Paper short abstract:

Contrary to the perception that Buddhism is a religion of moderation, Buddhist gentrification in Bhutan’s Bongo village has been detrimental to people’s historically sustainable livelihood practices conditioned by localised environmental conditions and their belief in powerful sovereign owners.

Paper long abstract:

Introduction of Buddhism, specifically its so-called monastic ‘cultural template’ (Ramble, 1993), has counterintuitively been detrimental to traditional livelihood practices that were conditioned by localised environmental conditions, and people’s conception of and their relations to numinous beings who held sovereignty over the landscape and all its human and non-human inhabitants. In Bongo where I conducted a year’s ethnographic fieldwork, traditionally livelihood practices were mainly based on herding of cattle and their movements between the homestead near the village centre and remote cattle stations in subtropical jungles of southern Bhutan. Indigenous belief in the power of unseen but powerful beings overseeing the rhythm and nature of people’s life meant that ‘herd management’ provided a sustainable “economic infrastructure for cultural beliefs and values” (Levine, 1999). However, a state supported Buddhist gentrification that has been likened to a ‘religious upgrading’ has resulted in the systematic dismantling of the indigenous and supposedly ‘backward’ animist beliefs. Through an ethnography of the herding practices of a traditional herdsman, my paper proposes to tell the story of how problematic, and essentially untenable, is the argument of the supposedly moderating effect of Buddhism when it is imposed on non-Buddhist communities under a Buddhist state. Buddhism can act as an unwitting agent of capitalist practices paving the path for the entrance of the latter in traditional village communities like Bongo, which have seen its socio-economic structures transformed from one in harmony with nature and its traditional sovereigns to one of modern market economy and a new Buddhist idolatry ritual culture.