J. Stephen Lansing

J. Stephen Lansing, born in 1950, is an American anthropologist and complexity scientist.² He is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona; from 2015 to 2019 he was founding director of the Complexity Institute at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.¹ He took his doctorate in anthropology at the University of Michigan in 1977, taught at the University of Southern California until 1996, and joined the University of Arizona in 1998.²

Most of his work is on Bali. With the ecologist James Kremer he modelled the water temple networks that set planting and irrigation schedules for the island's rice terraces, and showed that the networks can organise themselves.² His research on the water temples was the basis for Bali's listing as a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape in 2012.¹ He wrote about it in Priests and Programmers (1991) and Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali (2006). His most recent book, with Murray Cox, is Islands of Order: A Guide to Complexity Modeling for the Social Sciences (Princeton, 2019).^1,2,3 He is working with Balinese colleagues to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from rice paddies, and with the Leakey Foundation and the Nature Conservancy to help hunter-gatherers in Borneo.¹

He is co-author of the 1993 paper Emergent Properties of Balinese Water Temple Networks. The Bali scenario starts from that model, and the questions people ask page uses it as its example of a model that showed officials what farmers already knew.