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.
[10] 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.
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'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.
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.
[20] Vayda's critiques of views and approaches accepted by and popular among colleagues in the social sciences and human ecology are numerous and varied.
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: The methodological approach favored by Vayda and his frequent collaborator, Bradley Walters, drew on pragmatic features of the work of such philosophers as David Lewis on causal explanation and Charles S. Peirce on abductive reasoning.