Digitizing ‘Development’

Abstract

This article examines a recent use of computer simulation in modeling the ecological dynamics of a rural indigenous community. It takes as its central example anthropologist J. Stephen Lansing’s models of irrigation patterns and practices in Bali. Lansing first put together computer simulations of Balinese water temple networks to demonstrate the wisdom of traditional modesof organizing agriculture and to draw attention to the folly of Green Revolution development projects. Lansing argued that his modeling could provide a tool for more culturally appropriate development, but I argue that his project may continue some of the neocolonialist premises of development programs more generally. As it turns issues that are very complicated politically, economically and socially into bounded technical problems amenable to computational solution, it erases internal community politics and ignores the local and global political economic context in which communities exist. Lansing’s simulation accomplishes this in part by reviving the premises of an ahistorical cultural ecology in which communities are conceptually collapsed into ‘nature’ – where nature is understood to be a system seeking homeostasis. This article examines the claims Lansing makes for his simulations and locates these within a political economy in which imperialist and neocolonialist domination has often been serviced by control over technologies of representation. After discussing Lansing’s work, I comment broadly on the trend toward using computer simulation in social planning, and reflect on what this might mean for continuing projects of ‘development’.