In the Field
In Nalikhali, northern Bangladesh, Prakriti, a young Garo, or A·chik Mande, girl, records stories from elder women in her community. For The Garo Record, these conversations are more than interviews. They are acts of memory, linking matrilineal land, women’s knowledge, household life, and the future of a culture still carried through voice, presence, and trust.
ETHNOMAD is built on long-term, place-based ethnographic fieldwork. Before writing, filming, or publishing, we spend time in the field: listening, observing, and working alongside communities whose lives are shaped by land, environment, displacement, memory, and tradition.
Our work is grounded in presence, not extraction. We build relationships, return when possible, and document only what has been shared through trust.
How we work
ETHNOMAD fieldwork follows a consistent approach, adapted to local context:
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Long-term engagement rather than rapid assessment
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Listening before interpretation
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Community consent and collaboration at every stage
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Respect for cultural authority, knowledge systems, and limits
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Careful documentation that avoids harm, simplification, or spectacle
Fieldwork may involve living within communities and working through local partners, returning repeatedly over the years to understand change as it unfolds.
Where we work
ETHNOMAD’s fieldwork spans Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the Pacific, with long-term engagements in regions affected by conflict, environmental stress, and cultural transition. Our work is shaped by decades of experience in humanitarian response, conservation contexts, and ethnographic research.
Each project is grounded in its own geography, history, and constraints. There is no template.
Field-based ethnographic work documenting the relationship between culture, land, livelihoods, conservation, oral tradition, and the living environments that sustain community life.
Explore the projects we are developing in the field.
The Garo Record: Culture, Land, and Change:
An ethnographic archive project
A multi-year ethnographic project across tribal regions of South and Southeast Asia, documenting how traditional knowledge shapes land, livelihoods, conservation, education, and community life. The first three-year phase follows communities facing pressure from development, conservation policy, and displacement, while recording the practical knowledge being lost when older systems of restraint, ecological care, and social cohesion are ignored.
The Garo Experience, Nalikhali Guesthouse, is a rare homestead stay with the Garo, or A·chik Mande, Indigenous people of northern Bangladesh. Currently under construction, the project is led by ETHNOMAD in partnership with the local community, who are helping to build, train, host, and shape the experience.
Set among paddy fields, forest edges, village paths, and family gardens, Nalikhali is not a staged cultural display. It is a living community where guests encounter Garo life through food, conversation, music, oral memory, weaving, rice cultivation, matrilineal heritage, and a deep relationship with the land.
Shared Ground: Elephants, Land, and the Future of Coexistence
The question is not whether people or elephants should have the land. The question is whether a landscape can be planned intelligently enough for both to survive.
Bangladesh’s elephants are not currently a tourism asset. They are treated as a conflict cost. Shared Ground asks whether this can change without turning elephants into entertainment. The project will test whether ethnography, corridor mapping, community land-sharing, elephant food zones, and carefully managed field-based tourism can reduce conflict while creating direct value for the people who live with elephants.
Origins of Oil Painting:
From the Cave to the Canvas
A five-year ETHNOMAD research project tracing the overlooked history of oil-based painting from Afghanistan and Pakistan through Central and South Asia, the Islamic world, and Europe. Published with Istanbul University, the project challenges Eurocentric art history by documenting oil-based painting as a cumulative tradition shaped by migration, trade, religious art, material experimentation, and cultural exchange. ETHNOMAD will present the research at the Third International Conference on the Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan in Islamabad, May 19 to 23, 2026.
Traditional Knowledge Systems:
What Conservation Can Learn from Tribal and Indigenous Communities
Traditional Knowledge Systems documents what conservation, development, and modern education can learn from tribal, Indigenous, pastoralist, forest, island, and mountain communities.
Drawing on ETHNOMAD fieldwork with the Gurjar of Rajasthan, the Betsimisaraka of Madagascar, Indigenous Australians, the Garo or A·chik Mande of northern Bangladesh, mountain communities of Pakistan, and communities across Africa, the project records knowledge carried through land use, oral tradition, farming, herding, fishing, craft, ceremony, memory, and everyday life.
It asks what is lost when older systems of ecological knowledge, restraint, reciprocity, and community obligation are ignored.
People, Culture, and Climate from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal
The River Transect follows major river systems from the Himalayan foothills through Assam and Bangladesh to the Bay of Bengal, documenting the lives of people whose cultures, livelihoods, and futures are shaped by water.
Working with tribal communities, fishing peoples, boat dwellers, floodplain farmers, and char settlements, ETHNOMAD examines how climate change, upstream water control, borders, embankments, conservation zones, and development policies reshape life along the rivers.
The project treats rivers not as lines on a map, but as living systems that carry memory, movement, risk, food, work, and belonging.
Documenting Life on the periphery Society
Informal Settlements documents life in self-built neighbourhoods, refugee camps, displacement sites, and urban margins where people live beyond the full reach of formal planning.
Drawing on ETHNOMAD fieldwork in places such as Korail in Dhaka, refugee settlements in Bangladesh and Tanzania, and other communities on the edge of recognition, the project examines how people build homes, livelihoods, networks, education, safety, and social life under pressure.
It asks what development often fails to see: that informal settlements are not only places of poverty, but places of adaptation, labour, memory, skill, and belonging.
ETHNOMAD’s field projects document living heritage, traditional knowledge, conservation, livelihoods, oral traditions, and changing environments through long-term ethnographic work with communities.This work takes time, trust, travel, local researchers, translation, film, photography, archiving, training, and publication. Support from individuals, institutions, embassies, universities, foundations, responsible companies, and cultural partners allows us to continue recording knowledge that is too often ignored until it is already disappearing.We welcome support for current projects, partnerships for new work, and commissions from organisations seeking serious field-based cultural research, documentation, film, photography, community tourism design, conservation and livelihood studies, or public storytelling.