By Dr Tom Corcoran
Published by ETHNOMAD
Where the Edges of the World Begin
Over the coming weeks, I am preparing to relocate to Bangladesh, returning to a country that feels at once familiar and unstable. The camping gear is packed, cameras checked, hard drives cleared, and all the ordinary items of departure are waiting to be sorted. By late December, this will be home again, the centre of ETHNOMAD’s work across Asia. I know what lies ahead: the call to prayer through the early haze, the press of traffic in Dhaka, and the long road south toward the Chittagong Hill Tracts, where monsoon mist hangs low and rivers cut through the hills. I have lived and worked across South and Southeast Asia for decades, from Afghanistan to Bhutan, Indonesia to Australia.
What draws me back is not the romance of remoteness, but a recurring pattern I have seen across the region. The old frontier is gone. In Bangladesh, Assam, Nagaland, and far beyond, very few peoples remain outside the reach of the state, the market, or the road. Yet many have not been fully absorbed into these systems either. Instead, they live in an increasingly unstable middle ground, between customary worlds and external ones, between land-based autonomy and imposed dependence. These are what I think of as continuum peoples: communities living between systems, where older ways of governing land, labour, memory, and survival still endure, but no longer on their own terms.
The Chakma, Marma, and Tripura of the Chittagong Hill Tracts did not vanish when roads, hydroelectric schemes, military expansion, and settlement pushed into their lands. They endured. But endurance under pressure is not the same as continuity. A society that once relied on shifting cultivation, barter, and local reciprocity is forced to reorganise itself around checkpoints, land loss, wage labour, and administrative control. What changes first is not identity, but function. Land no longer feeds in the same way. Knowledge no longer governs in the same way. Customary systems remain, but under compression.
By the 1990s, many communities in the Hill Tracts had been displaced into settlements. Within two generations, social arrangements that had maintained food security for centuries began to fracture. Similar patterns can be traced across India’s northeast among the Naga, Mizo, and Tai-Aiton. None of these peoples were ever truly uncontacted. That was never the point. What protected them was not purity, but autonomy, the practical ability to organise life through territory, reciprocity, and inherited knowledge. Once missionary networks, state institutions, and market systems entered deeply enough, the rhythm changed. Labour exchange gave way to cash dependency. Forest sharing gave way to enclosure. Oral systems of trade and obligation weakened under external administration. Communities that had once managed scarcity through social cohesion began, within a generation, to experience debt, malnutrition, and the thin violence of dependence.
The same pattern appears further east. In Sumatra, the Orang Rimba of Jambi were driven from forest life into roadside settlements as plantations and forest conversion advanced. Malnutrition rose sharply. Literacy programmes designed in the language of uplift often detached children from one system without securing them in another. One elder put it plainly: “We lost our forest, and with it, our mind.” That loss was never just material. It was cognitive, moral, and territorial. It was the collapse of a world that had once made life intelligible.
This is why the language of recovery can be misleading. To say that a community may need three generations to recover after losing its customary lands already assumes a Western idea of damage and repair. It assumes that what was broken can be measured, managed, and gradually restored. But for continuum peoples, the deeper loss is not simply income, or even land in the abstract. It is the breakdown of a living system in which territory, memory, restraint, subsistence, and belonging once held together.
As I prepare to begin again in Bangladesh, this is what weighs on me most. The true edges of the world are no longer found only in remote forests or distant hills. They are found in the unstable margin between continuity and absorption, where people are forced to live in two worlds at once, and where the collapse of one is rarely matched by any meaningful arrival in the other.
He moves through water that is both road and refuge, where the forest does not end but continues beneath the surface. In these submerged worlds, knowledge is not written but lived, carried in the rhythm of the paddle, in memory of currents, seasons, and unseen paths that outsiders rarely perceive.
