Course Information

Course Name: “The Challenge of Change in Traditional Societies: Bhutan’s ‘Gross National Happiness’ as a Development Model for Indigenous Communities.”

Course Date: March 19-27th, 2016

Course Number: CRN 21106, IPMG 9546A

Application Deadline: December 1, 2015

Notify Financial Aid: February 5, 2016

Down-Payment for Trip: January 15, 2016

Travel Registration Form and Balance of Program Fee: February 15, 2016

Duration onsite: 9 days (arrangements should take into account an additional day before and after for travel)

Instructors: Jan Knippers Black, Professor, GSIPS

Credits:  4

Office Location:  McCone 117

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In the Spring of 2016, students from MIIS will take a trip to Bhutan to study an adaptable model of autonomy for indigenous peoples, environmental preservation, and Bhutan’s developmental philosophy of Gross National Happiness. This site will serve as a tool to follow the progress of the upcoming trip, while offering insightful information regarding the context of the trip.  Below is a brief description of the Bhutan Spring course prospectus:

This new onsite 4-hour course is to be offered by Professor Jan Knippers Black, GSIPM, in collaboration with Bhutan’s Royal Thimphu College. It is inspired by and undertaken in the context of Dr. Black’s teaching and research in pursuit of an adaptable model of autonomy for indigenous peoples.

An uphill battle for cultural survival is being waged around the world in the twenty-first century. Indigenous peoples have long aroused the fear, the ire, and ultimately the contempt of conquerors, missionaries, and late settlers simply by having been there already. They have been among the first of the native species to be depleted by explorers and exploiters and the lat of the peoples in the state superimposed over their homelands to enjoy the rights of citizenship. They are also the only reliable guardians of their own ecosystems.

Whether exploited for their labor or as cannon-fodder in high or low intensity conflicts or just obliterated in passing as their ancestral homes got in the way of bombs and bullets, herbicides and hydroelectric plants, the vulnerability of unintegrated survivors of ancient cultures seems always to have invited abuse. The resource rush of twenty-first century globalization, however, is pushing such peoples onto ever more marginal lands and subjecting them to new forms of violence, contamination, and deprivation. The most common means of measuring development – national aggregate data – are deceptive with respect to the fates of vulnerable peoples. High rates of per capita GNP growth may well represent the successes of conquering peoples or cultures in wiping out indigenous ones.

Multigenerational attachment to language and culture and profound ties to an ancestral homeland has made them at the same time more vulnerable and more valuable to the planet and its peoples. The Bhutanese, among the very few peoples who have been able continuously to defend their territory and to erect a state reflecting and reinforcing the values and practices of its indigenous people, have offered to the world another way of calculating the wealth of a nation. Their developmental philosophy of “Gross National Happiness” richly deserves our attention and our application to challenges faced by endangered cultural elsewhere.

Topics to be covered and challenges to be analyzed in this onsite course will include linguistic, cultural, and environmental preservation, community organization and development, entrepreneurship in handi-crafting, consideration of social impact in the promotion of small business and the design of NGO operations. We will also deal with the actual and prospective role of Bhutanese government in the protection of tradition and the promotion of low impact technological change conducive to enhanced standards of living. And finally, we will address the challenges posed both to environmental diversity and to cultural diversity by the encroachment of globalization and the diplomatic approaches that have been effective in constraining such encroachment.

Enrollment preference will be given to students of GSIPM, but the course will be open to all MIIS programs as well as to students from Middlebury College. To the extent allowed by logistics, the experience will be open also to MIIS alumni. There is no option of taking the course for fewer than 4 credits, but arrangements for independent study might be possible. Deliverables will be reports of 10 to 15 pages; shorter papers within that range might be elaborated with appropriate photos or accompanied by videos. Reports may be in the form of a research paper for an academic journal or in less formal, journalistic style suitable to be featured in a magazine. In either case, the paper should make use of primary sources – that is, arranged lectures and briefings, interviews and conversations, and observations onsite in Bhutan.

If you have questions regarding the course or the outlined learning objectives above, please contact Professor Jan Black (jblack@miis.edu) and Carolyn Meyer (cmeyer@miis.edu). Please copy Stephanie Nelson (sinelson@miis.edu) on all messages, as Dr. Black will be traveling frequently and will not have regular access to email.

                                                             Suggested Readings and Films:

Book edited by Michael Aris and Michael Hutt, Bhutan: Aspects of Culture and Development,
                      Esp. Introduction and chap. On Decentralization and Development.
Book by Jamie Zeppa, Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A journey into Bhutan
Film by Khyentse Norbu, Travellers and Magicians