eBookCourse Book (Course Book)
Related collections and offers
Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400845866 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/16/2012 |
| Series: | Princeton Studies in Complexity , #11 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Perfect Order
Recognizing Complexity in BaliBy J. Stephen Lansing
Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2006 Princeton University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-691-02727-7
Introduction
The transition from myth to reason remains a problem even for those who recognize that myth too contains reason. -Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece
WHEN ANTHROPOLOGISTS TRY to evoke an exotic non-Western society like that of Bali, the result may look like a dance of marionettes. Customarily we begin by highlighting the unusual, the strange symbols and beliefs that are most unlike our own. Through the alchemy of our own words we imprint these symbols on our subjects' minds, and then they are made to dance. This approach can sometimes be fruitful: the celebrated French theater director Antonin Artaud wrote that he drew much of his inspiration from Balinese performances that he witnessed at the Paris World's Fair in 1937, and saw no need to complicate his first impressions by further study. But if we are interested in a less superficial encounter there is an alternative. Suppose, in a playful spirit, we turn the question around and ask what Western social science might look like from a "magical" Balinese perspective?
Picture a scene in a griya, the residence of a Balinese high priest. Inside a walled stone courtyard, he sits engrossed intranscribing a fourteenth-century manuscript borrowed from a colleague, surrounded by the paraphernalia of his daily rituals: silver bowls and bells, jars filled with holy water, and woven baskets filled with flower petals used to make offerings. To become a high priest, he has undergone years of apprenticeship to a senior Brahmin priest, reading and discussing the ancient literature of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. When the mentor believes that the student is ready, a funeral ceremony is performed in which the student symbolically undergoes his own death, cutting his ties to ordinary human life so that he can concentrate on the cultivation of his mind. But not all of his studies are directed toward personal enlightenment; the apprentice also learns how to perform rituals for the benefit of the community. I have had many conversations over the years with these "twiceborn" priests, hoping to gain insights into Balinese ideas about the sorts of questions that interest social scientists. Not infrequently they ask me to reciprocate. Like them, I have had to undergo a long apprenticeship in an intellectual tradition, Western social theory, that explores many of the same topics they have studied. In the past these conversations sometimes became uncomfortable for me: should I admit that I regard much of their belief system as mere magic, with no foundation in reality? But as my knowledge of Balinese philosophical literature grew, I realized that my first impressions were superficial, and I began to see ways to keep the conversation alive.
The concept of magic is important for Western science, which often sees itself as engaged in a centuries-old battle against superstition. From this perspective, magic is the antithesis of rational thought. This opposition is particularly important for the social sciences. In a recent book (Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity), philosopher Charles Taylor argues that in the Western world, the loss of a magical worldview was the essential precondition for the appearance of the modern sense of the self: "The decline of the world-view underlying magic was the obverse of the rise of the new sense of freedom and self-possession. From the viewpoint of this new sense of self, the world of magic seems to entail a thralldom, an imprisoning of the self in uncanny external forces, even a ravishing or loss of self." According to Taylor, the need for a specifically social science comes from our recognition that the human mind is not fully rational, because it is constrained by being embodied and by living in the world. The task of social science is to make us cognizant of such constraints and, by so doing, help us to gain mastery over them.
Yet most of this would seem very familiar to a Balinese schooled in the disciplines of Saivasiddhanta and Buddhist philosophy. Both of these philosophical traditions have flourished for more than a millennium in Bali. They emphasize the liberation of the mind through awareness of the constraints imposed on it by the fact of being embodied in the material world. The real differences between the perspectives of Western social scientists and Balinese priests are not a simple matter of superstition versus science. Instead they reflect profoundly different ideas about the nature of society. Social science is comparative; it assumes that the world is a human creation and that social institutions are malleable. Comparisons, either between different societies or the same society in different historical periods, show how different social outcomes are produced. This idea was first articulated in Europe in the eighteenth century. "Civilization," for example, is derived from a French word that was first used in the plural form for the comparison of different societies in 1819. But for a Balinese priest, the idea of a comparative social theory begins with a false premise. Balinese Brahmanical ideas of society are founded on the concept of caste. In a caste system, every person inherits his or her caste status at birth, and differences between castes are taken to be facts about the world, not about history. So for a Brahmin scholar, the basic framework of the social world is a given, and the idea of a comparative sociology seems merely odd.
