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At Synge’s hands, the domestic hearth is known as a site of writhing and howling and pointing and laughing. The suffering is of children and donkeys alike, of ducks and old men in winter. A child’s unavoidable toothache is displaced into a parent’s laughter, and an adult’s pain in the head is measured by a distance down the road. Synge’s classic account zigzags between bodily projections and the forms of island exchange and between the politics of identity and a human commonality beyond rhetoric.
Christmas Island is described by Simone Dennis as ‘the last outpost of the nation’, that is, a multicultural microcosm of contemporary Australia, worried by a search for a national identity in touch with the past but not limited by it. How adjectival may the nation be without losing its substantive soul? To gain a sense life on Christmas Island is to be able to form an appreciation of the politics of identity on the subcontinent.
Small-scale analyses—the interactions of individuals in particular moments and moods—can be disinterred insights into the large-scale human truths; anthropology might be said to specialise in this apparent alchemy (cf., Eriksen 2001). In Simone Dennis, Christmas Island has its consummate ethnographer and analyst. Juxtaposed against her first book, Police Beat: The Emotional Power of Music in Police Work, there comes to be inscribed, as palimpsest, the Australian.
Professor Nigel Rapport University of St Andrews Scotland, U.K.