Perfect Order : : Recognizing Complexity in Bali / / J. Stephen Lansing.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Lansing, J. Stephen,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2012]; ©2006
• Year of Publication: 2012
• Edition: Course Book
• Language: English
• Series: Princeton Studies in Complexity ; 22
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (248 p.) :; 9 halftones. 21 line illus. 14 tables.
• Other title: Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; Chapter 1. Introduction --; Chapter 2. Origins of Subaks and Water Temples --; Chapter 3. The Emergence of Cooperation on Water Mountains --; Chapter 4. Tyrants, Sorcerers, and Democrats --; Chapter 5. Hieroglyphs of Reason --; Chapter 6 Demigods at the Summit --; Chapter 7 Achieving Perfect Order --; Additional Publications from the Subak Research Projects --; Index
• Format: Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
• ISBN: 9781400845866; 9783110442502
• DOI: 10.1515/9781400845866
• Access: restricted access
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: J. Stephen Lansing.

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.