Foucault and the Water Temples A Reply to Helmreich Steve Lansing University of Arizona, USA In a recent article in Critique of Anthropology, Stefan Helmreich deconstructs my research on the water temple networks of Bali, as published in Priests and Programmers (1991) and various articles: [Lansing] is hardly at the helm of a giant anti-politics machine, ideologically or financially, even if he has garnered some monetary support from inter- national agencies, most notably the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. His activities might rather be understood as small moments in the production of a dispersed and distributed network of practices that reinstall in more complicated ways some of the patterns of dependency and relations of inequality that have characterized neocolonialism. (1999: 256) Helmreich is concerned that my use of simulation models to analyse water temple networks ‘oversimplifies histor y and power relations’, since ‘the simulation encodes an objectivist God’s eye view, that view most famil- iar to administrators charged with counting and correcting’. Moreover, my presentation of model results in print and on video reinforces the ‘colonial gaze’; for these reasons ‘the use and abuse of computer simulations bears watching – especially in situations where there is a notable power differen- tial between those putting together the simulation and those whose lives are the subjects and objects of these simulations’. Thus Helmreich sees my work as not merely conceptually flawed, but morally deplorable. His views of my work are new to me, but evidently have been in circulation since 1993, at such distinguished venues as the 13th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences and the Center for Critical Analysis of Contemporar y Culture at Rutgers. So far I have not been invited to contribute a response, but here I claim the privilege of offering one. My comments will be directed first towards his discussion of my use of simu- lation models, and then his assessment of their political implications. Helmreich begins with a brief summary of my research on Balinese water temples. Perhaps to save time, he quotes from an unpublished manu- script by A.J. Michael, who purports to summarize my findings: ‘This complex system of irrigation and water management, which has been a functioning ecological system for over one thousand years, is controlled by Debate Vol 20(3) 309–318 [0308-275X(200009)20:3; 309–318;013846] Copyright 2000 © SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)