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Meanwhile, an historically and locally observed Chinese failure to observe iconic island animals as inedible places them at the bottom of a social hierarchy that persists still in the memories of some islanders.
Clifford Geertz (1973) dealt directly with the ways in which humans identify with animals and how animals symbolise and stand in for human activity in certain realms and for certain purposes. In his analysis of the Balinese cock fight, the Balinese were revealed to be telling themselves a story about themselves and who they are. But many analyses of animals have searched for things other than a sentimental education and have asked after conflicts that might be played out in animal-human relationships. These theoreticians have shown how constructions of identity and difference and power and inequity are made through animal worlds and whose purposes they serve (Borneman, 1988; Ohnuki-Tierney 1987; Schiebinger, 1993). Intersection with the world of animals, in this ethnographic case, through the medium of animals as food, serves to hierarchically order inhabitants on Christmas Island from a European perspective. Donna Haraway (1989, 1991, 1997) spearheaded the exploration of the ways in which human identities have been made through animals in unequal, inequitable, and highly politicised ways. Haraway asked important questions about the definition of being human in and through explorations of animals, such a chimps, who occupy border zones between the states of being human and being animal.1 In this work, I also look closely at border zones and the claims that are made through animals that live in those zones to locality and even to being native.
Looking at border zones also entails looking closely at those animals that have crossed to arrive into the island’s terrain. A devastating foreign ant, which decimates local red crab populations, is drawn into particular metaphors that are applied to incoming asylum seekers. Red crabs, which stand as natives to alien yellow crazy ants, are drawn into a localised argument for border security, in which ants are feral invaders.