But the conversation need not end there. After all, the social scientist's preferred method of comparison is at best indirect. Balinese literature is full of stories about different societies, which are studied for their insights into the workings of the social world. Why do some kingdoms-or some individuals-prosper while others do not? Why do conflicts arise, what makes them intensify, and how are they successfully resolved? The answers must lie in the actions of the people, and according to Balinese ideas, ultimately those actions are driven by people's sense of themselves. A great deal of Balinese philosophical literature, and much serious art including drama, painting, and poetry, explores the relationship between levels of mental development and behavior in the world. Thus the shape of an eye in a traditional Balinese drawing or painting expresses the level of emotional self-mastery of its owner. From the priest's perspective, a comparison between societies is like the beginning of a historical chronicle, a mere setting of the stage. The place to focus one's analytical powers-the heart of the matter-is in the ways the main characters display their shifting levels of consciousness and engagement with the world.
The Western social theory I studied is preoccupied with a different story: the emergence of modern society, the coming into being of a new kind of person. That is the story Taylor tells, but it is as old as social science itself, and has roots in a Christian worldview. The modern West is unique, according to this view, because only in the modern world is the self free to discover its own nature. Premodern societies see society as part of the natural order of the cosmos. The achievement of Western science has been to strip away superstition, to reveal that society is our own creation, not that of the gods. What Taylor calls "inwardness," the modern sense of the self as an autonomous agent and a historical being, is bound up in this recognition. Social science is thus a form of self-knowledge, as historical events are mined to discover the stages of the emergence of modern selfhood. In the European tradition of Hegel, Marx, and Weber, these stages are correlated with the development of democratic social institutions. Hegel's argument, which laid the foundation for nineteenth-century European social theory, is that social institutions reflect a society's level of maturity and self-awareness. It follows that genuine self-knowledge is available only to members of modern societies. Indeed, this tradition makes modern Western social scientists into uniquely privileged observers.
But a Balinese Brahmin priest also regards himself as a uniquely privileged observer, and for quite similar reasons. Like the social scientist, he lays claim to theoretical knowledge about human nature that is abstracted from observations of the world. Still, from the perspective of the social scientist, the priest's views and his own are not on an equal footing, because the Brahmin's views are contained within the horizons of his "premodern" worldview. This idea was perhaps most fully articulated by the French anthropologist Louis Dumont, author of a celebrated book on the caste system in South Asia (Homo Hierarchicus) and another on the modern West (Homo Aequalis). Dumont does not question the advanced historical vantage point of the West, or the "premodern" limitations of the Brahmanical worldview. But he argues that it is worth paying close attention to the East, because the caste system offers a chance to glimpse a universal aspect of human society, the principle of hierarchy, in a pure form unalloyed by modern ideas about equality. Homo hierarchicus still exists in the modern West, according to Dumont, but we have trouble recognizing him precisely because our ideology celebrates his downfall. Yet "caste has something to teach us about ourselves: ... the castes teach us a fundamental social principle, hierarchy. We, in our modern society, have adopted the principle contrary to it, but it is not without value for understanding the nature, limits and conditions of realization of the moral and political egalitarianism to which we are attached."
