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The ways in which feral animals have been vilified has been of particular interest to Morton and Smith (1999), who drew attention to the fight to conserve indigenous animals and to eradicate feral animals. This vilification is brought into particular contemporary circumstances on Christmas Island, where ants are sometimes understood to represent human invaders from across the sea, intent on inflicting harm on a local population—the red crabs. These red crabs circulate inside the island, where they are drawn into metaphors of blood, which not only connects all islanders but which can be affected by infection when it takes up foreign bodies into its red flow.
Michael Jackson (1983) argued that metaphors are not just reflections of landscape. In his view, they are much more and they do much more. In particular, he showed that it is in and through metaphors that the world of things is merged with the world of Being. In circulatory metaphors, red crabs run along ancestral veins. When red crab signs are understood in this particular way and when this peculiar decipherment of their movement is made, the moving red world correlates with the human body and its own circulatory habits. The protection of the island and the protection of the human body are sometimes drawn into a single entity that is directly threatened by alien ants and alien people. Both threaten to disrupt cyclic flows and the safety of local crab and human inhabitants. These red crab signs are not interpreted in the same way by everyone on the island though; red crabs are also brought into circulatory metaphors into which asylum seekers can be incorporated, without harmful consequence.
The second quality of movement I explore in this book is that which local people undertake in their enduring stay in specific neighborhoods on Christmas Island. In exploring this second quality of movement, I am interested in finding out what and how it is to be, and to be recognized as, a Christmas Island local. My attention in this undertaking is directed to the ways in which the built environs of Christmas Island might be understood to be moving rather than fixed. I have said that Christmas Island is made up of three main ethnic groups.