J. Stephen Lansing

J. Stephen Lansing is an American anthropologist who has worked on Bali since the 1970s. His book Priests and Programmers (1991) argued that Bali's water temples coordinate irrigation and pest control across watersheds, and that development planners could not see this because their plans assumed each farmers' association was the highest irrigation institution. He has drawn on ecology, simulation modelling and complexity science as well as fieldwork, working with the ecologist James Kremer and later with physicists such as Stefan Thurner; his collaborators have included Balinese students who gathered the yield and pest data. He has been affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and invited the Stockholm Environment Institute's study of the subaks after the World Heritage listing. (islandsoforder.com ; pnas.org ; sei.org)

His work and the case against it are on bali water temples. He placed his argument in the line of Roy Rappaport, who argued in the 1960s that ritual often plays a part in managing resources. His critics, among them Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin, Henk Schulte Nordholt and Andrew Vayda, accuse him of reading sources to fit his theory.

History and sources. Created by the research session of 27 October 2026 (Trail 2026-10-27) from his own papers and the SEI report. Priests and Programmers itself has not been read. Stated.

Related: bali water temples, Animism as perception