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There is such a thing as “being there” knowing, and there is local knowing; it is worth pointing out explicitly that my own sensual presence on Christmas Island was not the same as a local embodiment of the place. As Feld reminded readers in his 1996 paper, ‘Waterfalls of Song’, there is no perception in the absence of memory (cf., Bergson 1908/1988). In Casey’s words in Remembering (1987), which Feld makes use of in his paper, ‘orientation in place…cannot be continually effected de novo but arises in the ever lengthening shadow of our bodily past’ (p. 194). This shadowy past constitutes one important difference between anthropologist blow-in and island stayer; my bodily past and their bodily past was not shared, as I only recently entered the stream of island experience that many locals had spent their entire lives inhabiting. But the fact that I knew the place sufficiently sensually well allowed people who had moved away from the island, in some cases before I was even born, to tell me things of a sensual order that they knew I would understand. I did.
Living on the island for the months that I did, between 2005 and 2007, and coming to know the place that I was in, in some specific sensual ways, did not mean that I adopted an old-fashioned, traditional approach to the field as a bounded place that was handily contained inside the parameters of an island. Rather than being committed to the idea and the practice of studying Christmas Island as a locale about which I might generate particular disciplinary knowledge, I instead attend to the issues, especially the sensations of what being local means there, as well as what being local once meant and might continue to mean for those who have left the island. Indeed, my positionedness among locals is one that necessarily extends to those who are local in their memories and are no longer physically living on Christmas Island. I participated in a sensual field, one that persists in a particular geographic location but beyond it in space and time too. People who have not been to Christmas Island for years, and who now live remotely from it, recognised me as being sufficiently sensually experienced as to ask them the right questions. We, people on the island and people who left it and me, were all members of a sensual field, a sensory locale that, like a traditional field, excluded some people and included others.