The Picnic Makers of Bongo: Developing rituals and ritualising developments in a transitioning frontier Bhutanese community

Abstract

My thesis is based on a year's ethnographic fieldwork conducted in what has been called 'frontier zones' or 'zones of contact' in the anthropological literature of the Himalayas (Pratt 1991 as cited in Shneiderman, 2010: 291). Because of its removed distance from Bhutan's civilizational centre, Bongo was home to a multifaceted indigenous culture that is part of what Tucci (1980 [1970]) called 'folk religion' of the Tibetan cultural area. However, as the Bhutanese state embarked on a systematic modernisation process in the 1960s, precocious children from Bongo became one of its primary beneficiaries. Because of its close proximity to the neighbouring Indian hill stations of Darjeeling and Kalimpong, many of these children received British-style managerial education. Their new competencies enabled them to rise through the ranks of the then nascent Bhutanese civil service. However, the earliest interventions that these educated members of Bongo made in their community was to emulate the state's sophisticated Buddhist culture in their community in what I call the development of rituals. Similar processes can be witnessed in other Himalayan areas that Ortner (1995: 359) labelled as 'religious upgrading', where adoption of Buddhism was the first and primary manifestation of development and progress. From 2008, when the Bhutanese state became secularised and as successive elected governments promoted a material culture that is amendable to their more immediate electoral imperatives, Bongo's communal capabilities have been recalibrated to serve what I call a ritualised development. Therefore, I employ Shneiderman's (2015) distinction between the 'practice' and 'performance' of rituals to argue that "the process of modernisation [has been] a process of ritualization" in Bongo.

In view of the rich ritual culture that I was confronted with in my fieldwork, my research seeks to ask why the so-called 'development' or 'modernisation' (as some prefer to call this phenomenon) takes on ritual form in certain historically peripheral societies? In answering this primary question, I found that the state acts a major cause and catalyst of change, and so, this thesis asks what role does the state play in triggering such transformations? But contrary to some simplistic perceptions, the people can be agentive actors and can often mediate effectively with what is called the 'state effect' (Shneiderman, 2010: 291). Therefore, my research seeks to answer what broader impact does such modernising processes and 'objectification of culture' have on the redistribution of key economic resources and in realigning the axis of power between centrally and peripherally located actors in the state. Show more