Christmas Island: An Anthropological Study By Simone Dennis

At this stage, it is sufficient to say that resultant of the character of these data and my own sensual orientation to Christmas Island is a certain tantalisation of the reader in that I aim to bring a sensual world into appreciation to the point where it can almost be smelled, heard, touched, tasted, seen. It is intended to be sensual and, hopefully, with the same effect one gets from reading the recipe for a decadent dessert when experiencing a craving for something sweet. This, then, is an ethnography that has emerged from the sensual experiences of Christmas Islanders and from the ways in which they told them to an ethnographer also involved—albeit relatively briefly—in the Christmas Island sensorium.

I am well aware of the dangers of tantalising the reader with adjectivally rich passages about banana palms sprouting randomly in warm, damp backyards and balmy evenings drifting in like yards of soft velvet over the Indian Ocean; such descriptions might appear to veer dangerously close to an uncritical invocation of the exotic. Providing descriptions of the ways in which time seemed to become as pliant as warmed rubber in the wet balminess of the heat might be taken less as observations of the temporal contexts in which people lived their everyday sensual lives than romanticised meanderings brought on by far too much fieldwork in the tropics. It is not dangerous only for that reason though. Thomas (2004) warned that ‘it does not suffice to simply render strikingly in words the whirling worlds of the senses’, pointing to the relevance of a careful search for the principles and structures which organise or underpin those whirling worlds. I also strike out for that purpose, looking closely at the patterns of movement that give sensual life to the worlds of island locals, asylum seekers, and those who left their island homes.

The patterns of movement are also yielded from animals that arrive on Christmas Island as migrants, animals that remain within it as ‘natives’, and animals that have arrived as aggressive invading aliens. These animal movements are incorporated into human worlds through special metaphors and languages that make sense of island life for island locals. The metaphors into which animals are drawn also apply to the geographic terrain of the island, which is understood to correlate with the personal body, described as it is in the terms of its forest heart, moving body, and its red blood, circulating in the form of the island’s iconic red crab population.