I'm assuming you are talking about things in maya like manipMoveContext, manipScaleContext etc. In Maya, you can substitute the word context with tool. manipMoveContext is basically a command that creates a new move tool or manages the settings of an existing move tool. You can create as many move tools as you want, each with its own settings. You can also combine different contexts into super contexts, basically a single tool that changes to the appropriate context depending on the editor.
For example, the scale tool is a supercontext that is a combination of the modeling scale tool, the texture editing scale tool, the scale keyframes tool etc.
Anyway, start looking at the docs for the various context tools and also the contextInfo and currentCtx commands.