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SUBAK
August 23, 2024
February 17, 2026
Balinese irrigation is managed my a
system of water temples or "subaks".
This system dates back well over The Long Now regards this as one of
over 10 centuries-- some time before the candidates for oldest surviving
the 11th century, possibly around the forms of human social organization,
9th century: around 12 centuries old. though the Catholic Church and a
Japanese temple building
(Those are dates wikipedia organization are likely to be older.
has up, citing a UN report
as a source.) Catholics like to use 1 AD
as the beginning of their
history, though I suspect
a more reasonable, secular
view would put the
beginning of the church
itself later... I have no
idea when, though. But
There was a period in the 1970s (part of even if you date it from,
"The Green Revolution" in artificial say, Constantine and the
fertilizers), when western experts founding of Byzantium in
looked at Balinese agriculture and 324 AD, it's around 17
concluded that they could improve it: centuries old.
rather than an annual synchronized
harvest at one time of the year, they
figured it would be better to do
staggered harvests multiple times a
year, with the assistance of artificial There was an excellent
fertilizers added to the water. talk on this subject
by Stephen Lansing at
This turned it to be an extremely bad idea: the Long Now in 2006:
the single synchronized harvest had a
hidden virtue in insect pest supression, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj8hZ9w31Ho
and the staggered harvests led to an
explosion in the pest population.
And on top of that, the fertilizer
run off caused problems for the
coral reefs.
No one seems to have been aware that there
was some purpose behind the traditional
style of management by the subaks--
it was a set of evolved customs that
existed for thousands of years and
whatever stated rationale existed for
it was rooted in spiritual or philosophical
thinking, not any sort of practical argument.
J. Stephen Lansing, "Priests and Programmers" (1991, 2007):
"But if we accept the argument that productive
systems embody a cultural or symbolic logic, new
questions appear when we move from theory to
ethnography. The problem is a variant of the
'excess of meaning' argument, which has often
surfaced in cultural analysis. Simply put, the
question is the relationship between symbolic
systems, such as the agricultural rites of the water
temples, and productive relationships. What is the
match between practice and rites? ... The problem
is magnified when we confront the true complexity of
both the ritual and productive systems, for the
productive system is not a single field but a vast
engineered landscape of rice terraces and irrigation
systems, of markets and market shrines, irrigation
tunnel builders, and threshing societies. And the
symbolic system referents include not only the
fields and flowers but more immaterial or
transcendental concepts."
This, even in the abbrievated
form, seems fairly verbose... It could be it's not an
issue that can be
handled with English
language very well.
I think the idea is:
Originally outside observers looked at the water temple
system and tried to separate it's practical functions
from it's spiritual ones and tripped themselves up.
There's a set of rituals and customs, and a set of
practical functions, and it's not abundantly clear
what the connections are. Does the symbolic exist
to manage the practical? Are the practices chosen
to comply with a symbolic understanding?
Jumping to conclusions too easily here can screw things up
badly-- if you just presume that what *looks* to you like
unfounded "primitive superstition" is useless, you can rip
out system that's actually functioning fairly well-- even
if no one could tell you precisely how and why it worked.
FAIR_GAME
Now, stories like this are very popular among
us liberal-left types: tribal wisdom beats
those arrogant Western imperialists.
It's not clear to me how often
stories like this really pan out... SPECTER_OF_DENIALISM
But *this* one definitely does.
Now, it would be possible to draw many
analogies from this sort of story, and
some of them might actually not have E.g. traditional sex roles
that much appeal to us lefties: we tend vs. the more fluid vision
to like the idea of social progress and supported by present-day
the power of enlightened thinking to psychological experts. (But
revise traditional customs. not the past ones, who we now
regard as pseudo-scientists
overly influenced by the then
There's no particular reason to current cultural context).
go with either tradition or
innovation in *every* case. GENDER_X
Let's try another analogy, this time to software development:
I'm endlessly critical of the state of our knowledge
about software development. Software design and development
practices could, I think, be investigated via social science
techniques, but this is very rarely done in favor of
theoretical arguments and hand-waving.
MODEST_PROPOSAL
I'm pretty contemptuous of this state of affairs, and
I have argued-- and probably will continue to argue--
for doing actual experiments to develop a true "Computer
Science".
It could be I should pause to reflect that there *is* a
Computer Science tradition that's developed over the
last half-century, and it could be there's some actual
wisdom lurking in their beliefs, however unfounded they
may look to me.
But then: I've never denied that possibility--
the argument is that we should systematically
investigate practices, and firm up our knowledge
of which work (and when they work), and use
that knowledge to firm up the theory.
I want us to know more,
I don't claim we don't know anything. Well actually,
sometimes I do:
"We were clueless
then, and we're
clueless now."
I should probably
be more careful
about that.
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