important ways -- questions that are worth asking and also possible answers to that but, for the last couple of
decades at least, the emphasis in my work has been much more on getting
questions answered than contributing to theory. The questions can be general
ones -- as some people would think of as theoretical questions --
but that's not an issue for me. The questions could be questions coming from my most recent work: what are the causes of forest
fires in tropical moist areas (tropical moist forest fires, what are their
causes)? I've done work on causes of warfare which some people might
think of as a theoretical question but the last answers I have given to that
question have consisted of breaking up the question to many more specific and
sharply focused questions and giving answers to them, questions about what are
the consequences of warfare in either particular societies or under particular
circumstances, what are the motivations of the war, etcetera, etcetera. And we
can give answers to those questions which are different questions and answers
than would be the case if we were asking for a general theory of
warfare.
KS: So this is part two of my interview with Andrew Peter Vayda, it's April fifth 2008 in Sackville, New Brunswick. I guess I wanted to ask about your move from Columbia to Rutgers, can you tell me about that?
V: Maybe I should mention that I first moved to Columbia in 1960 after my first teaching job at the University of British Columbia, a job that had lasted two years. I was replacing other people and actually at the time I had the ambition of being a journeyman anthropologist going to lots of different places in the world but I couldn't resist the invitation to my alma mater, and I spent ten years there, no, twelve years, and initially it was a very exciting place to be at. There was a lot of intellectual ferment going on; Marvin Harris was developing his ideas which led to his massive and quite influential book, The Rise of Anthropological Theory. We had visitors like Fredrik Barth who did have a positive influence on my thinking. And Morton Fried who'd been my supervisor was still there and a number of other interesting people and good students. I enjoyed the initial years there but, with the particular interests that I had in the interrelations of people and their environment, I felt constrained in my ability to work across disciplinary lines, and my disillusionment with systems thinking had begun and my questioning of the materialist dogma -- I should perhaps say as espoused by Marvin Harris towards the end of that period -- had also begun. So I began to look for positions elsewhere and the one at Rutgers appealed to me because it was a senior position in what had been the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, which was looking at the time for a new identity as a multipurpose liberal arts college with a so-called “man and environment theme” and they invited me to join them and take a leading role in developing that. So I thought this was an opportunity to put into practice some of the ideas I had about working in a more interdisciplinary way or perhaps ignoring disciplinary boundaries so as to advance knowledge, understanding, explanation in this general area of people-environment interactions. So, although I was a full professor at Columbia at the time, I did move to Rutgers and, after I was there just a few months, the central administration prevailed upon me to become a dean and I thought this was a further opportunity to put into practice some of the ideas I had about getting away from some of the constraints of discipline-bound teaching, thinking, and research. And to a limited extent perhaps I succeeded -- but much less than I expected. And all the other administrators, I think, were disappointed in what they got from me and, after two years, were more than happy to let me loose back into the academic world. But, more than that, they gave me a degree of freedom which perhaps not many academics had. And for a few years I could take advantage of grants from UNESCO and other agencies to work on problems of deforestation and related issues in Indonesia and I did that on sort of an occasional basis by means of trips to Indonesia and participation in conferences in various places, mostly sponsored by UNESCOS's Man and Biosphere program but then, beginning in 79-80, we had a series of longer-term projects to look at the forces making for deforestation on Kalimantan or Borneo and those experiences were important to me as fieldwork experiences which you asked about previously. But these were different from the fieldwork experiences which were directed to getting the ethnography of particular societies. We were trying to answer questions about deforestation and it wasn't the role of a particular group or society in deforestation but rather we were trying to understand the various forces contributing to it. Taking cues from my earlier thinking and influences like, I guess, Fredrik Barth and some others who were inclined to focus more on events and actions than on systems, we proceeded to design research accordingly so that we were asking what does deforestation mean in more specific terms. Well it, means people cutting down trees. So, if it means people cutting down trees, well, we want to see who is cutting down trees and we want to focus our research on them and that's in fact what we did and we found various groups involved in deforestation and had a number of subprojects which were focused on looking intensively at the activities of those groups and there was a sort of significant break from what had been more traditional ways, anthropological ways, of proceeding. It also was multi-sited research before that became a fashionable term for so-called postmodern anthropologists. It was multi-sited because the problem was multi-sited; so we had to look for answers at a number of different sites. So that I think was a significant contribution of fieldwork to my thinking -- going back to the question you had asked in the first part of the interview.
KS: Can you tell me a little bit more of that Indonesian part of your life, your Indonesian fieldwork?