The Last Quiet Places:
There are still parts of the planet where the continuum has not yet taken hold. Places where no road has cut through the forest, where movement is guided by memory rather than infrastructure, and where knowledge remains a complete system rather than a fragment under pressure. Anthropologists estimate that between 100 and 200 uncontacted or voluntarily isolated groups remain, most of them in the Amazon Basin, the Andaman Islands, and the forests of Indonesia and Papua. Some have never seen outsiders. Others appear briefly at riverbanks, then retreat, maintaining distance not as a relic of the past, but as a condition of survival.
The Hongana Manyawa of Halmahera move through the forest in small groups, shifting camp as needed, reading the land through signs that do not translate beyond it. On North Sentinel Island, families have refused contact for thousands of years. They are not frozen in time. They are operating within systems that remain internally complete, where territory, knowledge, and survival are still aligned.
What distinguishes these societies is not isolation alone, but coherence. They have not yet been forced to divide life between competing systems. They are not required to translate their world into the language of markets, administration, or development in order to survive within it.
That condition is becoming increasingly rare. Between 2001 and 2022, Indonesia lost 9.6 million hectares of forest, much of it on Indigenous land. Roads, mining concessions, dams, and missions advance into regions that until recently remained beyond sustained external control. Each new corridor does more than connect. It restructures. It introduces new forms of authority, new dependencies, and new pressures that cannot be absorbed without consequence.
On Halmahera, the Hongana Manyawa now stand at this threshold. Beneath their forest lies nickel, a resource central to the global transition toward electric vehicles. The Weda Bay Nickel project, operated by French and Chinese interests, produces more than 60,000 tonnes annually. Satellite imagery shows access roads extending deeper into forest territory, bringing with them labour routes, extraction zones, and the infrastructure of permanent presence.
This is not simply a story of encroachment. It is the opening stage of transition. Once roads establish continuity with the outside, isolation is no longer a condition that can be maintained. Disease, displacement, and forced contact follow. Survivors are pushed into new arrangements, settlement edges, labour systems, and administrative categories. This is the point at which autonomous societies are drawn into the continuum.
An Indonesian anthropologist described the process with blunt clarity: “When the bulldozers come, they vanish, but the forest is shrinking faster than they can move.” What disappears is not the people themselves, but the conditions that made their way of life viable.
For the global market, this transformation is framed as progress, even as sustainability. For those on the ground, it marks the beginning of a long transition from coherence to contradiction, from a single system of living to the unstable reality of navigating several at once.
The Baduy: Holding the Line
High in the mountains of West Java, the Baduy live under pikukuh karuhun, an ancestral system of law that regulates how life is to be lived, what may be used, and what must be refused. This is not an absence of development. It is a restriction placed upon it. Technology, mechanised transport, chemical inputs, and infrastructure are not missing. They are deliberately excluded.
The Baduy are divided into Inner (Baduy Dalam) and Outer (Baduy Luar) communities, forming a structured boundary rather than a simple gradient of change. The outer settlements engage cautiously with the surrounding world and receive visitors under specific conditions. The inner territory is closed. Outsiders are not permitted to enter; photography is restricted, and even Baduy Luar members cannot move freely within these zones without adhering to stricter rules. Movement is regulated not by fences, but by a shared understanding of where authority changes.
This is not isolation in the conventional sense. It is controlled permeability.
What defines the Baduy is not simplicity, but coherence maintained through refusal. Forest use is regulated. Extraction is limited. Agriculture remains small-scale and cyclical. Houses are built from local materials, not because alternatives are unavailable, but because the system requires continuity between land, labour, and dwelling. Knowledge remains functional because it is still the primary means of organising life.
Rules are enforced through social obligation rather than force. All movement within Inner Baduy territory is on foot, and even the act of riding is considered a breach of order, a small shift that signals a larger imbalance. Violations, such as the use of prohibited tools, engagement in external economic activities beyond accepted limits, or breaking ritual restrictions, are addressed through communal sanction. Individuals may be required to undergo correction, temporary exclusion, or, in more serious cases, relocation from Inner to Outer Baduy areas. The system does not rely on punishment as spectacle. It relies on maintaining balance and restoring it when it is disturbed.
