Book Review: Priests and Programmers

I recently finished reading Priests and Programmers by J. Stephen Lansing, a book on irrigation practices and native religion in Bali.  To be honest, I found this book in the $1 used book bin at a textbook store outside UC Irvine, and I thought they were talking about computer programmers.  So I bought it expecting to find some Orwellian tale of a totalitarian government using religion and technology to blind it's populace.  Turns out they mean "programmers" as in "people who make up schedules," in this case, the priests setting the irrigation schedules.  Once I started reading it though, it was so interesting I kept going.

Apparently, the island of Bali (located in Indonesia) has an amazing irrigation system that has to be carefully maintained in order for anyone to grow any rice.  During the rainy season, there's water enough for everybody, but during the dry season, the water usage has to be regulated so that all of the farmers get enough water for their rice.  This gets slightly tricky since rice needs lots of water at the beginning of it's growth cycle, and very little at the end, so if you stagger the planting of the various farmers in the region, you can minimize the water shortages and maximize the rice.  The real trouble comes from the rice pests, which hop from field to field as long as somebody nearby is growing rice.  So to control the pest population you want to coordinate nearby fields so that they all lie fallow at the same time and the bugs and things die.  Striking the correct balance between synchronizing and staggering the fields is a complicated process that has to be tuned to the current conditions like rainfall and local weather.

In Bali the farmers attach mystical significance to the river and irrigation waters as being the property of the various gods and goddesses that inhabit the island.  As such, all of the water usage is coordinated by priests that inhabit temples built at the source of each canal, river, and lake.  These are called water temples, and serve to coordinate the water usage and planting cycles of all of the farms that belong to a particular watershed.  Lansing also argues that the religious rituals of the Bali people that involve the mingling of holy water from the various springs and lakes attached to the temple, symbolize the reliance of all these separate farmers and peoples on each other, and create a sense of group consciousness of the responsibility and social implications associated with water use.

Besides offering detailed accounts of the relevant religious ceremonies and an analysis of a computer model demonstrating the impact of water temple coordination with pest cycles, Lansing also tells the history of the Bali island and its water temples.  The Dutch arrived and eventually conquered the island in the 1850's or so, and tried to manage the local populace and the rice production.  However, they failed to notice the role of the water temples in coordinating the farming activities, because they tended to discount anything related to the local religions.  So the system kept functioning undisturbed until the "Green Revolution" hit Bali in the 1970's and 1980's.  Bali was now being run by Western-educated Indonesians, who didn't understand the roles of the water temples, and started disrupting the traditional farming practices by introducing new high-yield crops and farming technologies.  This quickly resulted in disaster as pest populations swarmed out of control, and devastated rice yields.  Farmers who resisted the transformation were written off as religious conservatives who were fighting change.  (Granted, it's not clear to me that the farmers or the priests completely understood their role in regulating the ecology of the rice fields, so I don't think you can completely write off the Western influence as being unduly dismissive of the traditional practices.)  At the time of the writing, the government of Bali was starting to study and understand the role the water temples play in managing rice production, and is beginning to allow them greater control in regulating the rice production.

All in all it was a good read.  There was a little bit of social-science style "Marxian Analysis" at the beginning and the end, but the rest of it was just anthropological study, history, and ecology.  I think it's definitely worth the few hours it takes to read it.  (It's not quite 200 pages altogether).