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This seems particularly the case in symbolic analyses, which takes animals as the static objects through which human activity might be read or reflected (King, 2001; Mullin, 1999).
Nicholas Smith, for example, put forward such a position in his anthropological paper, ‘The Howl and the Pussycat’ (1999). Smith focused on categories of good and bad animals and explored them within a specifically gendered framework. Paying attention to the apparently arch rivals, cats and dogs, Smith raised questions about the ways in which cats and dogs have been symbolically constructed in the Australian context to represent specific cultural, gendered, and differential values. In this view, the dingo stands as a tough, masculine, country, and quintessentially Australian dog and, as such, represents the Australian self. Cats, long standing companions of the witch, are mysterious, untrustworthy, female, selfish, and other. Smith also carefully examined the ways in which these animals might symbolize human activity in an Australian context, leaving the cat and dog symbols to stand for gendered being in one social imaginary of the nation.
While the symbolic dimensions given to animal characters in this case blur the line between nature and culture, in symbolic terms, since it is in the symbolic that cultural (human) and natural (animal) worlds are drawn together, what I intend to explore is a much more dialectical relationship between human and animal world. My analysis is deeply concerned with the activity with which humans, or at least humans living on Christmas Island, usher crabs and other animals into the world of human being to the point that a merger between the human and animal worlds is accomplished. On Christmas, true person-place interdependency is evident, as the crabs and their nemesis, the predatory yellow ants, are drawn into body, circulatory, and wholly sensual, more than just symbolic, metaphors that correlate personal and island body, articulate what it means to be local, what it means to leave Christmas Island, and what it means to arrive to it as an asylum seeker.
Into Liminal Terrain: Arriving by Boat on (un)Australia
The relationship of yellow, foreign ants to predictable, native, red crabs is a particularly dominant metaphor in local descriptions of how local islanders feel about the arrival of asylum seekers on the island.