In a country undergoing rapid industrial expansion, the Baduy occupy a narrow and increasingly difficult position. They are not outside the state, yet they do not fully participate in its economic logic. They exist within the continuum, but at its edge, maintaining a degree of autonomy through internal governance rather than external protection.
Their significance lies in the fact that they demonstrate that the transition into the continuum is not always immediate or total. Under specific conditions, it can be slowed, structured, and partially resisted. But that resistance depends on the continued authority of their own system. Once that authority weakens, the transition accelerates, and the balance they maintain becomes difficult to hold.
Indonesia officially recognises millions of Indigenous citizens, yet provides no legal framework for the protection of uncontacted peoples. In practice, the expansion of a green economy continues to overlap with Indigenous territories. In Baduy lands, ancestral law still governs land use, restricting resource extraction and limiting infrastructure development. Forest integrity is maintained not through policy, but through lived regulation, a system that persists because it remains internally enforced rather than externally designed.
The Boundary That Shifted
More than a decade ago, while working in Indonesia, I travelled to Central Kalimantan with a Dayak colleague and returned with him to his home in the interior. We reached Palangkaraya and continued north by road, then by boat, moving through a landscape cut by canals and cleared of forest. Mile after mile of oil palm and exposed ground replaced what he remembered. At times, even he struggled to recognise the route.
By the time we reached his village, the change was already visible. Many of the men were working in palm oil plantations and processing facilities. Electricity had arrived, but only for a few hours each day. The forest that had once structured life was no longer present in the same way.
Early one morning, two villagers agreed to take us further inland. We set out at first light on motorcycles, following tracks that cut through the plantation and degraded land. After several hours, they stopped. One of them pointed ahead and said this was where the forest used to begin.
But there was no forest.
What remained was a fragmented edge, pushed back so far that even those who had grown up within it could no longer place it with certainty. The boundary between forest and settlement, once held in memory, had shifted faster than memory could adjust.
Later, we saw the same landscape from the air. What had felt disorienting on the ground became undeniable from above. The forest was no longer a continuous system, but a pattern of interruption. Blocks of oil palm extended to the horizon, replacing what had once been a layered canopy. Rivers ran straighter. Boundaries appeared where none had existed before.
From that height, the scale of the shift was clear. This was not a gradual change. It was a replacement.
What unfolded across Kalimantan was not accidental. Beginning under Suharto’s New Order government, large areas of forest were opened through the transmigration program, moving populations from densely settled islands such as Java into frontier regions. This was followed by logging concessions, peatland drainage, and the rapid expansion of plantation agriculture. What appeared on the ground as a gradual change was, in fact, part of a broader restructuring of land use, in which the forest was reclassified, divided, and converted into production.
For those living within it, the transition was not experienced all at once. It unfolded through roads, contracts, labour, and access. But the effect was structural. The land no longer functioned as it had, and the knowledge tied to it could no longer fully operate.
This is how the continuum takes hold. Not through a single moment of loss, but through the steady separation of knowledge from land, and land from control.
For many Dayak communities, this was not a decision. It was a transition imposed from outside. The forest did not simply disappear. It retreated, and with it, the system that had made life intelligible.
Today, the Dayak are often represented through what remains visible, their crafts, textiles, and cultural forms that can be documented, displayed, and traded. What is less visible is the system that once bound those practices to land, movement, and subsistence. That system depended on the forest not simply as a resource, but as territory, memory, and method.
When that foundation shifts, what survives is often what can be separated from it. Culture persists, but in an altered form, detached from the conditions that once made it functional.
The Dayak are not a single uniform group. Some communities have long lived along rivers and coastal zones, adapting to different ecological conditions. But across these variations, the pattern holds. Where control over land and movement is reduced, the systems that organise life begin to fragment.
This is another expression of the continuum. Not only in how people live, but in how they are seen. What remains legible to the outside world is often what can be extracted, named, and circulated. What disappears is harder to record, the relationship between land, knowledge, and survival that once made those practices complete.
