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Both have been thoroughly questioned in current anthropological thinking. There is a sense that being attuned to movement is a more fruitful anthropological orientation than being attached to the notion of fixity, especially in geographic terms, and especially when it comes to the idea and the practice of being at home.
Lots of things move about that weren’t so mobile before—or so it seems. Turning on the news and catching the weather segment often involves hearing a detailed meteorological explanation of the international source of the current rain, wind, or weather. Diseases are on the way here from there. Drugs are smuggled through airports and seaports, and there are television programs that detail national responses to halting their illegal flows. Love flows through Internet connections that link the world in metaphors of highways, where information can be sent there from here almost instantaneously. In Australia, even though it receives far fewer than many other nations (see Mares, 2002), asylum seekers evidence that people are on the move.
Clearly, as Ghassan Hage (2005) reminded us, not all sorts of movement can be adequately characterised in the terms of the kinds of motions that bear people from one part of the world to another; many people are perfectly content to stay where they are, and anthropologists have to be mindful that their current orientation to the moving world does not characterise people as constantly circling about the globe. More to the point, we anthropologists must be careful not to be swept up in the notion or the volume of constant movement; we must instead look to the significance of the movements that people do make in the world, and especially to how physical movements are often prefaced by yearnings for the existential movement that will ‘move one up’ or allow us to ‘get somewhere’. But staying, as both Hage (2005) and Casey (1996) suggested, entails a kind of moving; therefore, even staying is not the opposite of migratory movement. The two kinds or qualities of movement are undeniably different however; on Christmas Island, the difference is certainly appreciated and, as I have already said, is often one articulated in metaphors that contain domestic native red crabs and aggressive, invading alien yellow ants from over the sea.