ETHNOMAD
Fading Cultures Magazine
ETHNOMAD is a field-based cultural research organisation producing long-term ethnographic documentation of living cultures under pressure, published through Fading Cultures Magazine for preservation, education, and institutional memory.
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People, Nature, and Consequence
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Living Cultures Under Pressure
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Conservation Ethnography
This first section looks at how forests are converted into bricks, tracing the chain from clay pits to kilns and fuel sources. It reveals how an ordinary construction material underpins deforestation, labour precarity, and long-term environmental stress. Based on fieldwork, the chapter situates brickmaking within the uneasy balance between livelihoods, growth, and the gradual depletion of forest landscapes.
This opening chapter focuses on memory rather than conflict. It traces the long shared routes of people and elephants across forests, floodplains, and farms, shaped by seasonal knowledge and restraint. Drawing on oral histories and field observation, it shows that coexistence is not an ideal but a practiced tradition. The chapter sets the baseline for understanding what has been lost, and why it matters.
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STORIES OF CHANGE
Carbon Elsewhere is an essay on climate responsibility, conservation, and the quiet ways its costs are displaced. Drawing on years of fieldwork from Madagascar to East Africa, the article examines how carbon offsetting, fortress conservation, and climate finance reshape land, livelihoods, and power, asking who truly bears the burden when responsibility travels further than emissions.
Written by Farhana Akter, Living With the Hills explores everyday life in Bangladesh’s hill regions, where communities navigate steep terrain, fragile ecosystems, and the quiet pressures of climate change and development. Through close observation and local voices, the article reflects on adaptation, resilience, and what it means to live in a relationship with the land that shapes both livelihood and identity.
IN FOCUS
The Work of Staying Human reflects on what humanitarian action is and what it was never meant to be. It is not a solution to war, displacement, or political failure. It is the work of easing suffering, protecting dignity, and remaining present when systems falter. Drawing on lived experience from Afghanistan, Lebanon, Nigeria, and Bangladesh, this piece examines how humanitarians continue to hold the line as crises become permanent, budgets shrink, and responsibility remains.
Written by Dr Tom Corcoran, this essay traces life in self-built neighbourhoods from Karachi to Dhaka through the lens of friction rather than poverty. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, it examines how effort accumulates or resets, how traditional knowledge sustains continuity, and why development often stalls when it fails to recognise where daily life actually slows, strains, and holds together.
Part 3 Out February 2026
Discover Conservation Ethnography?
Conservation ethnography examines how conservation reshapes human lives, knowledge, and relationships with land. It does not oppose protection, but questions models that treat people as secondary to nature. Grounded in long-term fieldwork and listening, it understands landscapes as lived places shaped by memory, labour, belief, and restraint. It asks who decides what protection looks like, whose knowledge counts, and what is lost when land becomes a system rather than a home.
"Ethnographic field guides for understanding places as lived realities, not project sites."
The Nature of Things
Climate
Migration
Forests:
As Australia records another year of extreme heat, scientists warn that the country’s conservation system is under growing strain. Despite decades of protected areas and recovery plans, Australia continues to lose small mammals faster than anywhere else on Earth. Researchers and Indigenous land practitioners say the losses reflect not only climate stress, but a land-management model that sidelined Indigenous stewardship and now struggles to cope with fire, heat, and ecological change.
Climate-driven delays in migration and shrinking wetlands are disrupting long-established flyways across Bangladesh, threatening bird populations that once shaped the delta's ecology and seasonal rhythms.
Indonesia’s decision to sue six companies after deadly floods and landslides in Sumatra signals a growing recognition that deforestation is not a side issue but a direct threat to public safety, one long warned about by scientists, communities, and environmental groups.
PROJECT UPDATES
A River Transect:
People, Culture, and Climate from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal
Shared Ground: Elephants, People, and Movement in Bangladesh
BRINGING HERITAGE STORIES
TO LIFE THROUGH THE PEOPLE
WHO LIVE THEM
What to watch
“Sangrai” is the water festival celebrated by the Marma communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh. This fascinating journey takes deep into the colourful history, enchanting myths, and lively celebrations that make Sangrai so special. With roots tracing back through generations, Sangrai serves as a symbolic marker of the transition into the new agricultural year; originating as a humble observance of the agricultural cycle, Sangrai has undergone significant evolution over the years, shaped by socio-economic changes, religious influences, and the passage of time.