V: It went on for some time in different ways after the UNESCO MAB project. I was in Indonesia again in 1989-90 as a Fulbright professor at the University of Indonesia and as part of that period we had a project where we joined a program on integrated pest management in central Java and we were asking about the acceptance of central Javanese people of integrated pest management programs. There again we were applying an approach where the focus was on actions and events in relation to the environment and some publications came out of that and I was working mostly with Indonesian students who were doing most of the actual field research. But some years later I was asked to contribute to a volume on local knowledge. That experience turned out to be significant and, with a couple of collaborators, I wrote an article in which we questioned the views of -- the view of -- local knowledge studies whereby whole knowledge systems, or so called local knowledge or indigenous knowledge systems, had to be understood for their relevance to questions of development, conservation, and so forth. And we argued in that paper that was just published in 2004 that we need to have a much more specific focus on the actions which are of interest because of their environmental effects and then we have to ask what is the knowledge behind those actions which leads people to take part in those actions rather than asking what is the totality in some sense of the knowledge system which is behind the actions. I don't know how much sense that makes, but I have plans to republish that article under the title, “On knowing what not to know about knowing,” which unfortunately sounds a little like a pronouncement of our former US Secretary of Defense but, if you think about the words, they are defensible and provocative and interesting. Then, as I said, recently I was involved in research on the causes of fires in tropical moist forests in Indonesia and that's research I first got into in '97, well, '98, because there were extensive forest fires in Indonesia during the El Niño event of 1997-98, and I had plans for the summer of '98 to do a little consulting work in the Arun valley of Nepal, together with a Norwegian research team headed by my friend Gunnar Håland of University of Bergen and I also had a grant from the Ford Foundation to spend some time in Yunnan, southwest China, on problems related to deforestation and so forth, but then I got a call from a former student of mine who was working with World Wide Fund for Nature in Jakarta and they had some money for work on the causes of forest fires and would I be interested? And I go into a little detail about this because I had no previous interest in causes of forest fires but that made the subject interesting to me. The question was specifically on causes of forest fires, something I knew nothing about, and here was an opportunity to learn something about it. So I did go to Nepal for two weeks but I cut the work in China to one month from two and I spent two months looking at the causes of forest fires in Kalimantan -- East Kalimantan. I'm not sure just how many hectares were damaged in East Kalimantan. I don't have the figures offhand, but in East Kalimantan and Sumatra together there were six million hectares of forest which were damaged -- so these were serious fires. We published a report on that in '99 but it wasn't till 2006 that I published a paper in Human Ecology which gives my considered views about how research on the causes of forest fires in Indonesia should proceed and successes that research has had and ways in which that research has failed because of failures in the methodology and logic whereby the research was conducted. So I think that paper and several others published recently reflect fairly where my current interests lie and are very different from the systems stuff from the sixties you saw.
KS: You talked a few times about problems with disciplinary boundaries. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about something that might touch on that. I wonder how you see your relationship with the discipline of anthropology today and maybe how that's changed over time.
V: Do I have to? [Laughs] Well, I have a significant relationship, although I feel that in some ways I've left the discipline of anthropology in that much that goes on in anthropology doesn't really interest me very much. I'm not sure I should be saying this for this series of interviews but that is the truth of it. And it's not so much that I've moved away from anthropology, although no doubt that's right, but also that anthropology has moved away from me. However, I wouldn't go into this at all except for the fact that I think the work I'm doing is for anthropologists and the social scientists and related disciplines like cultural and political geographers in that my recent writings on methodology -- for example, the last chapter of the book Against the Grain, which came out in 2008, published by AltaMira Press. (That's the extent of the plug; I'll let potential readers for themselves find out the subtitle of the book.) That last chapter gives methodological dos and don'ts for what I hope would be anthropologists and geographers. It's a chapter which is most intelligible to philosophers or the philosophically inclined rather than to the majority of anthropologists but I hope to improve my ability to communicate and get some of the things I'm saying across to anthropologists and geographers – “get across” may sound a little arrogant -- I hope to open up discussion with those folk, more communication about the questions I'm raising, about how research should be done and how questions should be formulated and so forth. So there is a relation to anthropology and for me it is a hopeful one but in other words it is one that I think will bring us closer together in the future if I live long enough. Does that make sense?
KS: It does. In know that's a complex chapter but I wonder what advice, I guess, you would have for my third year students in anthropology at Mount Allison.
V: Well, I can make it well with third year students better than with full grown anthropologists. The ideas in the chapter are fairly simple ones. They're ideas like if you're doing research know what you're doing research about, have clear questions that you're asking, be specific in the questions, keep focused on the questions -- all that's pretty straightforward. There is also some advice in it contrary to conventional advice, for example, that you don't need to start out with a theoretical framework. Rather than having one theoretical framework, it's good to know about lots of different theories. One of the papers cited in that chapter is a paper which I say should be read by every graduate student and professor in North America – well, in the world maybe -- interested in these subjects and I say that following someone named John Platt -- I think it's John, anyhow it's Platt -- who published an article on this, an article that I'm about to refer to in Science in the 1960s. The paper is a paper by the geologist by T.C. Chamberlin, first published in 1890 and called “The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses” and the idea is not to go out into the field to test one hypothesis or one theory but to have a question to which no doubt there are lots of different possible answers and the more different possible answers you're aware of, the better. You need lots of knowledge but the knowledge can never become comprehensive. You have as much knowledge as practically possible of possible answers and then you decide which of those are worth further empirical scrutiny and then you go about subjecting those to further empirical scrutiny whether the question is causes of forest fires or causes of particular violent outbreaks or causes of using the land one way or using it another, using it for oil palm plantations or using it for growing rice, etcetera, etcetera. I could go on with this but that gives you an idea.
[Portion edited out of video and left out of transcription at interviewer's request]
KS: So now that you've gotten into some work on forest fires, is that an area that you're going to continue in?
V: Well, in some ways yes, I may join a panel at the World Congress of Environmental History in Copenhagen next summer, the summer of 2009, on that and there may also be a panel at the World Forestry Congress in Argentina in 2009, but this would be a way of reporting on work already done and forest fires aren't an area I'm especially interested in continuing to do work on and I think that says something about how I get involved in things: I like to get involved in things from which I can learn something new and I'm sure there's much more to be known about forest fires than I can ever know but my curiosity about them has been satisfied for the time being and I'd love to get into new areas and explore things like the effect of climate change on wine production and biological corridors in Central America and various other topics. So this may say something in general about continuity of my interests: there's a continuity, at least in recent decades, in taking on topics with a challenge -- this challenge of understanding and explanation -- and I don't believe in giving superficial answers but at some point my own curiosity about a particular subject is satisfied and then I would like to learn about something new and I hope I can continue to do that as long as I am able to continue to do research.
KS: Thanks very much.
Interview transcribed by Ian Luddington, Mount Allison University.