The State of Anthropology in Bhutan

Abstract

The title belies the contents of this paper, which is a narrative of the transformation of the Bhutanese scholarship from Buddhist to secular matters, from religious to modern authors, and from classical Tibetan to English medium. The paper looks at the traditional Bhutanese scholarship—monastic education—which was dominated by lamas and monks, pursued only Buddhist themes, and wrote in the classical Tibetan; the western-style education system with English as the medium was introduced in the late 1950s parallel to the traditional education system; and the modern education system which is still biased towards studying science subjects, and hence the absence of anthropological study of and in Bhutan. The paper ends with discussions on potential areas of future anthropological research areas and challenges of doing fieldwork in Bhutan.