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HEIndividual fellowship2022–2024

BhutIdBuddh · Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Travel: Identity- and Nation-Building in Bhutan

Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2022-10-01 → 2024-09-30
EU contribution
€189,687
Participants
2
Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF

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Results in brief

Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Travel: Identity- and Nation-Building in Bhutan

The BhutIdBuddh (“Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Travel: Identity- and Nation-Building in Bhutan”) research project (2022–24) investigated identity- and nation-building in 18th-century Bhutan with a particular focus on the agency of Bhutanese Buddhist masters as important intermediaries in Bhutan’s entangled history with Tibet as well as with, first, the East India Company and later the British Raj. In particular, it focused on the period between the diplomatic travels of the 9th Chief Abbot of the Bhutanese Drukpa Kagyü school Shākya Rinchen (1710–59) to Tibet from 1740 onwards until the first colonial encounters with the East India Company in the 1770s. Bhutan is considered part of the Tibetan cultural area that stretches from what today is the Tibetan Autonomous Region within the People’s Republic of China to parts of Western China, Bhutan, the Indian Himalayas, Nepal, Mongolia, and the former Soviet Union, depending on the point in Tibetan and Bhutanese history one is looking at. This is, therefore, the first systematic study on understanding Bhutan’s global role from an emic perspective and as an essential actor in the religious and political history of South and East Asia and colonial Europe. The research is based on historical-philological/text-critical work and translations of primarily unstudied Tibetan and Bhutanese textual sources and British colonial documents combined with a religious studies framework. This innovative, interdisciplinary approach contributes equally to the fields of Tibetology and Global Religious Studies and will be published as a comprehensive monograph.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

This research project is an investigation of identity- and nation-building in eighteenth-century Bhutan with a particular focus on the agency of Buddhist masters as important diplomats and Bhutan's entangled history with Tibet. This will enable a novel understanding of Bhutan's religious and political history, particularly its Buddhism-induced development model of Gross National Happiness (GNH) that has not yet received systematic historical analysis in religious studies in Europe despite its global popularity as an example of alternative sustainable economic models. Furthermore, for the first time, Bhutan's historical role in linking South Asia, the British Raj, and East Asia will be systematically addressed. The research output will significantly advance both fields - that of Tibetology and religious studies. The innovative research design combines historical-philological methods by analyzing a thus far untranslated corpus of Bhutanese/Tibetan primary sources with a theoretical framework from religious studies focusing on identity and social differentiation. Therefore, the project is in its methodology, output, and impact inter-disciplinary. The researcher will produce a draft for a single monograph publication for habilitation in Germany. The proposed project involves as the researcher a German Tibetologist trained in Germany, Canada, India, and Bhutan reintegrating to Germany to work with a religious/Buddhist studies scholar at Leipzig University. This will enable substantial training for the researcher in religious studies and impactful two-way knowledge exchange between the researcher and the host institution due to the international experience of the researcher. An intersectional secondment at The British Library Endangered Archives Programme (London) will provide further Tibetological training in (digital) archival work, palaeography, and codicology, and produce globally accessible research data about this digitized Bhutanese/Tibetan primary source corpus.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

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Data: CORDIS, © European Union