By Andrew P. Vayda
During this number of essays from the previous 20 years, Vayda specializes in learn and clarification taken with explanations of concrete occasions, in particular human activities and the environmental adjustments led to via them.
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Extra resources for Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Changes
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22 On the frequent recounting of this anecdote in various contexts and Sutton’s own denial of its veracity, see Cocheo 1997. Causal Explanation as a Research Goal: Dos and Don’ts / 23 Let’s recall also some of the examples I have already given in the preceding section about explanations either too fine-grained or not fine-grained enough to be appropriate answers to the why-questions being asked. Thus, information about molecular interactions within cue balls and cue sticks is too fine-grained to be likely to satisfy as an answer to the question of why John beat Jack in a game of billiards, while information about Suharto-era forestry policies as causes of predatory logging which altered forest microclimates cannot be fine-grained enough to explain why fire occurred in some Indonesian logged forest areas and not others in 1997–1998.
Causal Explanation as a Research Goal: Dos and Don’ts / 33 previously in “Against Political Ecology” in 1999 (see chap. 6) by making the general point that fields or subfields should be distinguished on the basis of what is to be explained and not on the basis of a priori judgments, theories, or biases about what will do the explaining. However, although the point was made fairly conspicuously, it was not even mentioned by political ecologists responding to some of our other criticisms. 38 Indeed, distinguishing fields or subfields on the basis of whatever theories or programmatic statements are thought to be magic bullets for knowing the world and acting on it is a wellestablished practice, resulting every decade or two in the ascendance of a new field to deal with factors neglected by previous ones.
Even if they may think they are doing design analyses or obtaining necessary causal-history information, they engage in these, at best, in cursory or otherwise inadequate fashion and without duly considering alternative causal possibilities. ; Kuznar and Sanderson 2007: 4–7), put forward some decades ago on a wide range of subjects. The subjects included any number of food taboos and preferences, which Harris professed to explain by virtue of his having found some material benefits that accrued from the practices in question— such practices, for example, as cannibalism in Aztec Mexico and aversions to beef-eating in India, pork-eating in the Middle East, and dog-eating in Europe and North America (Harris 1966, 1974, 1985).