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The first quality of movement has to do with the distinctive animals that Christmas Island is famous for and how the movements they make on, to, and from the island are brought into human lives to make sense of things and events that occur on Christmas Island, including the movements that asylum seekers make to the place. Christmas Island is famous for its iconic red crabs. They are so numerous and so obviously present on the island that it should not come as a surprise that they, and their movements, are very important to local people. Available to all islanders, red crabs circulate in and out, as blood would connect the different organs of the human body, of three distinctive ethnic neighbourhoods that make up the sites of human habitation on Christmas Island. But crabs are important to the three main ethnic groups on the island in distinctively different ways. In particular, the crabs are critical to the kinds of claims that people make for island living and to the ways in which ethnic hierarchies manifested on the island.
Many theoreticians have explored the relationships that people have with animals and used them to give insight on human operations, feelings, and ideas about the world. Theoretical interest in human-animal relationships is not restricted to anthropology or even to the social sciences. Working in the area of cultural studies, Ham and Senior (1997) looked closely at the ways humans are configured in human history in and through their relationships with animals. The works undertaken by Birke and Hubbard (1995) and Kellert and Wilson (1993) are examples of the approaches taken in biology, and Wolch and Emel (1998) conducted research on the topic in the discipline of geography to reveal the ways in which places, politics, and identity are reckoned in and through ‘animal geographies’.
The idea and the practice of movement have been central in the reexamination and the subsequent renewed interest that anthropologists have taken in human-animal relationships. Early disciplinary approaches to human-animal relationships bore all the hallmarks of the determinist versus nondeterminist, or alternatively materialist/symbolic, approaches.