So for Dumont hierarchy is to the East what equality is to the West, the fundamental principle on which society is organized. The proposition could hardly be clearer. But is it true? A concern with hierarchy is certainly part of the outlook on life of a "twice-born" Balinese Brahmin priest. The farmers who visit him to ask for his assistance must speak to him in a language register called "High Balinese," filled with honorific terms, and he is supposed to respond to them in the unflattering vocabulary of Low Balinese. In this way, hierarchy is built into the fabric of daily life and the Balinese language. But if asked whether the concept of Homo aequalis is strange and unfamiliar to him, a priest might point out that the same farmers are obligated, as members of their village communities, to attend monthly assemblies where the community's affairs are decided by means of extended discussion followed by democratic vote. In those assemblies, every speaker must use the self-deprecating high register of the Balinese language, thus affirming both the personal dignity and the jural equality of his fellow villagers. Failure to use this register is understood to signify disrespect for the community, and is subject to formal sanctions. Farmers also belong to organizations devoted to the management of rice terraces for which we must use the Balinese word subak, because no equivalent term exists in English. Subaks are egalitarian organizations that are empowered to manage the rice terraces and irrigation systems on which the prosperity of the village depends, and they too have frequent meetings that are governed by the same strict democratic etiquette. Between them, the village and subak assemblies govern most aspects of a farmer's social, economic, and spiritual life. Thus the average Balinese farmer undoubtedly has more experience of direct democratic assemblies than the average Frenchman. These Balinese democratic institutions are not recent innovations; there are references to subaks and to village assemblies in thousand-year-old inscriptions.
Anomalous cases can be useful. Social science has long been fascinated by the Balinese, who have supplied some of the most colorful footnotes for our textbooks. But for the reasons we have just considered, it has proven difficult to get them safely tucked into their proper position in the "premodern" rear guard. The more we understand about Balinese society, the more the Balinese people seem to be marching off in both directions at once, adding new embellishments to their ancient rituals of status while also devoting themselves to the perfection of formal systems of self-governance. I am not the first anthropologist to take note of this paradox: Hildred and Clifford Geertz famously observed that "in Bali, homo aequalis and homo hierarchicus are engaged in war without end." Clifford Geertz also shares my skepticism about the application of standard social science models to Balinese society. "It is fatally easy," he writes, "to fit the Balinese state to one or another of these familiar models, or to all of them at once ... Yet to reduce [it] to such tired commonplaces, the worn coin of European ideological debate, is to allow most of what is most interesting about it to escape from view. Whatever intelligence it may have to offer us about the nature of politics, it can hardly be that big fish eat little fish, or that the rags of virtue mask the engines of privilege."
* * *
I would probably have lacked the courage to begin with this rather extravagant introduction had I not witnessed a series of social and environmental crises on Bali whose origins lie in precisely this problem, the failure of a Western social science preoccupied with modernity to adequately encompass the Balinese world. It is worth remembering that topics such as modernity, which appear as theoretical issues in academic classrooms, take on enormous practical significance in those parts of the world, such as Bali, where social scientists have given themselves the mission of promoting "modernization." As John Maynard Keynes wrote in the conclusion to his General Theory (1935), when madmen in authority hear voices in the air, they are likely to be listening to some academic scribbler of a few years back. Today, the path from academic scribbles to large-scale social engineering projects is nowhere shorter than in what is called the "developing world," where each new Five Year Plan must reflect the latest ideas about how to accelerate modernization.
Over the past forty years the Balinese have had much to do with Five Year Plans. The experience seems to have bred a profound ambivalence, particularly among the civil servants who are responsible for their actual implementation. On the one hand, Five Year Plans are seen as a good thing; they signify that the governance of the nation has passed from the hands of Western imperialists back to the Indonesians themselves. But in a paradoxical way, the Five Year Plans have actually intensified the involvement of Western advisers in policies related to rural development, compared with the role of the colonial civil services in the past. The explanation for this paradox is that colonial officials had limited practical goals, such as increasing agricultural production, and soon convinced themselves that the management of the rice paddies could be safely left in the competent hands of Balinese farmers. In contrast, the goals of the postcolonial Five Year Plans involved nothing less than wholesale social transformation, the comprehensive modernization of the countryside.
