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This attention to movement and the sensual life of the body, which is the site or locus of moving experiences, very obviously entails descriptions of those sensual experiences of the islanders with whom I spent time. Less evidently, it involves acknowledging that those descriptions have been infused with my own experience of being on the island, and I aim herein for an everyday, that is, a lived, sensual inveiglement of both their and my position.
My own sensing body was there for two major fieldwork periods, spanning 7 months between 2005 and 2007, and I also conducted ethnographic fieldwork among those who had left the island in their new locations, in Perth and Katanning in Western Australia during 2007. I was on Christmas Island long enough to get the place under my skin, to get used to the tropical glory of it all in the sense that I became familiar with it. I washed up, I washed clothes, I cooked, I came to lament the lack of goods in the supermarket, I ate and drank at ‘my local’ pub, I borrowed sugar from my neighbours, and I went out to people’s houses for coffee, lunch, and chats.
Anthropologists need to be careful when they claim to have lived in these ways in the field, lest they be regarded as having unproblematically forgotten those gulfs of qualitative difference that separate local from researcher, researcher from researched, and stayer from blow-in. But the fact that locals and ethnographers share, for a time, the same place might mean that this gulf is not entirely unpassable. According to Merleau-Ponty (1964, p. 120), the anthropologist has ‘a new organ of understanding at his [sic] disposal’, that a decade ago, Casey (1996) argued, had emerged resultant of the anthropologist’s placement in the field: