A new paper from CuHeMo’s Thailand sub-project documents how the Moken, a traditionally semi-nomadic seafaring people of the Andaman Sea, have been progressively “trapped in place” by overlapping pressures: national park regulations, maritime border controls, lack of Thai citizenship, mass tourism, and climate change. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted on Surin and Phayam Islands (November 2024–April 2025), Lukas C. Husa, Kwanchit Sasiwongsaroj, and colleagues show that the Moken’s mobility is not simply a lifestyle — it is the foundation of their cultural knowledge and ecological expertise. As movement shrinks, so does the knowledge system tied to it. The paper applies an intersectional framework to reveal how these pressures compound each other in ways that no single policy intervention can address.
Read the full article: Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies, Vol. 13(2) — Open Access.
