Photo of Karma Phuntsho by Matthieu Ricard.

From Oral to Audio-Visual: Cultural Documentation and Changes in Bhutan

Renowned historian and scholar of Bhutan Karma Phuntsho will present results and insights from a five-year-long cultural documentation project funded by the Arcadia Fund. Conducted in Bhutan in partnership with the University of Virginia, Karma has overseen a team of Bhutanese field researchers who traveled around the country to record vanishing oral and material traditions, material that will be available online as the core of the Bhutan Cultural Library. In his talk, Karma will share outcomes of the project in terms of its impacts on our knowledge and understanding of Bhutan’s cultures, as well as its effects on specific policies.

Karma Phuntsho is the Founder and President of Bhutan’s Loden Foundation, which focuses on cultural heritage, education, and social entrepreneurship. Among his previous positions he was a Spaulding Fellow for Comparative Religions at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, a visiting fellow at Harvard and a researcher at CNRS, Paris. Dr. Phuntsho finished full Tibetan Buddhist monastic training in Bhutan and India before he joined Balliol College, Oxford to read Sanskrit and Classical Indian Religions. He received a D.Phil. in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford.

He is the author of Mipham’s Dialectics and the Debates on Emptiness: To Be, Not to Be Or Neither (2005), History of Bhutan (2013) and The Autobiography of Terton Pema Lingpa (2015), among others.