To be born and raised and, in time, to die on the sea; to live out one’s seamless days together with one’s family, wandering the turquoise waters of the Andaman Sea in a hand-built boat and feeling suffocated by contact with land or civilization—this is the heritage of the Moken. It is an easily romanticized way of life that has captivated the land-locked souls of the Western world since the Moken were introduced to us by anthropologist Pierre Ivanoff in 1957.
