Priests and Programmers

Rating:
Summary: Where the Green Revolution failed, golf may succeed
Review: A brilliant study of how the ancient social and technical aspects of water management systems in Bali, inextricably bound with nature and religion, undermined the Green Revolution in the 1980s. Highly recommended

Rating:
Summary: Vital coverage of development, technology, society, states
Review: Lansing shows, through Balinese irrigation, that technology is simultaneously social and political, but often not in the ways imagined by Western academics and development experts. A dispersed system of water temples and priests successfully managed the irrigation of multiple valleys and plots through a process in which ritual served the regulatory function of feedback. Development projects decoupled the elements of the system and led to declining yields and increased pest damage. A computer simulation of the system was eventually developed, which effectively translated the system functions into a media that development experts could understand, and led to repairs to the damage done to agriculture following the implementation of Green Revolution techniques, revealing the role of ideology in presumably technical knowledge. The study also disproves Wittfogel's hypothesis that "oriental despotism" or extremely hierarchical and centralized states grew out of the expansion and control of irrigation systems. Highly recommended.