Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali

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

J. Stephen Lansing is professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona, external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and senior research fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. 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".

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 Knowing