Oil palm plantations extend in geometric patterns across Kalimantan. This is not adaptation, but replacement, a restructuring of land that transforms how people live within it, as systems of knowledge give way to systems of production.
Islands of Silence
Far out in the Bay of Bengal, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands mark one of the last clear boundaries of the continuum. Here, the distinction between autonomy and absorption can still be observed in its starkest form.
On North Sentinel Island, the Sentinelese have refused contact for generations. India enforces a five-nautical-mile exclusion zone, not as an instrument of control but as a buffer to prevent intrusion. The boundary is not maintained by policy alone. It is reinforced by the certainty of refusal. When outsiders approach, they are met with arrows. Not as acts of aggression, but as enforcement. The terms of engagement are set internally and have not changed.
What defines the Sentinelese is not isolation as absence, but coherence as a complete system. Territory, knowledge, and survival remain aligned. They are not required to translate their world into external terms in order to sustain it. They remain, for now, outside the continuum.
To the south, the situation is different. The Shompen of Great Nicobar move through a forest that is now subject to redesign. The Great Nicobar Project proposes a port, an airport, and a township for 650,000 settlers, an order of magnitude beyond the island’s current population. It will clear more than 130 square kilometres of rainforest, including areas within the Shompen Reserve, and introduce permanent infrastructure into a landscape that has never depended on it.
The shift begins with access. Roads cut through the forest that once structured movement. Survey lines precede allocation. Machinery establishes presence. Each step alters how land is used, how water moves, and how space is understood. What was once navigated through memory becomes fixed, measured, and reassigned. This is not a single event, but a sequence that reorganises the conditions of life.
For the Shompen, this is not a disappearance in the literal sense; it is a transition under pressure. As access expands, the possibility of remaining outside the continuum collapses. Disease, displacement, administrative control, and economic dependency follow.
The system that once held territory, knowledge, and survival together begins to separate.
The Sentinelese remain because the boundary holds.
The Shompen stand where it does not.
Some people maintain coherence through refusal. The other are being drawn into a different condition, where survival depends on navigating systems not of their own making.
And once that shift begins, it is not reversed. Not by policy, not by protection, not by recognition. Because what is lost is not only land, but the system that made that land intelligible, the knowledge that allowed it to be lived within rather than extracted from.
Papua: A Cultural Landscape Under Transition
For decades, New Guinea was described as one of the world’s last untouched wildernesses. That description was always wrong. Archaeological and ecological evidence show that these forests have been shaped by human activity for thousands of years. At Kuk Swamp in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, drainage systems and cultivation practices date back 7,000 to 10,000 years. Across the Sepik and Central Highlands, cycles of controlled burning, small-scale clearing, and regeneration reveal a landscape managed through continuity rather than extraction.
These are not wild forests in the conventional sense. They are cultural landscapes, systems sustained through long-term relationships between people, land, and knowledge. For generations, Papuan communities have organised life through small-scale gardening, hunting, and ecological restraint, maintaining a balance that does not separate survival from the environment.
What is changing is not the presence of people, but the systems that govern how land is used.
Across New Guinea, many communities now occupy the continuum. They are no longer fully autonomous, yet not fully integrated into external systems. Traditional knowledge persists, but it is no longer sufficient on its own. Administrative boundaries, infrastructure, and market forces are reshaping how land is accessed, how labour is organised, and how authority is exercised.
The shift is most visible in infrastructure. In West Papua, the Trans-Papua Highway now extends more than 4,000 kilometres into previously inaccessible highlands. Roads do not simply connect places. They reorganise them. Settlers follow. Logging expands. Military presence increases. Land that was once navigated through memory becomes surveyed, allocated, and contested.
Deforestation along the highway corridor is already significantly higher than in the surrounding forest. Mining concessions now overlap territories that were previously governed through customary systems. The Grasberg mine, one of the largest gold and copper operations in the world, has displaced communities and altered river systems that once structured both livelihood and belief.
