Francoise Pommaret, PhD, is a cultural anthropologist, Director of Research at the CRCAO/CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research, France) (retired) and Associate Professor at the College of Language and Culture (CLCS), Royal University of Bhutan. She has been associated with Bhutan in different capacities since 1981 and has published numerous scholarly articles and books on different aspects of Bhutanese culture.
She is currently involved in the documentation of the Bhutan Cultural Atlas https://bhutanculturalatlas.clcs.edu.bt/
Her research interests focus on the interface between deities, local powers and migrations in Bhutan as well as non-Buddhist practices in the framework of Vajrayana.
Her PhD dissertation was on the ‘Das log. Sources écrites et traditions orales, CNRS eds, Paris, 1989, 1994, 2010. She was the co-editor and co-author of Bhutan: mountain fortress of the gods, Serindia, London, 1997, and Bhutan. Tradition and change, Brill, Leiden, 2007.
Her wide audience books in English are Bhutan, a cultural guidebook, Odyssey Guidebook, Hong-Kong (1990, reprint 2003, 2006, 2010, 2018) as well as Tibet, an enduring civilization, Abrams Discovery series, NY, 2003. Both have been published in several languages. Her latest book co-authored with Stephanie Guyer-Stevens, is Divine Messengers, the untold story of Female Shamans in Bhutan, Shambhala, 2021.
Françoise Pommaret has lectured in numerous academic institutions around the world and has been guest-curator for several exhibitions.
For her work in Bhutan, she is the recipient of the French Legion d’honneur (2015) and the Gold Merit Medal of Bhutan ( 2017). She is now the French honorary consul in Bhutan.