Guest post by Yeshi Samdrup, Norbuling Rigter College, Bhutan Between 2024 and 2026, I had the opportunity to work with Barbara Gerke on the Pandemic Narratives Project. We explored how communities in Bhutan understood and responded to COVID-19 through Buddhist beliefs, ritual practices, and more-than-human relationships. Together, we carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Phushar village […]
Category: Research updates
By Barbara Gerke As my fieldwork in Bhutan comes to an end, I would like to reflect on a topic that has become central to my work over the past several years: the ethics and practices of collaborating with Himalayan colleagues in anthropological research. At the 2025 ISTB Research Day on Ethics in Research (University […]
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Aromatics and Epidemics
A two-day workshop at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Princeton University, NJ November 30 – December 1, 2023 Participants: Yan Liu, Associate professor in the Department of History at the State University of New York, Buffalo, IAS fellow Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London, IAS fellow Nira Wickramasinghe, Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at the Leiden University Institute […]
In the context of our project, I have been tracking the many lively online discussions involving physicians and scholars of Sowa Rigpa that have taken place since the emergence of a “novel coronavirus” in December 2019. Even though SARS-COV-2 can no longer be called “new”, I believe there is still much to learn from the […]