At the boundary of modernity

Amidst decorative banners and flags, the Royal Society for the Protection of Nature ¹ launched its Clean Bhutan campaign at the Clock Tower plaza in the heart of Thimphu, Bhutan's capital, in spring 2008. Residents gathered in a festive atmosphere to watch troupes of colorfully-clad singers and dancers perform entertaining presentations with didactic messages about proper household waste management. Though enjoyable, the presentations were aimed at getting the Bhutanese populace to incorporate environmental concerns into their lives by becoming responsible environmental citizens. Hearing the music blaring from the central square, my friend Tshering Chenzom, whose family ran the guesthouse where I was staying, grabbed my arm and we joined the audience. Though I could not follow all the songs in Dzongkha, the national language of Bhutan, I was surprised to note that banners and refrains employed the English term “Three Rs,” and implored citizens to adopt the commonplace “reduce-reuse-recycle” mantra of Western-style waste management. ² The modernist exhortations of the performers seemed to ignore existing cultural resources. The presentation of a “Three Rs” refrain, a trope so familiar to Western school children, was incongruous in the Bhutanese context, where reuse and recycling of organic materials are long-term rural agricultural practices, and the injunction to “reduce” contradicted national efforts to raise the material standard of living. ³ This incongruity led me to inquire into the environmental imaginaries (Peet and Watts 1996) animating multiple and competing views of waste, garbage, and pollution in Bhutan.