Cosmopolitical ecologies of Covid-19 in Bhutan

The Kanjur Choekor (bka’ ‘gyur chos bskor) is a well-known ritual in Bhutan, where heavy volumes of religious texts are carried around a territory. It has traditionally been performed as a rain-making ritual, a performance of environmental cosmopolitics carried out by the clergy at the behest of villagers suffering from drought. But with the advent of COVID-19, the ritual has been nationally repurposed and redeployed to protect the populace from the virus. While well-known through hearsay, this ritual has hitherto received no scholarly attention. Stemming from one author’s chance encounter with it while travelling across the country and the other author’s first-hand experience conducting the ritual as a young monk, this chapter draws from textual sources such as 17th century religious biographies (rnam thar), event and internet ethnography, to examine the origins, uses and revival of this ritual during the COVID-19 outbreak. With particular attention to state religiosity, cosmological materiality and symbolic representation, we ask what perceptions of human-nature relationships and environmental management strategies the ritual manifests in an era of climatic and socio-technological change. Through this example of the cosmopolitical synergy of state and clergy at a time of national crisis, we document how the cosmological is neither static, unchanging nor ‘out there’. Rather, we argue that the cosmopolitical is contingently composed within ecologies of practice that include the government, monk body, civil servants, citizens, monks, researchers, and of course, the virus in its different manifestations – as scientific, political and ritual object/actants. Ultimately, this examination of a ritual and a virus illustrates how modernist definitions of what is politics, what is religion, what is human or not, and what is nature or environment can be decentred in profound ways while the virus is efficaciously addressed

Aesthetics · Art · Biology · Geography · Repurposing · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Medicine · Ecology

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