5 Field Moments that Shaped ETHNOMAD
A step back into some of the people, places and experiences behind the Fading Cultures Project
From a fire in Australia to a homecoming in northern Bangladesh, five field encounters changed how I understood culture, knowledge and responsibility. Together, they became the foundations of the Fading Cultures Project and ETHNOMAD.
1. Australia: What more than 60,000 years of knowledge should be teaching us.
Although I was born in Ireland, I was too young to remember it. My childhood was an immigrant childhood in Australia. We arrived as “New Australians” and, like many families at the time, started again. As children, we were as wild as the landscape around us. We wandered through the bush, built rough cabins and disappeared for hours without anyone asking where we were. There were few fences, fewer regulations and little money, but money did not seem to sit at the centre of life.
Australia still felt like a frontier. Only later did I understand what that frontier had cost. The freedom we experienced existed alongside the dispossession of Aboriginal people from their land, language and culture. Indigenous history was not entirely absent, but it remained somewhere in the background, rarely spoken about and never properly explained. We walked through country without knowing whose country it was.
Years later, while working at Myall Lakes National Park, I met Steve, a Worimi man reclaiming songs, dances and stories that had nearly fallen silent. At dusk, he lit a fire and gathered people around it. Sometimes he came alone. Often he brought boys, cousins and elders from his community. There were no projectors, scripts or museum cases. Steve spoke about saltwater country, kinship, seasonal movement, fish traps, plants, tides and stars. Then he danced, and the younger boys followed his steps. Visitors may have believed they were watching a performance. I began to understand that I was witnessing knowledge being passed from one generation to another.
That fire stayed with me. Years later, in Indigenous communities, refugee camps and places fractured by disaster and displacement, I recognised the same struggle. Songs, stories, rituals, and skills survived because someone kept practising them, and because someone younger was there to learn. The idea at the heart of ETHNOMAD and the Fading Cultures Project began there: culture is not kept alive by preserving it at a distance. It survives when people keep living it.
Read the Australian Story: What the Fire Carries
2. Madagascar: The Farmer Who Was Told He Was Poor
Madagascar had lived in my imagination long before I arrived. It was the island of baobabs, lemurs and chameleons, an ancient world set adrift in the Indian Ocean. When I finally reached its red soil in 2009, I found a country far more difficult and revealing than the wildlife documentaries of my childhood had suggested.
I travelled north to Maroantsetra and then inland among forest communities along the Antainambalana River. There I met Henry Mani, a village schoolteacher who became my guide and friend. Henry believed deeply in protecting the forest, but he also understood the lives of those being asked to protect it. Families needed rice, land, schools, healthcare and a realistic way to earn a living. Silk-making and other conservation projects offered possibilities, but a livelihood that worked in a proposal did not always work in a village.
One day, Henry and I stopped beside a small bamboo house where a farmer sat with his two children. We shared pieces of sugar cane and talked about his family, his land and the forest
“I know that I am poor,” he told us.
A foreign researcher had visited the previous year, asked him a series of questions and then explained that he was poor. Before that meeting, the farmer said he had not known what poverty was. Now he thought about it often.
His life was not easy, and there is no virtue in pretending otherwise. A failed rice harvest, an illness or a cyclone could push his family into crisis. But before the researcher arrived, he had understood his life through land, rice, kinship, work and the forest around him. The researcher left him with another way of understanding himself: poor.
I never forgot that conversation. It showed me how easily development could collect a person’s story, translate it into data and return it as a judgement. The farmer had been listened to, but he had not been heard.
Madagascar convinced me that reports and statistics were not enough. I began using film and storytelling to remain with the person behind the category: the farmer behind “forest dependent,” the family behind “poor,” and the community behind “vulnerable.” This became central to the Fading Cultures Project and, later, to ETHNOMAD. The purpose was not to give people a voice. It was to make it harder for the rest of us to ignore what they were already saying.
Read about Madagascar: The Forgotten Liferaft
3. Indonesia: From the Ocean to the Fire
My relationship with Indonesia began when I was fifteen. In a hall near Merewether, Australia, I watched Gerry Lopez surf Uluwatu in the film Storm Riders. Soon afterwards, I was on my way to Bali, chasing the waves I had seen on that screen. Surfing opened Indonesia to me, but the country soon became more important than the waves. I returned over many years, travelling through islands and communities that changed how I understood land, culture and belonging. Eventually, that journey brought me to West Sumatra. I was working with communities preparing for earthquakes when I began looking closely at the bricks used to rebuild their homes. Many were dangerously weak, while the kilns producing them consumed timber from forests that held the surrounding slopes together. A material associated with progress and safety was quietly increasing other forms of risk.
To understand why, I worked beside a Minangkabau brickmaking family in Pasir Putih. I mixed clay, moulded bricks and helped prepare the kilns. There I met Uni Tati, who held the land and kilns through her matrilineal inheritance.
“We work between the sun and the clouds,” she told me. Rain could dissolve weeks of labour, while insufficient sun left moisture inside the bricks and caused them to crack during firing.
