Comment on Lansing/de Vet’s paper

Lansing/de Vet's article tries to substantiate the conclusion Lansing has presented in all his publications since " Priests and Programmers " , namely that the irrigation management was exclusively performed by water temples and their commoner priests. These water temples accomplished a synchronization of irrigation agriculture that was a means to achieve the sharing of water (up-stream/down-stream) and pest control. Furthermore, he suggested that subak (irrigation associations) have been democratic organizations run exclusively by farmers ; no lords or rulers were involved in the management of irrigation agriculture. Lansing's theoretical approach constitutes a grid which has been applied to the colonial literature in a deductive way and to data collection during fieldwork. The submitted article documents this perspective too. Three issues have come under criticism from different scholars: A) The allegedly democratic organization of irrigation agriculture, the non-involvement of lords and the commoner-based water temples (Schulte Nordholt, myself). B) The pest control as a goal of the water temple management and the synchronization of water use (Vayda, Falvo). C) The way Lansing has arbitrarily made use of sources (theory-driven reading of sources; " confirmation bias ") so that they are made to fit his purpose (myself, Schulte Nordholt, Vayda). In the submitted article, the authors react to critiques only in a restricted way; mainly to two articles published in Human Ecology 39,1 2011 and to a chapter by Vayda (2009). They react to A) and B), but not to C). The arguments put forward hardly convey new insights. The figures and lists of subak provided barely contribute to the clarification of the issues debated. The abstract seems to belong to another article (with the exception of the last two sentences). Not only shorter quotations, but also longer ones, are without references, for example, the quotations from Vayda and Schulte Nordholt. In the article, the authors attempt to defend the core statements Lansing has obstinately repeated over the past 20 years and to knock out all counter arguments. It is certainly due to this endeavor that contradictions in the paper have escaped the authors. On the one hand, the authors disclaim the historicity of (written) chronicles (ftn. 11). They do so in order to devalue my interpretation/con-clusion. On the other hand, the authors use poetry as historical texts: " Kidungs are a metrical genre of Balinese literature, rich with metaphors and allusions, interpreting them is regarded as a specialized skill ". …