Local farmers batted away questions about myths and rituals and suchlike, and started talking about rice: rice yields, rice pests, rice irrigation. A Balinese water templeBut he still had a dissertation to finish, and an anthropology research career to establish. The team in Bali had already observed that neighbouring upstream and downstream farmers cooperated closely when it came to sharing out irrigation water. Yet the researchers’ findings suggested that the original Balinese subak system came remarkably close to achieving Pareto optimality. The question was about whether the Balinese subak system displayed a property known as emergence.