Highland Bhutan is facing unprecedented challenges from a combination of climate change, new economic opportunities, and changing cultural aspirations of its residents. Today, what does highland heritage constitute, to who, and how does it matter?
This question was at the core of a hybrid workshop held on 30th September 2025, in which the first outcomes of the Gerda Henkel funded project Perpetuating Highland Heritages of Bhutan were presented and discussed.
Opening the workshop, Erik de Maaker and Jelle Wouters outlined the overarching aims and approaches of the project, and its conceptual grounding. Chencho Dorji talked about the methodology used, and Thinley Dema presented her PhD project which explores how highlanders are agents of change.
Speaking from one of the projects' fieldwork sites in highland Bhutan, research associates Nima Tshering, Passang Om, Pema Lhazom, and Thubtoen Tshering shared some of the highlights of their ongoing fieldwork. This included interconnected themes such as "Sacred Ecology," "Nature's Calendar," "Migration as Heritage," and "Social Change and Continuity."
Suraj Bhattarai (Audio-Visual Coordinator), and Nithil Dennis (Digital Content Creator), outlined the project's audio-visual methodology and presented a comprehensive web-based digital framework for ethnographic and digital assets. This website will ensure the accessibility and preservation of research materials for future scholarship, and allow these to serve as cultural and educational resources for this generation and the next.
Collectively, the contributions to the workshop reflected the resilience of traditional knowledge systems and their adaptive responses to contemporary pressures. The workshop thus allowed for a critical examining of heritage not as static artifact but as living, contested, and continuously negotiated social practice.
The project is conducted in close cooperation with the Bhutanese Department of Culture, and among the attendees were Mr. Tsheten Wangyel, Deputy Chief of Mission at the Royal Bhutan Embassy in Brussels, and Cornelis Klein, (hon.) Consul General of Bhutan in the Netherlands.
