Lecture | Hybrid workshop
Narrating Highland Heritages of Bhutan
- Date
- Tuesday 30 September 2025
- Time
- Explanation
- workshop (9.30 - 13.00) informal lunch (13.00 - 14.00)
- Location
-
FSW building
Wassenaarseweg 52
2333 AK Leiden - Room
- 1B01
Narrating Highland Heritages of Bhutan
Please join us for an interactive workshop in which we present initial findings and seek inputs on the Perpetuating Highland Heritages of Bhutan project. We have created this project to document the tangible and intangible heritage of these highlands, located at altitudes of 4000 meters and above. We intend to develop ‘highland vernacular heritage’ as a concept, an orally constituted legacy conveyed in dialogue with the environment and the beings within it—including rocks, plants, animals, and the spiritual beings everywhere emplaced and embodied in the landscape. It foregrounds a “more-than-human” landscape where humans have co-dwelt for millennia with yaks, earth-spirits, and deities in a “cosmic economy of sharing.” The Bhutanese highlands are facing a combination of economic, political, and climate change and related environmental challenges, resulting in rapid depopulation, turning ancient settlements, fortresses, and religious sites into ruins.
The workshop will feature presentations on the engagement with local communities and government stakeholders. We will showcase first results from recent fieldwork in Haa district in Bhutan collected by the six project researchers (Ms. Passang Om, Ms. Pema Lhazom Namgay, Mr. Thubtoen Tshering, and Mr. Nima Tshering, Mr. Chencho Dorji and Dr. Jelle J P Wouters), who will (some online, others in person) share their findings on the documentation of both tangible sites (ruins, shrines, geo-ecological formations) and intangible heritage (oral histories, rituals, lifeways of yak-herders). This will be complemented by a screening of visual materials from the field, presented by videographers Mr. Suraj Bhattarai and Mr. Nithil Dennis, offering a powerful, multi-modal glimpse into the storied landscapes and sacred lifeways of the Bhutanese highlands. Access to the workshop is free, but we do request you to register in advance. For further reading see: More-Than-Human Heritages of the Bhutanese Highlands
Register for the workshop
RegisterPrincipal Investigators, Partners, and Research Focus
We gratefully acknowledge the Gerda Henkel Foundation for its generous support of the ‘Perpetuating Highland Heritages of Bhutan’ research project. This project is also supported by the Himalayan Centre for Environmental Humanities (HCEH) at Royal Thimphu College and the Leiden Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology.
Prof. Dr. Jelle JP Wouters is a social anthropologist and a principal investigator on the project. His research focuses on highland Asia, exploring themes of relatedness, trans-species knots, and yak personhood in the Bhutan highlands. He has extensive experience leading research and capacity-building initiatives in Bhutan and the wider Himalayan region.
Dr. Erik de Maaker is a social anthropologist at Leiden University and a principal investigator on the project. An award-winning Visual Anthropologist, his work focuses on the Himalayas, particularly on culture, relatedness, and the environment. He supervises the PhD research and is responsible for guiding and training the project team in the audio-visual ethnographic methods that are central to the project's documentation efforts.
Dr. Radhika Gupta is a social anthropologist at Leiden University and a co-principal investigator on the project. Her expertise is grounded in ethnographic research in the Himalayan region, with focus on critical heritage studies and policy engagement with organizations such as International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). She leads the project’s stakeholder consultations and is responsible for linking research findings to policy outputs and capacity-building workshops.
Mr. Chencho Dorji is an Associate Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and the project’s coordinator, based at the Himalayan Centre for Environmental Humanities (HCEH) at Royal Thimphu College. He is instrumental in managing the fieldwork, facilitating community engagement, and liaising with local and national authorities, ensuring the project's methodologies are community-driven and culturally sensitive.
Ms. Thinley Dema is the PhD candidate for the project, registered at Leiden University. Her research focuses on emic conceptualizations of highland heritage among dwellers in the Soe and Lingzhi regions. She investigates how do western Bhutanese highland dwellers negotiate, adapt to, or resist the transformation of their sacred landscape in the face of contemporary socio-economic and environmental pressure.
This workshop is also an activity of the ‘Mixed Methods and Design Measures’ thematic research group under the Space, Society and Culture angle of the LDE-Centre for PortCityFutures.