Short presentation

Dendup Chophel started as a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies (ToRS) in January 2026. His project aims to expand understanding of workable governance models in times of crisis and transformative changes through an ethnographic study of the role of Bhutan’s Central Monk Body (CMB) during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic markedly increased global inequalities. Bhutan is still dealing with the pandemic’s socio-economic effects and resulting structural transformations. Within crisis situations, structures of state power are often renegotiated. Bhutan’s historical Buddhist governance model was based on a seamless coalition of religion and politics, which is usually conceptualised as chos srid zung ’brel. Its 2008 constitution created a separation between the two, removing monastic representation in the governing bodies. Yet monastics continue be play a prominent role in Bhutan’s ongoing ‘whole-of-society’ response to rapid transformations. This project explores the questions this raises about the nature of Bhutan’s secularist governance model. It also brings this case into dialogue with decolonial research in religious studies, anthropology and governance studies to address the broader question of how governance can be (re)imagined in mitigating crises in resource-poor nations. Bhutan’s acclaimed success in pandemic management and its status as the only sovereign state in the Tibetan and Himalayan region makes it an important case.

Dendup has been at the ToRS since January 2024 as a Postdoctoral Fellow on the project Waste: Consumption and Buddhism in the Age of Garbage. He has received a PhD in anthropology from the Australian National University. He was a 2023 Early Career Research Fellow of the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies, which is administered by the American Council of Learned Societies. Before that, he was a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies-Erlangen (Friedrich Alexander University, Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany). He was also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Developing Economies-Japanese External Trade Organization (IDE-JETRO) in Japan. He began his research career at the Centre for Bhutan & GNH Studies in Thimphu.

His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of religion, ritualism, material prosperity, economic development, and social movements and changes with a regional focus on South Asia, particularly focusing on the Himalayas and Bhutan.