ABSTRACT

Historical knowledge production about Bhutan by outsiders has generally relied upon the dominant lens of understanding the place and people through accounts that combine narratives of travel and strategy. In this article, I interrogate the complexly layered itinerary of such accounts to demonstrate how their imperial ethos has either been ignored or underplayed. I critically analyse the systematicity, selectivity, and the positionality in knowledge-making on Bhutan. I find that imperial knowledge production endeavour tends to be projected as casual and unintentional, innocent of its biases, unaware of its calculations, and oblivious to how it prioritises its own interests at the expense of the native Others and their worldviews. Thus, the sourcing of knowledge on Bhutan is linked to the histories of power in the region and marked by asymmetries in terms of whose views were heard and reproduced over time. Understanding the politics of knowledge-making on Bhutan – constructed as a peripheral non-Western region of the world, and having been subjected to multiple and overlapping imperial forces – has the potential to inform, and be informed by, other similar understudied areas.

摘要

局外人对不丹的历史知识生产通常依赖于通过结合旅行和战略叙事的叙述来理解地方和人民的主导视角。在这篇文章中，我询问了这些帐户的复杂分层路线，以证明他们的帝国精神是如何被忽视或低估的。我批判性地分析了系统性、选择性和定位性。在不丹的知识创造中。我发现帝国知识生产的努力往往被投射为随意和无意的，没有偏见，没有意识到它的计算，并且没有意识到它如何以牺牲本土其他人和他们的世界观为代价来优先考虑自己的利益。因此，关于不丹的知识来源与该地区的权力历史有关，并且随着时间的推移，其观点被听取和复制的程度不对称。了解不丹知识创造的政治——被构建为世界的外围非西方地区，并受到多重和重叠的帝国力量的影响——有可能为其他类似的未研究地区提供信息，并被其他类似的未研究地区提供信息。