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Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali. J. Stephen Lansing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 225 pp.
Perfect Order is an embellishment of an analysis begun in Stephen Lansing's earlier book, Priests and Programmers (1991). The core of both is a demonstration of the ability of the subaks (irrigation associations) and the nested hierarchy of temples that incorporate them, to manage water from "the bottom up."
In the present contribution, Lansing continues this theme by examining water temple networks as a basis for farmer cooperation. On the basis of computer modeling, he argues that upstream farmers control pests and obtain more reliable yields as the price for releasing water to their downstream neighbors. As cooperation spreads, so differences between harvests lessen, and groups of subak settle to a stable pattern of synchronized optimizing cropping. Lansing argues that this works over the longer-term and wider landscape because networks have evolved as complex selforganizing adaptive systems, a context in which neighbors share information and agree on strategies without need of higher external authority. The ethnography, it seems, vindicates the simulation.
In a sense, this is all a prelude to a bigger issue: how self organization was ever possible, given what we know of the history of...