In the village of Ketokha in southwestern Bhutan, Buddhist and shamanic traditions once coexisted, with female mediums (nejom) and male mediums (pawo) protecting villagers' health and prosperity. By 2018, infrastructure development and modernist discourses elevated Buddhism to dominance, and mediumship was discontinued. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this shift, establishing a refashioned protective ritual called Aum Bogum as the community's primary ritual identity. This photo essay focuses on that ritual and the life story of 94-year-old Tandin Om, the oldest living nejom, examining how archaic shamanic practices were discarded. Using Discard Studies, it unpacks the marginalization of elderly ritual practitioners as community elites promote a more progressive Vajrayana Buddhist order.
In a Bhutanese village with established religious pluralism, shamanic mediumship serves as both a formulaic, mimetic retention of history and an indeterminate, fluid improvisation. Mediums become sites for multisensory communicative dramas between ontologically distinct but relational spirits who negotiate their standing with the community. The phenomenal and phantasmal beings remain present in the village lifeworld, entangled in an ethics of care requiring dedication from both spirits and community. The paper unpacks the poetics, poiesis, and politics of metaphorical, cryptic, silent, and gestural codes through which charismatic mediums reinforce social order, examining how the lifeworld of Chungsekha village is lived, experienced, and discursively reconstructed through phantasmal and multisensory dialogues.