Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix Chapter 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

About the Author

J. Stephen Lansing is professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona, external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and senior research fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. He is the author of "Priests and Programmers" and "The Balinese", and writer and codirector of documentary films such as "Three Worlds of Bali" and "The Goddess and the Computer".

Reviews

Winner of the 2007 Julian Steward Book Award, Anthropology and Environment Section of the American Anthropological Association "[A] winning combination of hard science and interpretative ethnography."--Roy Ellen, American Anthropologist "I would recommend ... this book ... as perhaps providing an example of social and ecological self-organization which might be useful in modeling other systems, whether in the social or ecological field or even in other fields in which complex adaptive systems may be studied."--Phillip Guddemi, Cybernetics & Human Knowing