Across the border in Papua New Guinea, similar pressures unfold under different administrations. Roads, pipelines, and logging routes extend inland from the coast, linking remote regions to global markets. River systems shift under the pressures of extraction and flood regimes. Clan boundaries, once maintained through ecological knowledge and movement, become harder to sustain.
Isolation in Papua is no longer simply a geographic condition. It has become a deliberate act of resistance. Communities withdraw, restrict access, and attempt to maintain control over territory. But as infrastructure expands, that resistance becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.
Papua does not represent disappearance. It represents a transition at scale. One of the clearest examples of how deeply rooted cultural systems are drawn into the continuum, not through a single event, but through sustained pressure that separates knowledge from land, and land from control.
The Right to Remain Unknown
In response to these pressures, a different approach has begun to take shape, unevenly and often too late. Across parts of South America and Southeast Asia, governments and Indigenous organisations are advancing a principle that reverses earlier assumptions: the right to remain unknown.
It recognises a basic fact. Protection does not require contact. In many cases, contact accelerates collapse.
Brazil has established protected territories such as the Vale do Javari Reserve, where uncontacted groups are monitored but not approached, often by Indigenous rangers operating under strict non-intrusion protocols. Peru has designated similar zones. In Indonesia, organisations such as AMAN advocate for legally recognised exclusion areas around communities like the Hongana Manyawa.
This is not preservation in the conventional sense. It is a restrained, formalised decision to limit intervention rather than extend it.
The principle acknowledges that some societies remain viable precisely because they have not been drawn into the continuum. Their knowledge systems hold because they are not required to operate alongside incompatible external systems, systems that separate land from control and survival from knowledge.
But this approach is inherently fragile. It depends on enforceable boundaries, political will, and the absence of overriding economic interests. Where those conditions fail, protection quickly gives way to access, and access initiates the transition.
The right to remain unknown does not resolve the pressures these communities face. It marks the last point at which transition might be delayed. Beyond it, the shift observed in places like Papua is not theoretical. It is the expected outcome.
Many Worlds Within Worlds
Not every community remains outside the continuum. Across Asia and the Pacific, millions now live within it, in the narrow space between autonomy and absorption. These are continuum peoples, societies no longer able to sustain life through a single system, yet not fully integrated into another.
The Penan of Borneo move through forests now intersected by logging roads, teaching their children knowledge that no longer governs the land as it once did. The Orang Rimba of Sumatra, displaced by plantations, live along roadsides, trading forest products within an economy that has replaced their own. In central India, the Baiga have been removed from forest territories in the name of conservation, their subsistence systems restricted to buffer zones designed without them. Across regions, the pattern is consistent. When territory fragments, the systems built upon it begin to separate. Knowledge remains, but without the conditions that once made it complete.
For those living within this space, the task is not to return to the past. It is to hold continuity under pressure, to maintain fragments of one system while navigating another that does not recognise it.
This is the defining condition of the present. Not isolation. Not full integration. But prolonged tension between ways of living that do not reconcile.
Modern systems tend to interpret what they encounter through exposure. To map, document, integrate, and manage. But not everything survives translation. Some systems remain viable only when they are allowed to operate on their own terms, within boundaries that are not continuously opened.
The Sentinelese hold that boundary. The Hongana Manyawa are losing it. The Baduy regulate it. Across Papua and beyond, it is being redrawn through roads, extraction, and administration.
What is at stake is not cultural difference as identity. It is the persistence of systems that organise life through relationships between land, knowledge, and restraint. Once those systems are separated, they do not reassemble easily.
There are still places where smoke rises through the forest at first light, where movement follows memory rather than road, and where knowledge remains embedded in the act of living. Those places are not outside the world. They are part of it. But they exist under increasing pressure, held in place only where boundaries remain intact.
Whether they persist will not depend on how well they are described, protected in name, or integrated into broader systems. It will depend on whether the conditions that sustain them are allowed to remain.
If this essay resonates, you can read: When Conservation Hurts:
which explores similar questions of dignity, endurance, and moral choice for the future of the earth."