Perpetuating Highland Heritages of Bhutan
Jelle Wouters (RTC Bhutan), Erik de Maaker (CADS Leiden) and Radhika Gupta (CADS Leiden) have been awarded a €260.000 grant by the Gerda Henkel Foundation for the research project ‘Perpetuating Highland Heritages of Bhutan’. This 4-year research project focuses on vernacular and unacknowledged heritages of the highlands of Bhutan. It seeks to make a major contribution to the preservation of these heritages, to create a cultural resource for current and future generations.
Contrary to popular imagination the highlands of Bhutan do not constitute ‘pristine’ nature. Located at altitudes of 4000 meters and above, they have been inhabited for thousands of years. Herders, monks, and rulers have crisscrossed these highlands, resulting in an ever-evolving, deeply socialised and carefully managed cultural landscape. They have experienced the geo-ecological and biophysical features of the landscape as ‘texts’ and ‘scripts’ that tell stories, and provide instructions about ethics, morality, cosmology, and social organisation. The highlands have also always been a more-than-human landscape, with humans co-dwelling with yaks, earth-spirits, and deities as their companion-species. These have interacted with humans, co-shaping highland culture. Bhutan’s highland landscape is replete with dwellings, objects, and ritual sites, constituting the tangible heritage of the highlands. As an intangible counterpart, everyday rituals, religion, myths, stories, lifestyles and performances associated with the sacred landscape constitute a deep cultural history of the material culture of nomadism, trade and political control.
The project emphasizes the importance of understanding tangible and intangible heritage as inextricably entwined, acknowledging that the conservation of tangible heritage is predicated on the perpetuation of intangible heritage in the Bhutan highlands and beyond. So far, little attention has been paid to highland and nomadic peoples as repositories of heritage and critical stakeholders for its perpetuation. Consequently, there is also only scant information available on the number of sites or the variety of cultural beliefs and practices that constitute highland vernacular heritage in Bhutan.
The project will be conducted between the Himalayan Centre for Environmental Humanities, Royal Thimphu College (Bhutan), the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (Leiden University) as well as the Department of Culture (Bhutan). It will be the first to enumerate, map and document highland landscapes that have been shaped by multi-species co-dwelling.
Next to the three co-PIs, the project will encompass a Bhutanese PhD student who will be based at Leiden University. In addition, the project encompasses several social sciences and humanities faculty co-researchers, as well as four graduate students from Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan.