Bomena, misunderstood culture: contextualizing a traditional courtship custom practiced in the villages of Bhutan

Abstract

A traditional courtship custom practiced in the villages of eastern and central Bhutan has been blamed for some of the problems generally associated with any custom or marriage practice in most traditional as well as modern societies. Known as bomena (literally meaning going towards a girl) in Wamling village, this courtship involves a boy stealthily entering a girl’s house at night for courtship or coitus with or without prior consultation. This is an institution through which young people find their partners and get married. This paper is the result of a short anthropological study of this custom in a small village in central Bhutan conducted in 2009. The study revealed that the custom is not as simple as it is generally assumed, but is related to the village’s geography, history, economy, religion, social structures and institutions, inheritance, culture, customs, values and other factors. Besides its obvious courtship role, it performs some unacknowledged roles which are served by separate institutions in most societies. What made the urban Bhutanese populations to brand it as ‘primitive’ is not because of the custom’s inherent nature, but their changing value system and the construction of farmers as the anthropological ‘other.’ The paper calls for respecting a culture as fundamental as courtship institution and for giving people time and space to evolve such institutions, which are largely a function development.