
Perfect Order
Recognizing Complexity in Bali
J. Stephen Lansing(Author)
Princeton University Press
Will be published approx. on 26. March 2006
Book
Hardback
240 pages
978-0-691-02727-2 (ISBN)
Description
Along rivers in Bali, small groups of farmers meet regularly in water temples to manage their irrigation systems. They have done so for a thousand years. Over the centuries, water temple networks have expanded to manage the ecology of rice terraces at the scale of whole watersheds. Although each group focuses on its own problems, a global solution nonetheless emerges that optimizes irrigation flows for everyone. Did someone have to design Bali's water temple networks, or could they have emerged from a self-organizing process? Perfect Order--a groundbreaking work at the nexus of conservation, complexity theory, and anthropology--describes a series of fieldwork projects triggered by this question, ranging from the archaeology of the water temples to their ecological functions and their place in Balinese cosmology. Stephen Lansing shows that the temple networks are fragile, vulnerable to the cross-currents produced by competition among male descent groups. But the feminine rites of water temples mirror the farmers' awareness that when they act in unison, small miracles of order occur regularly, as the jewel-like perfection of the rice terraces produces general prosperity.
Much of this is barely visible from within the horizons of Western social theory. The fruit of a decade of multidisciplinary research, this absorbing book shows that even as researchers probe the foundations of cooperation in the water temple networks, the very existence of the traditional farming techniques they represent is threatened by large-scale development projects.
Much of this is barely visible from within the horizons of Western social theory. The fruit of a decade of multidisciplinary research, this absorbing book shows that even as researchers probe the foundations of cooperation in the water temple networks, the very existence of the traditional farming techniques they represent is threatened by large-scale development projects.
Reviews / Votes
Winner of the 2007 Julian Steward Book Award, Anthropology and Environment Section of the American Anthropological Association "[A] winning combination of hard science and interpretative ethnography."--Roy Ellen, American Anthropologist "I would recommend ... this book ... as perhaps providing an example of social and ecological self-organization which might be useful in modeling other systems, whether in the social or ecological field or even in other fields in which complex adaptive systems may be studied."--Phillip Guddemi, Cybernetics & Human KnowingMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
New Jersey
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Trade binding
Illustrations
9 halftones. 21 line illus. 14 tables.
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
482 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-691-02727-2 (9780691027272)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
06/2015
1st Edition
Princeton University Press
from
€120.95
Available for download

Book
09/2012
Princeton University Press
€33.00
Article not available at the moment
Person
J. Stephen Lansing is Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, and Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is the author of "Priests and Programmers" and "The Balinese", and writer and codirector of documentary films such as "Three Worlds of Bali" and "The Goddess and the Computer".
Content
Acknowledgments ix Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: Origins of Subaks and Water Temples 20 Chapter 3: The Emergence of Cooperation on Water Mountains 67 Chapter 4: Tyrants, Sorcerers, and Democrats 88 Chapter 5: Hieroglyphs of Reason 122 Chapter 6: Demigods at the Summit 153 Chapter 7: Achieving Perfect Order 190 Additional Publications from the Subak Research Projects 213 Index 217