BRISTOL — The Kingdom of Bhutan will be explored in this month’s program of the One World Library Project in Bristol. Kit Anderson, who teaches in the Environmental Program at the University of Vermont, will present “Bhutan: Sacred Landscapes, Buddhas and Dragons”on Thursday, Oct. 23, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the Lawrence Memorial Library in Bristol.
In this free program, Anderson will discuss her recent journey to Bhutan, a Buddhist country with a population similar to Vermont. Bhutan is a landlocked country on the eastern edge of the Himalayas and is bordered by China to the north and India to the south, east and west. Many people know of Bhutan as a country that uses an index of “gross national happiness” instead of “gross domestic product.” However, despite this index, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Bhutanese have fled or been expelled from the country since the 1990s, and nearly 80,000 have resettled in the United States.
Anderson has wanted to travel to Bhutan for 30 years, ever since she discovered a map of the mysterious country in the UVM library. This year she was finally able to visit Bhutan during a conference for the International Society for Ethnobiology. Her trip was a chance to combine many interests: ethnobiology, storytelling, hiking, geography and cultural exploration. Her talk will focus on sacred landscapes, the interplay of old and new, foods both wild and cultivated, the arts in everyday life, and Bhutan’s sense of graciousness.
For more information on the program, contact the Lawrence Memorial Library at 453-2366 or go online to www.OneWorldLibraryProject.org.