Progressive contextualization

Progressive Contextualization was pioneered and developed by Profesor Andrew P. Vayda and a number of his research team in 1979-1984 to understand cause of damage and destruction of forest and land during the New Order Regime in Indonesia as well as practical ethnography. Vayda suggested Progressive Contextualization (PC) methodology due to his disatisfaction on several conventional anthropology methods to edscribe accurately and quickly cases of illegal logging, land destruction and the network of actor-investor protecting the actions, as well as various consequences towards environment and social life.

The essence of this methodology is to assess and note done carefully: (1) what the actor does (actor-based) or network of certain actors (actor-based network) in military business practices in certain location and time; and (2) series of consequences that are intended and unintended from what the actors or their networks do, in a time and space that can be different from the original time and space, as long as it is in accordance with the interest of the research an the available time. Therefore, PC methodology does not have to be bound to a certain research place and time pre-determined in the research design.

It rejects the assumption of ecological and sociocultural homogeneity. Instead, it focuses on diversity and it looks at how different individuals and groups operate in and adapt to their total environments through a variety of behaviors, technologies, organizations, structures and beliefs. `Due attention to context in the elucidation of actions and consequences may often mean having to deal with precisely the kind of factors and processes often scanted or denied by holistic approaches: the loose, transient, and contingent interactions, the disarticulating processes, and the movements of people, resources, and ideas across whatever boundaries that ecosystems, societies, and cultures are thought to have' (Vayda 1986)