The Philosophy of the Home: Bhutanese Domesticity as Knowledge
Laura Dzelzytė surveys a restored Kabu-Dharcham (house) in Nobgang, Bhutan
If the Renaissance placed magic in the hands of the learned man in his study, spiritual enlightenment in the temple overseen by a cleric, and power in the institution, the Philosophy of the Home proposes a different embodiment of knowledge: the woman at home. This perspective challenges what Audre Lorde described as the European mode of knowledge, a system that values ideas only for their productivity or problem solving capacity. In its place, I search for an epistemology grounded in self worth, self knowledge, and a care for the dignity of others. It is a poetic and soulful way of knowing that flourishes precisely in the spaces formal institutions have often ignored: the home, the community, and the body.
Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia describes the home as the epitome of moral reality, a microcosm of the world rather than a container of architectural form. Space, in its geometric purity, is uninhabitable. Only when filled with objects and people does it begin to reveal its purpose. Coccia writes that home, like love, has long been imagined as a female realm. Through gestures of care that are repeated and intimate, she quietly shapes our sense of self. These gestures form the moral, cognitive, emotional, and relational ground on which life develops.
Feminist anthropologists add important depth to this vision. Michelle Rosaldo argued that the domestic sphere is where a society’s deepest values are internalized. Sherry Ortner’s work revealed how the so called “private” sphere is not intellectually passive but a place where meaning is reproduced, contested, and transmitted. Their insights help reposition the home as a site of sophisticated knowledge rather than a space of mere sentiment or routine.
As a migrant female artist born Catholic during the crumbling of the Communist regime, I have lived in many places and moved frequently. I have learned the oppressive shapes, rigid margins, and weak points of different power structures: a collective farm on which I grew up, marked by stories of the manor house and land we lost to the regime after the Second World War, and clandestine rosary prayers after sunset; the parameters of a small flat with no dining table where my parents lived because the main meal was lunch at the workplace canteen, where it was easier to monitor conversations of the proletariat; university halls in Cambridge with wooden panelling and paintings of old masters; pale blue drawing rooms of British country houses; and libraries full of classics in Italian palazzos. Some buildings were crowded yet intimate, while others were grand but hollow and silent. I inhabited them all as best I could, yet the idea of home has always been somewhat elusive to me, something that was lost or perhaps never there.
Bhutan offered a different path. In Bhutan, land, property, and household authority traditionally pass through the female line from mother to eldest daughter. This matrilineal structure is often paired with a matrilocal tradition in which the husband joins the wife’s household. Scholars of the Himalayan region including Mona Schrempf and Kelzang T. Tashi have noted that ritual and domestic authority in many Bhutanese communities is deeply gendered in ways distinct from Western histories, where domesticity often grants virtue but rarely power. In Bhutan the home gives women control over material continuity, ritual life, and the rhythms of time itself. The traditional Bhutanese house thus becomes an epistemic structure, a living archive through which women carry identity across generations.
My destination was Nobgang in Punakha, an eighteenth century settlement built around the Tsuglakhang temple and known as a place of strong women. It is also the birthplace of the four Queen Mothers of Bhutan who were raised within its matrilineal traditions. The village offers a vivid example of domestic authority, particularly through its distinctive kabu dharcham houses. These L shaped rammed earth structures support specific patterns of ritual, storage, caregiving, and seasonal rhythms. They are not simply architectural forms but environments shaped around women’s knowledge.
Unlike temples, monasteries, state offices, and other institutions historically dominated by men, the Bhutanese home has long been a centre of women’s authority. Hearths, grain stores, family shrines, and multigenerational rooms are domains through which women maintain memory, tend to rituals, preserve seeds, manage food systems, and cultivate the emotional environment in which children learn who they are. This aligns with feminist theorists such as Donna Haraway and Sara Ahmed, who argue that knowledge is always embodied and situated, emerging not from abstraction but from lived experience.
Preserving the architecture of the Bhutanese house therefore also means preserving a female centred system of knowledge that operates through intimacy, care, and repetition. It is a reminder that identity and understanding often arise not from institutions of study but from the ordinary acts of dwelling together in spaces designed to hold them.
Yet Bhutan is changing. Technology, migration, and new economic opportunities draw young people away from traditional life. The ways of home and community are increasingly at risk. Efforts supported by Her Majesty Gyalyum Tshering Yangdoen Wangchuck aim to preserve traditional houses through community based heritage programs, testing whether the old forms of life can be carried forward rather than retained only as cultural memory.
The Bhutanese home is not merely a cultural artifact. It is a living epistemology. It embodies an ethics of care, a method of learning, and a worldview sustained through gestures repeated across generations. The challenge is to imagine how this knowledge might accompany Bhutan into the future, not as a relic but as a vital system of understanding. The seemingly ordinary Bhutanese home is a place of profound significance, a site where meaning is continually made and remade, a place that shows how the world can be known through care, continuity, and the quiet power of dwelling.
Philosophy of the Home is a long term research and sculpture project by London based artist Laura Dzelzytė and the Department of Culture, Bhutan.
Laura is a Lithuanian multidisciplinary artist based in London. She studied at the University of Cambridge and received an MA in Painting (with scholarship) from the Royal College of Art in 2025. Working across painting, sculpture, drawing, conceptual publishing, and immersive installations, Laura examines what it is to be a human now. In wax sculpture series, Laura reimagines furniture, statues, icons in wax (a Puglian bed, a Victorian bench, a library door, a wooden Pensive Christ), to examine the relationship between object and memory.
"Through an original form, Laura examines and connects a lost reality and the psychological condition of the present". Arts Biweekly, 2025