With the advent of the Five Year Plans, in the late 1960s a network of new institutions designed to achieve fundamental changes in the management of agriculture began to appear in Balinese villages. Farmers were urged to follow the advice of the agricultural extension service as a matter of patriotism, as their contribution to national development. It was foreseen by the architects of the modernization plans that the new methods would come into conflict with preexisting local ideas; indeed they were intended to do so. The planners and consultants were prepared to believe that the farmers of Bali were already practicing effective techniques for managing irrigation and growing rice. But however successful such systems might be from a practical perspective, they were not designed to accomplish the broader goals of modernization. Five Year Plans were seen as an extension of the nationalist agenda: why should social and economic change be haphazard, when it could be intelligently guided?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Perfect Order by J. Stephen Lansing Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixChapter 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
What People are Saying About This
Perfect Order is an exceptional work—a new classic in the anthropology of religion, the environment, and society. It will provoke considerable debate in the field—all, I feel, for the better.
— Robert W. Hefner, Boston University, author of "Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia"
A master story teller, Stephen Lansing is unique in his ability to explain order in human societies within the framework of complex systems theory. Through the lens of his Balinese study system, hierarchical organization, equality, and self-organization all become clearer. There are lessons in this book for understanding diverse societies, including our own.
— Simon A. Levin, Princeton University, author of "Fragile Dominion"
The extraordinary complexity of Balinese social life, the grand variousness of its culture, and the clockwork precision of its terraced wet rice agriculture climbing up the sides of towering volcanoes have long astonished scholars, administrators, and tourists alike. In this brilliant synthesis, the anthropologist-cum-ecologist J. Stephen Lansing uncovers the principles which animate them and traces the ways in which they support and govern one another to produce a tremulous and troubled self-organizing, self-repairing whole. The collective management of irrigation, the endemic factionalism of village life, the fears and suspicions of the witches' and demons' spirit world, and the ritualized hierarchy of precedence and power are seen as conducing to a complicated common order precariously maintained. The result is something we have not had before—a comprehensive and circumstantial study of Bali as a whole. A major achievement.
— Clifford Geertz, Institute for Advanced Study
This wonderful book weaves together two fields that rarely come close to each other—complex adaptive systems and anthropology. In showing how the two can both give insights into one human-environment system, Lansing also reminds us that complex adaptive systems are not just computer abstractions, but have real-world significance; and that human cultures, while rich in their own right, follow certain dominant patterns and rules, with lessons for the evolution of human societies and cultures today.
— Ann P. Kinzig, Arizona State University
"A master story teller, Stephen Lansing is unique in his ability to explain order in human societies within the framework of complex systems theory. Through the lens of his Balinese study system, hierarchical organization, equality, and self-organization all become clearer. There are lessons in this book for understanding diverse societies, including our own."—Simon A. Levin, Princeton University, author of Fragile Dominion"The extraordinary complexity of Balinese social life, the grand variousness of its culture, and the clockwork precision of its terraced wet rice agriculture climbing up the sides of towering volcanoes have long astonished scholars, administrators, and tourists alike. In this brilliant synthesis, the anthropologist-cum-ecologist J. Stephen Lansing uncovers the principles which animate them and traces the ways in which they support and govern one another to produce a tremulous and troubled self-organizing, self-repairing whole. The collective management of irrigation, the endemic factionalism of village life, the fears and suspicions of the witches' and demons' spirit world, and the ritualized hierarchy of precedence and power are seen as conducing to a complicated common order precariously maintained. The result is something we have not had before—a comprehensive and circumstantial study of Bali as a whole. A major achievement."—Clifford Geertz, Institute for Advanced Study"Perfect Order is an exceptional work—a new classic in the anthropology of religion, the environment, and society. It will provoke considerable debate in the field—all, I feel, for the better."—Robert W. Hefner, Boston University, author of Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia"This wonderful book weaves together two fields that rarely come close to each other—complex adaptive systems and anthropology. In showing how the two can both give insights into one human-environment system, Lansing also reminds us that complex adaptive systems are not just computer abstractions, but have real-world significance; and that human cultures, while rich in their own right, follow certain dominant patterns and rules, with lessons for the evolution of human societies and cultures today."—Ann P. Kinzig, Arizona State University