'Skin has eyes and ears': audio-visual ethnography in a Sepik society

My PhD thesis is based on several visits and a year of fieldwork in Ambonwari village of East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea. It deploys audio-visual methods to explore how people shape, and are shaped by, their social and cultural environment through their sensory experience. I focus on the visible arɨm 'skin, body' and the invisible wambung 'insideness, understanding', as the main sources of people's experience. My aim was not simply to explore these Ambonwari understandings of experience but to follow insights derived from Maurice Merleau- Ponty and David MacDougall, among others, in order to understand the reciprocal function of these sensory engagements as ways of knowledge. I chose to have the camera as a mediator in my research and a catalyst for an 'exchange of vision' between myself and the Ambonwari. I discuss the possibility of seeing the invisible by changing one's skin and I take my audio-visual material, Ambonwari recordings, and our public film screenings to explore this concept. Both, in the text and in the audio-visual material, I highlight how Ambonwari concepts of 'skin' and 'insideness', and the seen and the invisible, structured their experience of film viewing and filmmaking. In doing this I outline an approach to visual ethnography that stresses the sensual properties of the Ambonwari visual experience