The Goddess and the Computer

1990

Filmmaker: Andre Singer

Anthropologist: J. Stephen Lansing

The Film, with its combined visuals and sounds, let Balinese speak for themselves, giving us a richer picture of Bali than any words can. This film tells about Lansing’s anthropological research on the irrigation system of Bali. After WWII, great efforts were made to develop new strains of rice to help feed the growing populations of Asia. This was called the Green Revolution, and it promised to solve some real problems. But somehow, as the film says, “miracle rice has started to produce miracle pests.” The film and Lansing’s 1991 book are about his attempt to understand what had happened. This film is splendid demonstration of holism. Bureaucrats and scholars in Bali had long considered that Balinese temples were “religion” and Balinese rice irrigation was “economics,” and the two were unrelated. Lansing walked the rice fields and listened to talk in the temples and made the connection, which he has described both in the film and in print. The film is also an excellent introduction to the ways in which one cultural anthropologist used anthropological concepts to study a real-world problem and how he then attempted to solve it.