Bali Temple based Irrigation System (and other aspects of Balinese Culture)

[Nicholas]

I'll start out by saying that I wasn't able to find a whole lot, and one of the articles I did find was on JSTOR, and I'm not sure how many of you have access to JSTOR, so I'll give a quick overview which I will try to expand on later.

Basically, the people on the island of Bali rely on a volcanic crater lack for all of their water, and so need to allocate it evenly to a large number of fields. What they have done is use a system of temples to determine when certain fields will be flooded with water for rice to be planeted. After the alloted time for one group of fields is over, the water is diverted to another group of fields, and so on. The system works very efficiently and allows for an abundant crop of rice to be grown. They have also learned to deal with the pests that inevitably find their way into the waterlogged fields, they use ducks. The Balinese will actually herd ducks through the fields, allowing the ducks to eat the pests and whatnot. There is alot more detail, but that will have to wait for a while.
Now, it is interesting to point out that the Indonesian government had pushed the people of Bali to abandon their old system and replace it with the use of pesticides and fertilizer, growing as much as they could all at once. Needless to say, things went horribly wrong and they eventually returned to the traditional system, after which things returned to normal.

Some more information for those who are interested:
http://www.depts.ttu.edu/aged/miracle_rice_in_bali.htm

http://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5100/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subak_(irrigation)

And for those with access to JSTOR:
http://www.jstor.org/view/00027294/ap020468/02a00030/0

[FreezBee]

Great post, Nicholas

- FreezBee

[Paintbucket]

Pretty impressive. Whoever thought of that is a pure genius. Perhaps not everything new is the best.

[Nicholas]

Pretty impressive. Whoever thought of that is a pure genius. Perhaps not everything new is the best.

This is one of the things I find so interesting (though I'm pretty sure it was developed over generations). We look around the world and find that there are alot of things that societies once considered "primitive" know that we could learn from. Shamans in the Amazon rainforest have knowledge of thousands of plants used for medicinal purposes.

Now, back to Bali. There is another interesting fact to note that I learned in my Anthropology class when we watched a documentary on titled the Three Worlds of Bali. They believe that over time the world decays, so every one hundred years they perform the ceremony of Eka Dasa Rudran in which they revitalize the universe. They summon demons who they must then transform into gods. During the 1963-64, then President Sukarno of Indonesia forced them to start the ceremony early, which they were finally forced to prepare for. During the preparation the Mount Agung volcano erupted, kiling a large number of people and destroying villages. Oddly, the Temple of Besakih located on the slope of the mountain, survived unharmed.

[Paintbucket]

Well, with the way the world works now in many places fast, expensive and artificial is the way of life. However, we think of ourselves as best, and others as inferior. Every tribe does it, to each his own. I wonder though, with all of the advancements of today, is there any chance that we could all come out really good and learn and share with everyone?

[FreezBee]

Well, with the way the world works now in many places fast, expensive and artificial is the way of life. However, we think of ourselves as best, and others as inferior. Every tribe does it, to each his own. I wonder though, with all of the advancements of today, is there any chance that we could all come out really good and learn and share with everyone?

Good questions

Maybe we should just learn to accept to be different -- in some parts of the world doing things in one way has shown to be beneficial, in other parts of the world doings things in a different way has shown to be beneficial.


- FreezBee

[Nicholas]

Well, with the way the world works now in many places fast, expensive and artificial is the way of life. However, we think of ourselves as best, and others as inferior. Every tribe does it, to each his own. I wonder though, with all of the advancements of today, is there any chance that we could all come out really good and learn and share with everyone?

I very much agree that we should be more accepting of other cultures. The way I see it, we can learn as much from other societies as they can learn from us.

[SteveF]

Couple of papers I dug up from a quick search. The first seems to be a bit of a classic, using fitness landscapes which is rather weird - more usually found in an evolutionary context, starting with Fisher in the 30s. My friend in my office is doing a PhD on complex adaptive systems so I'll point this out to him. Anyway, I digress:

Lansing, J.S. and Kremer, J.N. (1993) Emergent properties of Balinese water temple networks - coadaptation on a rugged fitness landscape. American Anthropologist, 95, 97-114.

For over a thousand years, generations of Balinese farmers have gradually transformed the landscape of their island, clearing forests, digging irrigation canals, and terracing hillsides to enable themselves and their descendants to grow irrigated rice. Paralleling the physical system of terraces and irrigation works, the Balinese have also constructed intricate networks of shrines and temples dedicated to agricultural deities. Ecological modeling shows that water temple networks can have macroscopic effects on the topography of the adaptive landscape, and may be representative of a class of complex adaptive systems that have evolved to manage agroecosystems.

this is then critiqued by:

Helmreich, S. (1999) Digitizing 'Development' - Balinese water temples, complexity and the politics of simulation. Critique of Anthropology, 19, 249-265.

This article examines a recent use of computer simulation in modeling the ecological dynamics of a rural indigenous community. It takes as its central example anthropologist J. Stephen Lansing's models of irrigation patterns and practices in Ball. Lansing first put together computer simulations of Balinese water temple networks to demonstrate the wisdom of traditional modes of organizing agriculture and to draw attention to the folly of Green Revolution development projects. Lansing argued that his modeling could provide a tool for more culturally appropriate development, but I argue that his project may continue some of the neocolonialist premises of development programs more generally. As it turns issues that are very complicated politically, economically and socially into bounded technical problems amenable to computational solution, it erases internal community politics and ignores the local and global political economic context in which communities exist. Lansing's simulation accomplishes this in part by reviving the premises of an ahistorical cultural ecology in which communities are conceptually collapsed into 'nature' - where nature is understood to be a system seeking homeostasis. This article examines the claims Lansing makes for his simulations and locates these within a political economy in which imperialist and neocolonialist domination has often been serviced by control over technologies of representation. After discussing Lansing's work, I comment broadly on the trend toward using computer simulation in social planning, and reflect on what this might mean for continuing projects of 'development'.

Lansing goes on to reply in a later issue.