Creating a Design anthropological foundation.
Our design anthropological approach interrogates how Indonesian rice cultures operationalise the principle ‘food also is a god‘ (Bateson & Mead, 1942, p. 10)1 as a working sustainability framework, extracting design insights for contemporary systems that reunite what modernity has fragmented. In their 1942 ethnographic study Balinese Character, anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead captures a worldview where the material and spiritual realms are not separate domains but deeply integrated aspects of existence. Food is not merely sustenance that symbolically connects to the divine; it participates in the sacred order itself. This understanding resonates powerfully today when we examine how rice cultures around the world have developed intricate relationships with this grain that go far beyond nutrition. Insights that can be drawn upon when systems are broken (through colonisation, industrial agriculture, development) and damage cascades across material, economic, life, social, and spiritual domains simultaneously.
How does this map in the every day?
- Spiritual Domain (the integrating core): Rice as sacred provides the ethical foundation that prevents sustainability from becoming mere technique
- Material Domain: Sacred food demands regenerative practices, closed loops, and zero waste.
- Economic Domain: Sacred food requires true-cost accounting that values social and ecological capital, not just financial profit
- Domain of Life: Sacred food maintains biodiversity as spiritual obligation, preserving thousands of rice varieties and integrated ecosystems
- Social Domain: Sacred food creates kinship bonds, community cohesion, and intergenerational continuity
Rice as sacred: toward integrated understanding
Bateson and Mead’s observation and Ben-Eli’s (2015) framework together reveal may actually represent sophisticated systemic wisdom. Rice cultures that can successfully maintain the integration of all five domains achieve what contemporary sustainability efforts struggle to conceptualise:
a dynamic equilibrium between population and environment where humans develop their full potential without irreversible harm.
(Ben-Eli, 2015)2
As Ben-Eli notes, when the five principles are integrated and seamlessly inform choices and actions, sustainability “can be realized spontaneously and completely” (Ben-Eli, 2015) rather than appearing as a difficult, distant goal.
- Bateson, G., & Mead, M. (1942). Balinese character: A photographic analysis. New York Academy of Sciences. ↩︎
- Ben-Eli, M. U. (2015). Sustainability: Definition and five core principles, a new framework. The Sustainability Laboratory. https://www.uwosh.edu/sirt/wp-content/uploads/sites/86/2017/08/Ben-Eli_Sustainability-Definition-and-Five-Core-Principles.pdf ↩︎