ABSTRACT
Anthropologists have long been interested in how social and cultural environments shape the ways in which humans experience the world. Previously I have argued that traditional Indigenous Australian cosmologies foster a perceptual openness, an attentiveness to the possible manifestations of ancestral and other spirit beings in country, and to their presence in dreams. In this paper, I build on these arguments to consider visual perception as part of the ontological foundations of Bardi and Jawi people from the northern Dampierland Peninsula, reflecting their maritime orientation as “saltwater people.”
