ABSTRACT
Ethnographic engagement with yaks and herders in the Bhutan highlands lead to a rethinking of the idea and idiom of ‘the geopolitical’ in the Anthropocene context. Dominant understandings relate geopolitics to the modern geopolitical imagination, which has roots in the hegemonic, indeed ontological, association between political theory and socio-spatial contracts of states. This chapter forefronts another thought-tradition by relating geopolitics not to the world, but to the earth, not to nation, but to nature. Thus wresting geopolitics from the utilitarian narratives of State-Capital, and its manifold colonialities, this chapter offers an indigenously lived and lively version of ‘geo’-politics, one that is distinctly less state- and anthropo-centric in its form and character. It does so by encountering and engaging the more-than-human social contracts and norm-worlds that, in the Bhutan highlands, entangle and enmesh humans, yaks (and other animals), deities, and the physical earth in material, affective, spiritual, cultural, and political terms. What emerges is an indigenous ‘geo’-politics that relates as a communion and cycle of give-and-take between the earth and all its earthlings, including between humans and their material and spiritual grounds.
