Book cover of "Among Tibetan Materialities: Materials and Material Cultures of Tibet and the Himalayas". On the image are pots with paint in different colours.

Comment citer

Chophel, Dendup: The material poetics and politics of the patag: Bhutan’s ceremonial sword as a heroic artefact, in Martin, Emma, Brox, Trine et Lange, Diana (éd.): Among Tibetan Materialities: Materials and Material Cultures of Tibet and the Himalayas, Heidelberg: Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing, 2025, p. 291–322. https://doi.org/10.11588/hasp.1522.c23988

Licence (Chapitre)

Creative Commons License

Ce travail est disponible sous licence Creative Commons Attribution - Partage dans les Mêmes Conditions 4.0 International.

Identifiants (Livre)

https://doi.org/10.11588/hasp.1522
ISBN 978-3-98887-015-5 (PDF)
ISBN 978-3-98887-016-2 (Hardcover)

Publié

10/28/2025

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Auteurs

Dendup Chophel

The material poetics and politics of the patag

Bhutan’s ceremonial sword as a heroic artefact

This chapter examines the potency of the Bhutanese ceremonial sword or patag in the ongoing construction of the Bhutanese nation state. It does so through a study of the patag’s material, affective and symbolic qualities, and how these have been instrumentalized in Bhutan’s national discourse and honours system since parliamentary democracy was introduced in 2008. I conceptualize the patag as a ‘heroic artefact’: a material object that, like a human hero, has the generative potential to foster in people the capacity to imagine themselves as capable of and willing to take heroic action. I argue that this potential is rooted in the patag’s material brilliance, which is inseparable from its culturally 
layered significance as a discursive object with fluid martial and religious meanings. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and a wide range of oral and written sources, this chapter foregrounds Bhutanese ways of conceptualizing and talking about the patag and its interrelated material and immaterial qualities. At the same time, it offers a new perspective on the understudied role of heroism in nation-building, shifting the focus away from narratives and images of human heroes to the affordances (and limitations) of potent material artefacts like the patag in fostering heroic imagination. 

Keywords Patag, Bhutanese sword, heroic artefact, heroism, nation-building

Dendup Chopel is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Buddhist Studies, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. He previously held a Robert H.N Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddist Studies Fellowship and a research fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität-Erlangen-Nürnberg. He gained his PhD in anthropology from the Australian National University.