The Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan is one of the least ethnographically studied locales in the world. As a late-comer to the tertiary education landscape, the discipline of anthropology remains highly under-represented nationally, as well as isolated from the wider discipline in terms of international networks, theoretical engagement, intellectual debate and peer-review processes. Efforts in developing a doctoral program throw into sharp relief the challenges of advancing the discipline, including contestations of commonly held ideas regarding contributions made by anthropologists and their importance for an academic curriculum – deriving from questions concerning the discipline in terms of its identity and cohesion as a field of scholarship, its scientific 'relevance', and issues of institutionalization and representation (Verma and Levine 2022). At a historic moment for the discipline when its future is unclear in an uncertain and highly fluid local policy context, this paper reflects on whether a critically-oriented anthropology is possible. It explores emergent opportunities and tensions at the cross-currents of decolonizing anthropology that unsettle the discipline more broadly, and maintaining critically grounded theoretical and ethnographic analysis as hallmarks of the discipline that unsettle local institutional modalities of regulating academic knowledge and research. What lessons emerge from developing the discipline and ethnographic practice in unique and crypto-colonial regions such as Bhutan (Herzfeld 2002), and what issues arise at this specific moment in history in a context of substantial national policy change? Beyond simple North-South binaries that unsettle disciplinary and local academic landscapes, the paper considers the ways knowledge and power work and oscillate in developing and/or challenging new in-roads for rigorous anthropological training, and/or the discipline’s ability to establish standards of practice. It also reflects on establishing world anthropologies in the wider education arena in the context of decolonization, and the ways this affects the future hopes and possibilities of anthropology.
