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...

In an afterword he wrote to an earlier book of mine about Balinese water temples, Valerio Valeri commented on the apparent detachment of the princes of Bali from the productive system of irrigated rice terraces. Why didn’t the kings claim these important resources for themselves? Valeri observed that “the puzzle exists because we do not understand a political ideology that discourages the indefinite expansion of kingly power, especially in the direction of the basic grounds of its existence.”

This question recurs in the literature on Balinese kingship and society. In 1932 the great Dutch ethnographer V. E. Korn described “the...

The irrigation system that provides the water to flood the Sebatu water mountain begins at a dam several kilometers upstream, deep in a valley carved by the Petanu River. The dam allows a third of the river to flow downstream, where it is captured by other subaks, and shunts the rest into a tunnel. The tunnel parallels the river but gains a little elevation, so that when it emerges a few kilometers downstream, it is at the top of the Sebatu water mountain. The flow from the tunnel is immediately divided in two: one canal floods the Sebatu rice terraces;...

One afternoon about fifteen years ago, a group of farmers stormed angrily out of a meeting in the village of Kedisan and declared that they would no longer participate in subak affairs. The reason for their anger was the refusal of their neighbors to agree to call them by an honorific title. This title had recently been adopted by some of their relatives in other villages, as a prerogative based on the hierarchical rank or “caste” of their descent group. Their neighbors, however, were inclined to view the title not as the restoration of an ancient prerogative but rather as...

The Kebayan-kings of Pujung were merely the latest in a long list of stray elements that had so far eluded capture in our simulation models, videotapes, and questionnaires. Witches, sorcerers, Blerong spirits, and for that matter the entire panoply of rituals at the water temples had been spared our attentions; it was much easier to catch leafhoppers—or gossip, for that matter. But while supernatural beings are usually left untroubled by scientists, the one exception is anthropologists. While my colleagues were gathering factual data with their flowmeters and surveys, when left to myself I often reverted to old habits, asking...

Perched dramatically on the rim of Mount Batur overlooking the crater lake, the supreme water temple Ulun Danu Batur is a collection of nested stone courtyards enclosing an array of towering shrines and pavilions, dedicated to the worship of a pantheon of forty-five deities, foremost among them the Goddess of the Lake, who is said to make the rivers flow and bring prosperity to the land (figure 26). From an architectural standpoint the temple seems ageless and serene, but for the past half century it has been a site of almost continuous turmoil. The explanation for this instability, I suggest...

The initial impetus for the research that led to this book was the discovery that computer simulations of Balinese water temple networks will self-organize, provided each node of the network is given the capacity to adapt to its local environment. As simulated networks coalesce, their ability to solve problems expands from the level of individual nodes to that of the network as a whole. In this way, the whole becomes something more than the sum of all the parts, a phenomenon noted by Aristotle.¹ Viewing the water temples from this perspective offered an opportunity to make use of the mathematical...