The Cultural Production of the “Disabled” Person: Constructing Difference in Bhutanese Schools

The Himalayan country of Bhutan has witnessed monumental social and cultural changes in only the last fifty years with the implementation and institutionalization of mass secular schooling. This “modern” schooling has also served to newly sort, produce, and construct “disabled” persons. Through a year of ethnographic fieldwork, I explored this construction of disability through the institution of schooling and have organized these observations into four forms: physical, pedagogical, curricular, and linguistic.