Bhutan has recently garnered international praise for its policy of Gross National Happiness （GNH）, which seeks to strike a balance between the pursuit of economic growth and that of cultural and spiritual contentment. At the same time, GNH has been criticized by some anthropologists who say that it serves as an “anti-politics machine” that fabricates reality in such a manner as to privilege the standpoint of policy elites, while suppressing the voices of ordinary people.

Those engaged in that anti-political critique propose to take the side of ordinary people and reconstruct reality from their hidden voices. That assertion, while potentially helping broaden the debate on GNH, is flawed in that it simplistically assumes that ordinary people merely resent elite control. The anti-political critique resultantly diverts attention from the multiplicity of realities that supersedes the anti-politics machine.

One clue that allows us to redress that drawback can be traced to the ontological turn that problematizes our common-sense divide between human societies and non-human objects. Instead of lapsing into the human/nonhuman divide, which leads anthropologists to focus on representations of non-human objects by particular human groups （in this paper, the praise of GNH spearheaded by policy elites, or ordinary people’s alternative representations）, the ontological turn focuses attention on the various connections among human and non-human entities. Both are positioned as agents to call into being the multiplicity of reality.

This paper looks at the case of a village in central Bhutan, whose residents are immersed in close ties with nonhuman and divine beings, while practicing Buddhism on a daily basis.

The anti-political nature of GNH praise surfaced when a businessperson called off a plan to build a golf course in the village, partly in response to a web-based campaign launched by a member of the urban-based elite. That elite member sought to stress, in a media interview, the role of his GNH-inspired campaign in warning against the possible negative environmental, cultural, and spiritual consequences of the plan, and urged the government not to approve it. On the other hand, the following initiative, made by the residents, was sidelined in his story: the residents had also said ‘no’ in a public hearing, despite the lucrative prospects of landing new jobs, on the grounds that the plan would disturb their domestic animals and local deities.

The anti-political critique mistakenly posits a simplistic dichotomy of the ‘powerful’ elite versus the ‘powerless’ residents. The ontological turn, on the other hand, takes into account the latter’s active engagement with non-human and divine beings, which empowers them to assess the pros and cons of the plan in their own terms. In that way, the ontological turn enables us to engage in a more balanced debate on GNH than does the anti-political critique, which is plagued by its dwelling on the ‘powerful-powerless’ divide.