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The wholeness that James and Woolf conjured with, its embodied interconnexions and its elusive patterning, recalls Bateson’s experiential intricacies. But how might its study and its inscription be fully accomplished? How is one to write the human consciousness and a consciousness of the human? Even setting ideas against sensations and feelings, trivial impressions against fantastic and evanescent, may this not give rise to the same tragic delimitations as setting psychology against sociology and history? Even if anthropology affords itself the task of nonspecialism, as Woolf (1938) wished for literature equally (‘everything is the proper stuff of fiction’, p. 153), how is this to be achieved in practice? Since every vocabulary and every symbolic classification is an exercise in limitation and prejudice, prescribing the world in advance—its entities and classes, identities, causes, and relationships. As Nietzsche (1901/1968) observed, ‘We set up a word at the point at which ignorance begins, at which we can see no further, e.g., the word “I”, the word “do”, the word “suffer”:—these are perhaps the horizon of our knowledge, but not “truths” ’ (p. 482).
For Dennis, a key methodology derives from the tension between a noun and its adjectives and between the substantive and the qualifier. One asserts forms of substantive reality but then qualifies them to the point at which the relationship becomes almost too complex, too nuanced to be borne, and the substantive assertion turns into more will-o’-the wisp than thing-in-itself, that is, the substantive assertion turns into something elusive. And then one posits anew. In the constant zigzag between substantive and qualifier, between substantives, and between qualifiers is the truth of human experience, the stream of human consciousness, and its possible truthful accounting. On the one hand, there is anthropology, and, on the other, there are the qualifiers of social and cultural, functional and structural, ecological and existential, and Freudian and Nietzschean. On the one hand, there is the stream of Christmas Island experience, and, on the other, its qualification by the stream of consciousness of Audrey, one of the main participants in this work, in Perth, smelling McDonald’s hamburgers while craving Chinese deep-fried, crispy fruit bat, killed by her brothers’ sling shots on Christmas Island. On the one hand, there is the experience of Christmas Island crabs, migrating between forest home and sea, and, on the other, there is the particular migratory experience of asylum seekers, seeking on Christmas Island an Australian home away from home.