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.