When I proposed testing palm kernel shells instead of forest timber, Uni Tati entrusted me with one of her kilns. If the experiment failed, the loss would be hers. That gesture taught me that fieldwork was not simply about observing or recording people’s lives. It required trust, shared labour and a willingness to carry some of the risk. I first came to Indonesia looking for waves. Sumatra taught me how to stay. That principle became central to ETHNOMAD: work beside people, understand what is at stake, and leave something useful behind.
Read the full story: Between the Sun and the Clouds: Trading Forests for Clay
4. India: Knowledge Held in the Hands
India did not shape my work through one encounter. It did so slowly, through masons, pastoralists, healers, teachers and children whose knowledge was inseparable from the lives they lived.
In Jodhpur, the Blue City revealed itself not only through palaces and painted streets, but through stone. At Rani Mahal and other historic buildings, walls carried the marks of quarrymen, carvers, masons and generations of repair. The buildings were archives, but so were the hands of the people who knew how to read, cut and place the stone.
This changed how I understood heritage. A monument does not survive through architecture alone. It survives because knowledge passes from one worker to another: how to select a stone, mix lime, follow an old joint and repair a wall without erasing its history. When that chain is broken, the building may remain standing while much of its meaning is lost.
I encountered the same principle in Ayurveda. Knowledge of plants, food, the body and the seasons had been developed through observation and practice over generations. It did not fit neatly into the modern division between medicine, ecology, spirituality and domestic life. It belonged to all of them.
Among the Gurjar of Sariska, this understanding returned in another form. Before we walked through tiger country with a group of children, an elder told us not to lead them, but to follow. The children knew how to read the forest. We did not. Across India, the lesson remained the same. Knowledge lived not only in books or institutions, but in skilled hands, disciplined bodies, memory, and repeated practice. A stonemason could read a wall. A healer could read a plant. A Gurjar child could read a forest.
India helped shape the central concern of the Fading Cultures Project and ETHNOMAD: when a craft, language or tradition disappears, the loss is not simply cultural. It is the loss of a way of knowing the world.
Read the stories: The Gurjar Girls and The Still Mind
5. Bangladesh: When the Record Became a Responsibility
I first knew Bangladesh through the Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar. There I saw what happens when people are separated from land and compressed into a single identity: refugee. Yet language, food, prayer, dress and memory continued to hold people together. Culture became something portable, carried when almost everything else had been lost.
Years later, I returned to Bangladesh with a loose plan. On my first day in a new apartment in Dhaka, the security guard introduced himself. His name was Fotik.
“I am Garo,” he said. “We are Christians. We come from the north.” That brief introduction eventually took me to Nalikhali, where Fotik and his brother Sagar returned to land held through their mother’s line. In Dhaka, Fotik was quiet, formal and contained within his uniform. As we travelled north, he began to change. Near the village, he called out to people along the road. Voices answered from houses and tea stalls. He laughed more freely and moved with the confidence of someone recognised by the land and by everyone living upon it.
He was no longer a security guard. He was home. Over the following days, Fotik tried to remember dances he had learned as a boy. Some movements returned immediately. Others had already begun to disappear. “I forget,” he said. “Before, I know all.”
The Garo Record began in that space between return and forgetting. It grew from the understanding that documenting a culture is not enough if the conditions sustaining it continue to weaken.
The Garo Experience followed, creating work and giving food, weaving, music, storytelling and hospitality a place within the village economy. Shared Ground extended that responsibility into the forests and fields where Garo communities and wild elephants now struggle to inhabit the same shrinking landscape.
Bangladesh brought ETHNOMAD's purpose into focus. A story should preserve memory, but it should also remain answerable to the people whose lives it enters. The work could no longer end when the recording stopped.
Continue with The Garo Record: A Garo Man Comes Home and A Culture Divided by a Line.
What Remains
These five moments took place across different countries and different periods of my life, but each revealed the same truth: culture does not survive through documentation alone.
It survives because someone keeps carrying it. A Worimi man teaches boys beside a fire. A Malagasy farmer refuses to fit neatly inside an outsider’s definition of poverty. A Minangkabau woman risks her kiln on the possibility of change. Gurjar children guide adults through a forest the adults cannot read. A Garo man returns to his mother’s land and tries to remember the dances of his childhood.
The Fading Cultures Project began by recording such moments. ETHNOMAD grew from the recognition that recording them was not enough. Stories can make people visible, but visibility must be followed by respect, relationship and, where possible, practical commitment. Otherwise, the documentarian leaves with the story while the community remains with the same pressures.
Culture is the glue that holds a society together. It connects land to memory, knowledge to survival, and one generation to the next. When those connections weaken, people may remain in place while losing the world that once made the place meaningful.
ETHNOMAD exists to work within that fragile space: to document what is changing, listen to those carrying the knowledge, and support the conditions that allow culture to remain lived rather than merely remembered. The field did not teach me how to save cultures. It taught me to recognise the people already holding them together, and to make their work harder to ignore.